Quotes on Urban Planning

Our national flower is the concrete cloverleaf.

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.

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.

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

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

We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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