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TheArtist
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« Reply #1 on: April 07, 2008, 06:04:16 pm » |
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Here are some I found.
Factors that are driving the popularity of large houses: "First, with less of a sense of community and public life in our culture, the home becomes a fortress which needs to contain everything we need, including multiple forms of entertainment, rather than basic shelter…" - designer-builder John Abrams of the South Mountain Company in West Tisbury, Mass.
A common mistake people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools. -Douglas Adams
...It does not require a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless minority keen to set brush fires in people's minds. - Samuel Adams (1722-1803)
Suburbia is a collection of private benefits and public nuisances. - Anonymous
If car ownership is mandatory, [the place is] not urban. - Donald Baxter
In a quality city, a person should be able to live their entire life without a car, and not feel deprived. - Paul Bedford
Those who buy into the suburbs because they want to be close to nature are going to keep doing so. The point of parks in cities is not to satisfy that urge, but to make better urbanism for those who want real urbanism. - David Brain
Automobiles need quantity and pedestrians need quality. - Dan Burden
We must not build housing, we must build communities. - Mike Burton
Cars are happiest when there are no other cars around. People are happiest when there are other people around. - Dan Burden
Freedom is not constituted primarily of privileges but of responsibilities - Albert Camus:
Anyplace worth its salt has a 'parking problem'. - James Castle
Planning of the automobile city focuses on saving time. Planning for the accessible city, on the other hand, focuses on time well spent. - Robert Cervero
The food would have to be pretty horrible for this not to be a perfect lunch. --Buff Chace sitting down in a Roman piazza
Vancouver killed the freeway because they didn't want the freeways to kill their neighborhoods. The city flourished because making it easier to drive does not reduce traffic; it increases it. That means if you don't waste billions of dollars building freeways, you actually end up with less traffic. - Rick Cole
When we build our landscape around places to go, we lose places to be. -Rick Cole
Increasingly, we live in a world where cities compete for people, and businesses follow. This trend has largely been ignored by many cities, which are still focused on business climate and tax incentives. But I think the big question businesses will ask in the years to come is going to be 'Can I hire talented people in this city?' Cities need to be able to answer 'yes' to succeed. - Carol Coletta, president and CEO of CEOs for Cities.
People yearning for community are like people at a party who crowd into the kitchen because they like it. - Bruce Donnelly
Parking is a narcotic and ought to be a controlled substance. It is addictive, and one can never have enough. - Victor Dover
To most Americans the cures for traffic congestion are worse than the congestion itself. – Anthony Downs
Climate has little to do with [how much people walk]. Toronto residents, New Orleanians and Manhattanites, with extremes of weather, walk more than Atlantans. The variable is the quality of the urbanism. Not the weather. People in Stockholm walk more than people in the suburbs of Seville. People in Stockholm's center walk more that they do in Stockholm's 1950's new towns. The variable is always the quality of the urbanism--not the weather. - Andres Duany
In [the traditional New England town], one can live above the store, next to the store, five minutes from the store or nowhere near the store, and it is easy to imagine the different age groups and personalities that would prefer each alternative. In this way and others, the traditional neighborhood provides for an array of lifestyles. In conventional suburbia, there is only one available lifestyle: to own a car and to need it for everything. - Andres Duany, "Suburban Nation
We are not running out of land. We are running out of urban places. - Andres Duany
The Department of Transportation, in its single-minded pursuit of traffic flow, has destroyed more American towns than General Sherman. - Andres Duany
The 5 Bs - bricks, banners, balloons, benches and berms - do NOT create streetlife. It is the available shopping that provides it. - Andres Duany
The loss of a forest or a farm is justified only if it is replaced by a village. To replace them with a subdivision or a shopping center is not an even trade. - Andres Duany
Amateurs accustomed to emulation made great places. It is the professionals of recent decades that have ruined our cities and our landscapes with their inventions. - Andres Duany
Higher density housing offers an inferior lifestyle only when it is without a community as its setting. - Andres Duany
In the suburbs you have backyard decks; in towns you have porches on the street. - Andres Duany
What you need is a system of zoning based not on use, but on the quality of street frontage. Then develop your street grid with a rhythm of "A" streets and "B" streets. Designate those streets like your Walnut Street as "A" streets, where every building on these blocks must be high-grade, pedestrian-oriented and reinforce continuity - no parking lots, no curb cuts. Then assign all your anti-pedestrian frontages to your "B" streets, your service streets. There is absolutely nothing worse for a city than to make every street excellent. If you try to make every street excellent, every street will be mediocre. - Andres Duany
If you design communities for automobiles, you get more automobiles. If you design them for people, you get walkable, livable communities. - Parris Glendening and Christine Todd Whitman
Urbanism works when it creates a journey as desirable as the destination. - Paul Goldberger
If what you sell is the perception of privacy and exclusivity, then every new house is a degradation of the amenity. However, if what you sell is community, then every new house is an enhancement of the asset. - Vince Graham
If buildings are beautiful, higher density compounds that beauty. Conversely, if buildings are ugly, then higher density compounds that ugliness. - Vince Graham
I've always described Density in terms of dollars: The more you have of it, the more you can "buy" with it -- referring to amenities, of course (cultural, entertainment, dining, etc.). When I get asked what's the single most important thing that can be added to a city to help revitalize it (they are always waiting for the latest retail or entertainment thing...), I always say "housing." - Seth Harry
The "suburban conundrum": As density goes down in a suburban setting, both arterial sizes and retail format sizes tend to go up, while the frequency of both go down, resulting in longer trips, to fewer boxes, of ever increasing scale.
