Urban Planning Quotes

Great artists need great clients. ~ I.M. Pei

Probably the most important element in intricacy is centering. Good small parks typically have a place somewhere within them commonly understood to be the center - at the very least a main crossroads and pausing point, a climax. ~ Jane Jacobs

In great cities, spaces as well as places are designed and built: walking, witnessing, being in public, are as much part of the design and purpose as is being inside to eat, sleep, make shoes or love or music. The word citizen has to do with cities, and the ideal city is organized around citizenship
around participation in public life. ~ Rebecca Solnit

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. ~ Jane Jacobs

Urban planning that fails to account for women's risk of being sexually assaulted is a clear violation of women's equal right to public spaces... ~ Caroline Criado Perez

Our national flower is the concrete cloverleaf ~ Lewis Mumford

Too often critics have taken as the sole and crucial matter of fantasy the preoccupation of Tolkien, the quest for a remedy to the world's pain that will not destroy innocence with the temptations of power. Impressive and popular as The Lord of the Rings is, it manages its landscapes, vast green-leaved or slag-heaped vistas of pathetic fallacy and implied morality, far better than its people; it leaves the impression that important issues have been turned by sleight of hand and Georgian prettiness into questions of good and bad practice in urban planning and rural conservation. After all, the Grail is only worth seeking if you can believe in a god who put it there to help those who help themselves, in an Avalon to which burned-out heroes can retire with dignity. There is another great Matter for fantasy, one of more obvious resonance for the creative artist - the reconciliation of faerie and humanity; of the passion, power and wit of a world of sensuality, magic, and danger with the requirements of kind and ordinary life. ~ Roz Kaveney

There is no logic that can be superimposed on the city; people make it, and it is to them, not buildings, that we must fit our plans. ~ Jane Jacobs

As in the pseudoscience of bloodletting, just so in the pseudoscience of city rebuilding and planning, years of learning and a plethora of subtle and complicated dogma have arisen on a foundation of nonsense. ~ Jane Jacobs

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. ~ P. J. O'Rourke

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. ~ Frank Lloyd Wright

When we are trying to come up with new health laws, you bring doctors, you bring experts in medicine. In urban planning, you bring the best architects. How it is possible that when we are talking about the way we are going to feed America, no chef shows up in the room? ~ Jose Andres

Canadian cities looked the way American cities did on television. ~ William Gibson

Terror is a form of urban planning. ~ Karan Mahajan

There are fashions in building. Behind the fashions lie economic and technological reasons, and these fashions exclude all but a few genuinely different possibilities in city dwelling construction at any one time. ~ Jane Jacobs

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. ~ Zaha Hadid

A noble, logical diagram once recorded will never die. ~ Daniel Burnham

Dull, inert cities, it is true, do contain the seeds of their own destruction and little else. But lively, diverse, intense cities contain the seeds of their own regeneration, with energy enough to carry over for problems and needs outside themselves. ~ Jane Jacobs

Americans are in the habit of never walking if they can ride. ~ Louis-Philippe I Of France

If a city is designed in a way that makes a long drive to work necessary, we harm the social health of that city. If a lot of people cycle, it's probably an indication that you live in a healthy neighborhood. This is something that should be seriously considered in urban planning, if you want to ensure a neighborhood togetherness and trust among locals. ~ Meik Wiking

Sustainability is now a big baggy sack in which people throw all kinds of old ideas, hot air and dodgy activities in order to be able to greenwash their products and feel good. ~ Kevin McCloud

Ahhh, God's balls! The Horrible Halt!" Adoulla pronounced the Dhamsawaati term for the complete standstill of traffic with a familiar disgust. ~ Saladin Ahmed

Make big plans; aim high in hope and work, remembering that a noble, logical diagram once recorded will not die, but long after we are gone be a living thing, asserting itself with ever-growing insistence. ~ Daniel Burnham

Because I believe a lot of people share my feelings about the tragic landscape of highway strips, parking lots, housing tracts, mega-malls, junked cities, and ravaged countryside that makes up the everyday environment where most Americans live and work. A land full of places that are not worth caring about will soon be a nation and a way of life that is not worth defending. ~ James Howard Kunstler

Forewarned, forearmed; to be prepared is half the victory. ~ Miguel De Cervantes

A city is not an accident but the result of coherent visions and aims. ~ Leon Krier

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

If you are a pedestrian, you are not mechanical enough to be of priority to traffic engineers. ~ Archimedes Muzenda

