Urban Planning Quotes

There's a simple solution to our traffic problems. We'll have business build the roads, and government build the cars.

Americans are in the habit of never walking if they can ride.

Do not try to make circumstances fit your plans. Make plans that fit the circumstances.

A thousand policemen directing traffic cannot tell you why you come or where you go.

Those who plan do better than those who do not plan, even should they rarely stick to their plan.

Every public action which is not customary, either is wrong or, if it is right, is a dangerous precedent. It follows that nothing should ever be done for the first time.

The suburb is a place where someone cuts down all the trees to build houses, and then names the streets after the trees.

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.

...frequent streets and short blocks are valuable because of the fabric of intricate cross-use that they permit among the users of a city neighbouhood.

Poor planning or poor execution of plans is simply to let some force other than reason shape reality.

I like to say I had a very varied undergraduate education. I was an English major first, and then at the end of my college career I decided I was interested in urban planning. I became an urban studies major, with a minor in poetry. I don't think I knew what I was looking for in my early twenties, but I know I kept not finding it.

A plan that everyone dislikes for different reasons is a success. A plan everyone dislikes for the same reason is a failure. A plan that everyone likes for the same reason is an act of God!

The Democrats are the party that says government will make you smarter, taller, richer, and remove the crabgrass on your lawn. The Republicans are the party that says government doesn't work and then they get elected and prove it.

If a policeman must know the Constitution, then why not a planner?

Our national flower is the concrete cloverleaf.

I've often thought that if planners were botanists, zoologists, geologists, and people who know about the earth, we would have much more wisdom in such planning than we have when we leave it to the engineers.

Particular attention should be given to the opportunities which the environment presents or precludes for involvement of children with persons both older and younger than themselves.

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.

A land full of places that are not worth caring about may soon be a nation and a way of life that is not worth defending.

Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.

Nothing's dangerous if you know what you're doing.

Forewarned, forearmed; to be prepared is half the victory.

The government solution to a problem is usually as bad as the problem.

The outcome of the city will depend on the race between the automobile and the elevator, and anyone who bets on the elevator is crazy.

One has to watch out for engineers. They begin with the sewing machine and end up with the atomic bomb.

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.

Italian cities have long been held up as ideals, not least by New Yorkers and Londoners enthralled by the ways their architecture gives beauty and meaning to everyday acts.

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.

We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us.

I feel however, that we architects have a special duty and mission... (to contribute) to the socio-cultural development of architecture and urban planning

Architects and engineers are among the most fortunate of men since they build their own monuments with public consent, public approval and often public money.

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.

Canadian cities looked the way American cities did on television.

Planning is for the world's great cities, for Paris, London, and Rome, for cities dedicated, at some level, to culture. Detroit, on the other hand, was an American city and therefore dedicated to money, and so design had given way to expediency.

We know what we are, but know not what we may be.

A noble, logical diagram once recorded will never die.

Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men's blood.

Make big plans; aim high in hope and work, remembering that a noble, logical diagram once recorded will not die.

Men often oppose a thing merely because they have had no agency in planning it, or because it may have been planned by those whom they dislike.

By far the greatest and most admirable form of wisdom is that needed to plan and beautify cities and human communities.