- Seth Harry
Adding lanes to solve traffic congestion is like loosening your belt to solve obesity. - Glen Hemistra
Nothing will ever be attempted if all possible objections must first be overcome. - Samuel Johnson
Architecture without sensibility to its context is like sex without love: entertaining perhaps, but not the source of lasting joy. - Mark Wilson Jones
The more parking space, the less sense of place. - Jane Holtz Kay
Any city planner who thinks that easing the traffic flow will decrease the city’s congestion is simply living in a dream world. Likewise, the addition of parking facilities will not, and never has, eliminated parking problems. When you improve a small congested road, you wind up with a big congested road. Likewise, the better the traffic pattern, the more traffic on that pattern; the more parking lots, the more people looking for a place to park. - John Keats
If you plan cities for cars and traffic, you get cars and traffic. If you plan for people and places, you get people and places. - Fred Kent
Whatever a traffic engineer tells you to do, do the opposite and you'll improve your community. - Fred Kent
Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it. - Matthew 7:13-14
Men do not love Rome because she is beautiful; Rome is beautiful because men have loved her. - Leopold Kohr.
The majority of sprawl in this country is produced by those who are fleeing from sprawl. -Alex Krieger
It matters that our cities are primarily auto storage depots. It matters that our junior high schools look like insecticide factories. It matters that our libraries look like beverage distribution warehouses. It matters that the best hotel in town looks like a minimum security prison. To live and work and walk among such surroundings is a form of spiritual degradation. It's hard to feel good about yourself when so much of what you see on a typical day is so unrelentingly drab. - Jim Kunstler
...there's a reason that Elm Street and Main Street resonate in our cultural memory. It's not because we're sentimental saps. It's because this pattern of human ecology produced places that worked wonderfully well, and which people deeply loved. - Jim Kunstler
What's bad about sprawl is not its uniformity, but that it is so uniformly bad. - Jim Kunstler
The 20th Century was about getting around. The 21st Century will be about staying in a place worth staying in. - Jim Kunstler
It actually took more effort, and a deeper background in principle and technique, on the part of the 19th century architect to contrive proportioning schemes that would nourish the heart and soul of a normal human being. Today it is the common citizen, forced to live among the baleful monstrosities of 20th century architecture, who must expend extreme mental effort to keep from shrieking in agony at every turn. - Jim Kunstler
I have never seen a fact that would stand up to a myth at a public hearing. - J. Gary Lawrence
You say what you think needs to be said. If it needs to be said, there are going to be a lot of people who will disagree with it, or it wouldn't need to be said. - Herb Lock
Growth is inevitable and desirable, but destruction of community character is not. The question is not whether your part of the world is going to change. The question is how. - Edward T. McMahon
What kills a city are people who want only low taxes, only want a good deal and only want cities to be about . . . pipes, pavement and policing. - Glen Murray, mayor of Winnipeg, Manitoba
We are making great progress, but we are going in the wrong direction. - Ogden Nash
Each on-street parking spot that is lost costs an adjacent business about $10,000 a year in sales. - National Main Street Program
Infill development is publicly cheap but privately expensive, while sprawl is publicly expensive but privately cheap. - James Nicholas
Cities are for people. A city is where people come to work and raise their families and to spend their money and to walk in the evening. It is not a traffic corridor. -John Norquist
There is no greater form of subsidized social engineering than the interstate highway, which hastens the flight out of the city without doing much to ease traffic congestion. -John Norquist
This used to be Main Street USA. It's now a code violation all over America. - John Norquist
With modest roads, Big Box retail is impossible. With large roads, Big Box retail is inevitable. - Dom Nozzi
This nation is drowning in a sea of free and abundant parking. - Dom Nozzi
Working adults formerly enjoyed an hour of "community time" after the workday was over and before they were expected home. It has been replaced by an hour of "commuting time." The former warmed us to our fellow human beings, the latter conditions us to hate them. – Ray Oldenburg, Celebrating the Third Place
A good plan today is better than a perfect plan tomorrow. - George S. Patton
Anything you do to make a city more friendly to cars makes it less friendly to people. - Enrique Penalosa
The desire for community is a constant of human nature. - Stephen Price
Nothing looks so dated as yesterday's vision of the future. - Christian De Quincey
Every freedom has a corresponding responsibility. - John D. Rockefeller
The measure of any great civilization is in its cities, and the measure of a city's greatness is to be found in the quality of its public spaces, its parks and squares. - John Ruskin
For a concert hall, Los Angeles requires, at a minimum, 50 times more parking spaces than San Francisco allows as the maximum. This difference in planning helps explain why downtown San Francisco is much more exciting and livable than downtown Los Angeles. - Donald Shoup, The High Cost of Free Parking
Minimum parking standards are fertility drugs for cars. - Donald Shoup
Staunch conservatives often become ardent communists when it comes to parking, and rational people quickly turn emotional. - Donald Shoup
If the earth was an apartment, we wouldn't be getting our security deposit back. - Jim Shubert
A suburban through street is similar to a New Urbanist through street in the same way that a concrete flood channel is similar to a babbling brook. - Patrick Siegman
The great thing about urbanism…is that the more you build, generally the better. The opposite is true of sprawl. - Robert Steuteville
There are three rules of urban design [for the establishment and preservation of walkable commercial areas]. Build [buildings] to the sidewalk (i.e., property line), make the front of the building 'permeable' (i.e., no blank walls), and prohibit parking lots in front of the building. - David Sucher, City Comforts (2003)
The paradox of transportation in the late 20th Century is that while it became possible to travel to the moon, it also became impossible, in many cases, to walk across the street. - Joell Vanderwagen
The only way you run into someone else in LA is in a car crash. - Susan Sarandon, on why she moved to NY.
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