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. ~ Alexander Hamilton

The intellectual force of the West is still dominant, but other cultures are getting stronger. I expect that we will develop a new way of thinking in architecture and urban planning, and that less will be based on our models. ~ Rem Koolhaas

The contempt of motorists for pedestrians is so ironic, because no matter how many cars they have, they are also pedestrians, biologically. Unless they fly to the doors of their cars. ~ Archimedes Muzenda

Henceforth the crisis of urbanism is all the more concretely a social and political one, even though today no force born of traditional politics is any longer capable of dealing with it. Medico-sociological banalities on the 'pathology of housing projects,' the emotional isolation of people who must live in them, or the development of certain extreme reactions of rejection, chiefly among youth, simply betray the fact that modern capitalism, the bureaucratic society of consumption, is here and there beginning to shape its own setting. This society, with its new towns, is building the terrain that accurately represents it, combining the conditions most suitable for its proper functioning, while at the same time translating in space, in the clear language of organization of everyday life, its fundamental principle of alienation and constraint. It is likewise here that the new aspects of its crisis will be manifested with the greatest clarity. ~ Tom McDonough

Privacy, self-reliance, choice -- all these can and must remina core American values. Yet so too must we remember that other core American value, the value of community. And we must redefine community more broadly to include not just our street or our tract, but our town, our metropolis, our region. ~ William Fulton

13 million Indians will join the workforce every year from now till 2030. They know their prospects aren't good. Here's why: in the years from 1972 to 1983 - not celebrated as a time of overwhelming prosperity - the total number of jobs in the economy nevertheless grew 2.3 per cent a year. In the years between liberalization in 1991 and today, jobs have grown at an average of only 1.6 per cent a year. But, if these young people have to be absorbed, then jobs must grow at least 3 per cent a year - almost twice the rate at which they have since liberalization. This is simply not happening. In other words, one out of every two youngsters who starts looking for a job next year won't find one. ~ Mihir S. Sharma

There is danger that someday the farm land will be gone, the Downtown will be deserted, and the middle class living outside the city boundaries. If it is done intentionally, then that is our choice, but if it is allowed simply to happen without purpose, then that is ignorance. Indianapolis contains fantastic elements to become a vital city, but frequently our heritage has been destroyed in favor of cheap development and easy profits. Architects are not perfect, and many chances to improve our city have been lost. They allow the client to build structures without concern for what that building will do to the surrounding environment. The matter of conscience falls prey to the matter of making a living. A desire to improve our quality of life on the part of the client and profession will provide the best solution for all. Readers of this book, be inquisitive, explore your city, question its growth, let your feelings be known if your city is faulty, speak out if it is praiseworthy. Talk to your architects, politicians and developers; they are professionals, but they are also your servants. Use them to make your city better. Enjoy Indianapolis. It is a city to be lived in and can be taken to heart if one tries. ~ Rick A. Ball

Detroit is largely composed, today, of seemingly endless square miles of low-density failure. ~ Jane Jacobs

A border
the perimeter of a single massive or stretched-out use of territory
forms the edge of an area of 'ordinary' city. Often borders are thought of as passive objects, or matter-of-factly just as edges. However, a border exerts an active influence. ~ Jane Jacobs

Beyond a certain speed, motorized vehicles create remoteness which they alone can shrink. They create distances for all and shrink them for only a few. A new dirt road through the wilderness brings the city within view, but not within reach, of most Brazilian subsistence farmers. The new expressway expands Chicago, but it sucks those who are well-wheeled away from a downtown that decays into a ghetto. ~ Ivan Illich

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. ~ Rebecca Solnit

Build a statue of me, just as I am right now, with this basket of meat and shirts. I am a monument to the trucking industry, supercenters, and the failure of urban planning. Build me out of the particle board they used to make the desk hutch in Home & Office Solutions. I will stand until the end of time. The termites will taste me and retch. ~ Jon Bois

In Haiti, untitled rural and urban real estate holdings are together worth some 5.2 billion. To put that sum in context, it is four times the total of all the assets of all the legally operating companies in Haiti, nine times the value of all assets owned by the government, and 158 times the value of all foreign direct investment in Haiti's recorded history to 1995. ~ Hernando De Soto

I have a very pop voice, but there's so much of me I associate mostly with urban music, so I try to blend the two. ~ Aubrey O'Day

The ego of a god, the wit of a goldfish. ~ Shah Wharton

I was planning to study more, but it's a struggle with so many opportunities for film and trying to get better through studying. No matter what, I want to be making more movies. ~ Zhu Zhu

