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Urban Planning Quotes

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Urban Planning Quotes

“There are three key attributes that make people happy in their communities and cause them to develop a solid emotional attachment to the place they live in. The first is the physical beauty and the level of maintenance of the place itself - great open spaces and parks, historic buildings, and an attention to community aesthetics. The second is the ease with which people can meet others, make friends, and plug into social networks. The third piece of the happiness puzzle is the level of diversity, open-mindedness, and acceptance: Is there some equality of opportunity for all? Can anyone - everyone - contribute to and take pleasure from the community?”

“Infrastructure is always hugely expensive, and there's no clear way to measure the overall future return on investment, whether it's in the form of innovation, development, or new communities or jobs. Infrastructure provides a skeleton on which to grow a new economic model. The infrastructure investments we make now will determine the kind of economy we have in the future.”

“The neighbourhood is a social construct that enables people to live, work and play together in close quarters with a feeling of engagement and security beyond their existence as individuals. (...) a sense of scale and community that is manageable, more village-like than urban. The most attractive neighbourhoods [are] the ones where there’s a palpable sense of an open, rather than closed community. Being a good neighbour is not about watching from behind your curtains and reporting any suspected misdemeanour to the police - it’s about inhabiting your neighbourhood beyond the curtains, bringing life to your street with open arms, not closed minds.”

“Once upon a time the general problem of the City Chaotic looked so simple. Boulevards and civic monuments were going to create the City Beautiful. After that proved insufficient, regional plans were to create the City Sensible. These proved unacceptable and now we are struggling, sometimes it seems at the expense of everything else, to improvise the City Traversible.”

“Architects in urban planning are talking about this but they're not talking about it yet I don't think at that level that [Buckminster] Fuller is talking about when he talked about putting a dome over Manhattan, which is to say an attempt at integrating all of these different technologies in a way that makes for a city that, without having an actual dome, thermodynamically manages the heat flow for that urban environment and therefore makes it so that it is a highly efficient machine for a living or a dwelling machine as he would have preferred in terms of thermodynamically optimizing it.”

“Cities have always offered anonymity, variety, and conjunction, qualities best basked in by walking: one does not have to go into the bakery or the fortune-teller's, only to know that one might. A city always contains more than any inhabitant can know, and a great city always makes the unknown and the possible spurs to the imagination.”

“I'm trying to discover - invent, I suppose - an architecture, and forms of urban planning, that do something of the same thing in a contemporary way. I started out trying to create buildings that would sparkle like isolated jewels; now I want them to connect, to form a new kind of landscape, to flow together with contemporary cities and the lives of their peoples.”

“In the planning and designing of new communities, housing projects, and urban renewal, the planners both private and public, need to give explicit consideration to the kind of world that is being created for the children who will be growing up in these settings. Particular attention should be given to the opportunities which the environment presents or precludes for involvement of children both older and younger than themselves.”