Quotes About Urbanism

#1. I guess I've always been quite interested in the Situationists' ideas about urbanism and spectacle and how we move through life.

Rirkrit Tiravanija

#2. The biggest thing growing cities need to do is minimize barriers to development so that as long as someone is doing good urbanism, they can get permitted quickly and get building quickly.

Alex Steffen

#3. The truth be told, the World Trade Center was neither a very good work of architecture nor a very successful piece of urbanism. Its shortcomings were somewhat mitigated by the westward and southward expansion of the World Financial Center and Battery Park City during the 1980s.

Martin Filler

#4. I grew up in a small town that was absolutely a perfect embodiment of new urbanism.

Leon Krier

#5. The dining room is a building; the bathroom is a building. If we scatter this single-program architecture inside of a domestic environment, we can link an interior urbanism in a way similar to a village or a township of tiny houses.

Jimenez Lai

#6. Urbanism is the most advanced, concrete fulfillment of a nightmare. Littre defines nightmare as 'a state that ends when one awakens with a start after extreme anxiety.' But a start against whom? Who has stuffed us to the point of somnolence?

Tom McDonough

#7. A unitary urbanism - the synthesis of art and technology that we call for - must be constructed according to certain new values of life, values which now need to be distinguished and disseminated.

Gil J Wolman

#8. I think the art fair is very much a form of urbanism. I think something really happens to the cities when such a fair happens. The city becomes an exhibition; it's amazing.

Hans Ulrich Obrist

#9. One of the most persistent images in American urbanism is that of the proverbial city on a hill, as first envisioned on these shores by the Puritan John Winthrop, via the Gospel according to Saint Matthew.

Martin Filler

#10. Our cities need to change, fast. Tactical Urbanism is a guided tour of solutions created when local people decide they can't wait for politics to catch up before they improve their neighborhoods. This weathervane book deserves a place on any urbanist's bookshelf.

Alex Steffen

#11. Tactical Urbanism is pure American know-how. It is the common sense that housed, fed, and prospered an entire continent of penniless immigrants.

Mike Lydon

#12. Fate does not invite ugly boring people to save the world; and if you do try to save the world (without being beautiful, strong, clever, or wise), you will soon die pointlessly and how much adventure is there in that?

James Alan Gardner

#13. Toward the end of the Second World War, a
new consciousness arose amongst the public
and policy makers of the Western World. After
ten years of crippling economic depression
and another five at war, the public demanded
something new from their disintegrating
urban environments.

Lucas Mascotto-Carbone

#14. Automobiles are often conveniently tagged as the villains responsible for the ills of cities and the disappointments and futilities of city planning. But the destructive effect of automobiles are much less a cause than a symptom of our incompetence at city building.

Jane Jacobs

#15. The course of urban development in America is pushing the individual toward that line seperating proud independence from pitiable isolation.

Ray Oldenburg

#16. I believe strongly that we should have nominees to the United States Supreme Court based on their qualifications rather than any litmus test.

John McCain

#17. The development of an informal public life depends people finding and enjoying one another outside the cash nexus.

Ray Oldenburg

#18. Everyone is aware that tremendous numbers of people concentrate in city downtowns and that, if they did not, there would be no downtown to amount to anything
certainly not one with much downtown diversity.

Jane Jacobs

#19. Anger is only our friend when we know its caliber and how to aim it.

Neal Shusterman

#20. ... where the two cities are close up they make for interference patterns, harder to read or predict. They are more than a city and a city; that is elementary urban arithmetic.

China Mieville

#21. No neighbourhood or district, no matter how well established, prestigious or well heeled and no matter how intensely populated for one purpose, can flout the necessity for spreading people through time of day without frustrating its potential for generating diversity.

Jane Jacobs

#22. Entrepreneurs are outsiders by nature - outsiders with a work ethic.

Anita Roddick

#23. The stars have bewitched the sky of darkness

Jandy Nelson

#24. While Australia is superficially referred to as a continental nation, upon closer scrutiny, it is in fact an archipelago.

Asher Judah

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

Socrates

#26. Architecture and urban design, both in their formal and spatial aspects, are seen as fundamentally configurational in that the way the parts are put together to form the whole is more important than any of the parts taken in isolation.

Bill Hillier

#27. Everything good in New York used to be something awful, I guess."
"And everything awful used to be something good.

Brian K. Vaughan