The explosions, like the urban legends, are a great way of bringing people in to watch, because it's really fun, and you know we're always going to give you a satisfying ending. ~ Adam Savage

In this sense socialism means the abolition of private enterprise, of private ownership of the means of production, and the creation of a system of "planned economy" in which the entrepreneur working for profit is replaced by a central planning body. ~ Friedrich Hayek

He strolled through the store to the back room.
Leah sat at a desk, staring at a computer screen that displayed a spreadsheet of some sort. "Give me two minutes," she mumbled, her tone distracted, "then I'll be done."
Seth leaned against the wall and crossed his arms. She wore glasses tonight. He had never seen her do so before and wondered if she needed them for reading and close-up work the way many humans did once they reached their forties. The frames were black, reminding him of those that had been popular in the sixties. Her long hair was pulled back in a slightly disheveled bun. The jeans and blazer she'd apparently changed into before going back to work hugged her beautiful figure.
She had, as Sheldon would say, a real sexy-librarian thing going on that heated Seth's blood. The longer he watched her, the more he wanted to touch her, to peel that blazer off, loosen her hair, and -
"Finally," she announced with a sigh. Closing the file, she removed her glasses and spun the chair around to face him. When she looked at him, her eyebrows flew up. "Hi."
"Hello."
She studied him for a moment. "Something on your mind?"
Aside from a deep desire to strip her naked? ~ Dianne Duvall

You can talk all you want about having a clear purpose and strategy for your life, but ultimately this means nothing if you are not investing the resources you have in a way that is consistent with your strategy. In the end, a strategy is nothing but good intentions unless it's effectively implemented. ~ Clayton M Christensen

Following the rules of your industry will only get you so far. ~ Max McKeown

Are you going to drink my blood?" he wanted to know. I think I had expected him to be a little more afraid of me and his casual tone was a tad bit frustrating to my ego. "Well, I was planning on it, yes. ~ Cyma Rizwaan Khan

A "Wait and See" approach to an external factor is not strategic ~ Fritz Shoemaker

Once when I was a tree, African sun woke me up green at dawn. African wind combed the branches of my hair. African rain washed my limbs. Once when I was a tree, flesh came and worshipped my roots. Flesh came to preserve my voice. Flesh came honoring my limbs. Now flesh comes with metal teeth, with chomping sticks and fire launchers. And flesh cuts me down and enslaves my limbs to make forts, ships, pews for other gods. Now flesh laughs at my charred and beaten frame, discarding me in the mud, burning me up in the flames. Flesh has grown pale and lazy. Flesh has sinned against the fathers. Now flesh listens no more to the voice of spirits talking through my limbs. If flesh would listen, I would warn him that the spirits are displeased and are planning what to do with him. But flesh thinks I am dead, charred and gone. Flesh thinks that by fire he can kill, thinks that with metal teeth, I will die. Thinks that all the voices linked from root to limb are silenced. Flesh does not know that he does not give me life, nor can he take it away. That Is What the spirits are singing now. It is time that flesh bow down on his knee again. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves.
- MATTHEW 7:15 ~ S.G. Holster

When our customer leaves Urban Outfitters, the Main Line is the type of place where more of them go than don't. ~ Richard Hayne

Progress is impossible without accurate planning. ~ Sunday Adelaja

One of the most unfortunate side effects of the urban activism of the '60s and '70s is the belief that development is wrong and that fighting it makes you an environmentalist. ~ Alex Steffen

We were talking about urban youth. And by urban I mean lives in a city not urban as in black like white people use it. ~ Hannibal Buress

The lake comes to the fringe while lights go up around the bay. Somewhere near, cow flesh is singed. Smoke floats above the walkway. I've eaten green that comes up black, risen cold from torrid mud. I've licked my paws and tasted blood. What is this world of busy lies? Some urban genie feeding food to flies! ~ Andre Alexis

Every time. You know why? I want to fail. I work like a dog for twenty years so I'll have the supreme pleasure of failing. Never knew anybody like that, did you? I'm very cunning. I plan it in advance. I fool myself right up to the last minute, and then the time comes and I know how cunningly I've been planning it all the time. I've been a failure all my life. ~ Wallace Stegner

His mouth descended on hers in a fierce kiss.
He seized, he captured.
He dominated.
And she loved every second of it. ~ Donna Grant

