“But when a plethora of stimuli begins to divert us from receptive consciousness, the city renders us insensible. Then, in our inability to order experience, we merely suffer the city and long for some adequate means to comprehend it as a product of human creation--a product of intelligent, ordering forces. Just as the scientist is frustrated when the order or pattern of phenomena is too fleeting to observe or too complex to recognize with existing tools, so is the city-dweller frustrated when human order cannot be found in the environment. At such moments, when one sees only the results of mechanical and economic processes controlling the form and feeling of the place, one feels estranged and excluded.”
Source: Nurturing Dreams: Collected Essays on Architecture and the City
“As much as we complain about other people, there is nothing worse for mental health than a social desert.”
Source: Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design
“Much as participatory design and placemaking was a reaction to the lack of citizen involvement in the planning process, the history of incremental city design was a reaction to the utopian master plan that dictated whole scale redevelopment in favor of an incremental approach that gradually affected the status quo. As a theory of policymaking, incrementalism was first introduced by Charles Lindblom in the 1950s.”
Source: Solving Critical Design Problems: Theory and Practice
“Modern interest in environmentalism is driven by a yearning to protect what we haven't ruined already, to conserve what we haven't used up, to restore as much as possible of what we're destroyed, and to devise ways of reconfiguring our lives so that civilization as we know it can be sustained through our children's lifetimes and beyond.”
Source: Green Metropolis: Why Living Smaller, Living Closer, and Driving Less are the Keys to Sustainability
“Abstractionism exacerbated the problem but sustainability, if intelligently conceived, could heal the rift between garden, landscape and urban design. Absolute sustainability is not possible. But relative sustainability is a practical and desirable proposition.”
Source: British Gardens: History, philosophy and design
“Learning that sexual alchemy and divine intimacy can uplift human consciousness and light up the Spirit without alcohol, drugs, or illicit uses of sex, will bring enlightenment to an individual or couple, while they enjoy the great and pleasurable times together.”
Source: Sexual Alchemy & Divine Intimacy
“Today, one marvels at the conversions of old buildings that are now offices and and residences or both. Office buildings are apartment houses, mansions are office buildings, manufacturing lofts are apartments, tenement apartments are small factories, everything from a barge to a barn is a restaurant...These buildings were not designed with flexibility in mind, but their manageable scale provided inherent adjustability and their design and quality constriction provided inherent appeal.”
“There is a message for all city makers here. It is that with the right triangulation, even the ugliest of places can be infused with the warmth that turns strangers into familiars by giving us enough reason to slow down.”
Source: Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design
“The greatest environmental gains from population density arise once destinations become so close to one another that people elect to get around all by themselves - the urban-transit equivalent of the point at which a nuclear chain reaction becomes self-sustaining.”
Source: Green Metropolis: Why Living Smaller, Living Closer, and Driving Less are the Keys to Sustainability
“Stacking and concentrating dwellings and businesses is the easiest way to make communities truly efficient, and it is the only way to achieve deep reductions in per-capita energy use and carbon output in large, prosperous populations...”
Source: Green Metropolis: Why Living Smaller, Living Closer, and Driving Less are the Keys to Sustainability