Raeder, the political admiral, stealthily built up the German Navy in defiance of the Versailles Treaty, and then put it to use in a series of aggressions which he had taken a leading part in planning. ~ Erich Raeder

Are you planning on coming out and kissing me any time soon? Or should I just stab myself in the chest, rip out my heart, and leave it out in the open? ~ Jay McLean

Not my species, not my problem. ~ Susan Sizemore

The process of simplifying man's environment and rendering it increasingly elemental and crude has a cultural as well as a physical dimension. The need to manipulate immense urban populations - to transport, feed, employ, educate and somehow entertain millions of densely concentrated people - leads to a crucial decline in civic and social standards. A mass concept of human relations - totalitarian, centralistic and regimented in orientation - tends to dominate the more individuated concepts of the past. Bureaucratic techniques of social management tend to replace humanistic approaches. All that is spontaneous, creative and individuated is circumscribed by the standardized, the regulated and the massified. The space of the individual is steadily narrowed by restrictions imposed upon him by a faceless, impersonal social apparatus. Any recognition of unique personal qualities is increasingly surrendered to the manipulation of the lowest common denominator of the mass. A quantitative, statistical approach, a beehive manner of dealing with man, tends to triumph over the precious individualized and qualitative approach which places the strongest emphasis on personal uniqueness, free expression and cultural complexity. ~ Murray Bookchin

It depends on you how you mold them and shape their thinking. Depending on the values they get from you, they will either be the angels or demons of time. ~ Varun Sayal

So I got lucky. But then again, it took me many hundreds of rejections to manage to find that luck.
I am sure there is a lesson n that somewhere.
Someone had taken a punt and had faith in me. I wouldn't let them down, and I would be eternally grateful to them for giving me that chance to shine.
Once DLE were on board, a few other companies joined them. It's funny how, once one person backs you, somehow other people feel more comfortable doing the same.
I guess most people don't like to trailblaze.
So before I knew it, suddenly, from nothing, I had the required funds for a place on the team. (In fact I was about £600 short, but Dad helped me out on that one, and refused to hear anything about ever being paid back. Great man.)
The dream of an attempt on Everest was now about to become a reality.
So many people over the years have asked me how to get sponsorship, but there is only one magic ingredient. Action. You just have to keep going.
Then keep going some more.
Our dreams are just wishes, if we never follow them through with action. And in life, you have got to be able to light your own fire.
The reality of planning big expeditions is often tedious and frustrating. There is no glamour in yet another potential sponsor's rejection letter, and I have often felt my own internal fire flickering close to snuff point.
Action is what keeps it alight. ~ Bear Grylls

I have no idea of what it's going to look like when I start a piece. Making art is like having a relationship. You want to bring in some ideas, but if you don't allow it to develop naturally and speak to you as it develops, you end up imposing and projecting upon it. ~ Nick Bantock

Some years ago I had a conversation with a man who thought that writing and editing fantasy books was a rather frivolous job for a grown woman like me. He wasn't trying to be contentious, but he himself was a probation officer, working with troubled kids from the Indian reservation where he'd been raised. Day in, day out, he dealt in a concrete way with very concrete problems, well aware that his words and deeds could change young lives for good or ill.
I argued that certain stories are also capable of changing lives, addressing some of the same problems and issues he confronted in his daily work: problems of poverty, violence, and alienation, issues of culture, race, gender, and class...
"Stories aren't real," he told me shortly. "They don't feed a kid left home in an empty house. Or keep an abusive relative at bay. Or prevent an unloved child from finding 'family' in the nearest gang."
Sometimes they do, I tried to argue. The right stories, read at the right time, can be as important as shelter or food. They can help us to escape calamity, and heal us in its aftermath. He frowned, dismissing this foolishness, but his wife was more conciliatory. "Write down the names of some books," she said. "Maybe we'll read them."
I wrote some titles on a scrap of paper, and the top three were by Charles de lint – for these are precisely the kind of tales that Charles tells better than anyone. The vital, necessary stories. The ones that can change and heal young live ~ Terri Windling

Life is what is happening today while you were planning tomorrow ~ John Lennon

Deciding when and where you're going to do something will dramatically increase the likelihood you'll follow through. Let's look at the results from a specific study. Because most psychology research uses students as guinea pigs, this example relates to essay writing. Students who had an essay to complete were divided into two groups. One group was asked to state when and where they would complete their essay. Of this group, 71% completed the essay before the due date. The other group was given the due date but were not asked to state when and where they'd write their essay. Only 32% of this group finished on time. This extremely simple, two-minute intervention transformed the task from one in which most people failed to one in which most people succeeded.
To implement this change in your own life whenever you're planning to take action, identify when and where you'll act. Make this a habit you do every time. ~ Alice Boyes

Central banking has become the new central planning. Under the old central planning, government attempted to manage production and the supply of goods and services. Under the new central planning, the Fed attempts to manage the financial system and the supply and allocation of credit. ~ Anonymous

The artistic element of Manhattan has kind of moved to Brooklyn. Has it changed it? Yeah. Has it ruined it? I would say no. It is what it is. I say better that than an urban war zone. ~ Julian Casablancas

More bungalow-type setups. Rent by the week. Artsy places," Zane
explained. "It's different."
"Do I look like an artsy type to you?" Ty asked, bristling on principle.
It didn't even faze Zane. "You look like sex on legs to me. You'll
blend in, no problem. ~ Madeleine Urban

I came to a point where I couldn't walk into an urban store and find anything I liked. Everything was just getting too baggy, everything was getting so over [priced]. It's as if what I wanted in street wear was nowhere in stores, with no disrespect to any hip-hop brands. ~ K-Maro

The quality of your ideas 'your actual thoughts' determines your success more than you think. ~ Auliq Ice

By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail. ~ Benjamin Franklin

Never Let The Roosters Wake You! ~ Latif Mercado

Han hated planning. He also hated preparing. But what he really hated above everything else, besides maybe the Empire itself, was meetings. ~ Daniel Jose Older

What will happen if you can travel in somebody's memories??
To see did he done this crime, who kill this woman, or this man, what he has done, what he is planning what happen then if we know this?? ~ Deyth Banger

Writing is emotional ... it is baring your soul to the world and waiting for someone to acknowledge and love it, or shun and hate it, or worse be indifferent about it. ~ Anne-Rae Vasquez

Father was about to leave the house with his camera on his way to call for Mrs Walsh. They were going to a nearby park where, he said, he was planning to take her on the swings if the light was appropriate, and possibly on the roundabout as well ... Father explained that in outdoor work he has found a fillip which delights him. ~ Norma Hall

De facto segregation, we tell ourselves, has various causes. when African Americans moved into a neighborhood like Ferguson, a few racially prejudiced white families decided to leave, and then as the number of black families grew, the neighborhood deteriorated, and "white flight" followed. Real estate agents steered whites away from black neighborhoods, and blacks away from white ones. Banks discriminated with "redlining," refusing to give mortgages to African Americans or extracting unusually severe terms from them with subprime loans. African Americans haven't generally gotten the educations that would enable them to earn sufficient incomes to live in white suburbs, and, as a result, many remain concentrated in urban neighborhoods. Besides, black families prefer to live with one another.

All this has some truth, but it remains a small part of the truth, submerged by a far more important one: until the last quarter of the twentieth century, racially explicit policies of federal, state, and local governments defined where whites and African Americans should live. Today's residential segregation in the North, South, Midwest, and West is not the unintended consequence of individual choices and of otherwise well-meaning law or regulation but of unhidden public policy that explicitly segregated every metropolitan area in the United States. The policy was so systematic and forceful that its effects endure to the present time. Without our government's purposeful impositi ~ Richard Rothstein

Yeah, well, it's really none of your business, is it?"
"No."
"There you go, then," she says, waving her juice at me before taking another swig. "Unless you're planning to lick it or stick it, Lorenzo, keep your nose out of my business. ~ J.M. Darhower

In Argentina, urban poverty plummeted from 54.7 percent in 2003 to 6.5 percent in 2011, according to government data collected by the U.N. ~ Naomi Klein

We all have a dual nature,some of us are just better able to control the energy we expend on each part of it." Lessons for an Urban Goddess ~ Laney Zukerman

I subscribe to the online Urban Dictionary's definition of nerd: 'one whose IQ exceeds his weight'. I'm also keen on the same Urban Dictionary's definition of geek: 'the person you pick on in high school and wind up working for as an adult'. I happily proclaim myself a book nerd/reading geek and proud of it. ~ Malorie Blackman

Whatever you plan, plan realistically. ~ Eraldo Banovac

During last night's debate, John Kerry and John Edwards were so friendly to each other some political experts think that they may end up running together. In fact Kerry and Edwards were so friendly, President Bush accused them of planning a gay marriage. ~ Conan O'Brien