January Gehl Quotes

If, instead of hiring half-baked revolutionary planners to fill our college undergraduates with ingenious schemes to disperse populations, split up big cities into little ones, go underground or into distant places to escape bombs and congestion, abandon large urban areas in favor of roadside villages, we were to publish reliable, simply written, common-sense information to control the building boom, what a country this would be!

Stockholm is surely an urban planner's dream. Everything works. Everything looks good.

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

We have stopped making communities in which people want to live and are making communities where people drive through.

The Italians have long known what makes a livable town or city.

We can’t be a great country unless we have great cities.

Transit builds a city that people choose to live in.

I hope that any expansion of London will learn from the planning examples of some of its most desirable areas such as Chelsea, Notting Hill, Belgravia and Mayfair. All are characterised by high density and a generosity of green spaces. They are all pedestrian-friendly with shops, entertainment, restaurants and pubs within easy walking distance.

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.

What kind of town do we want in the future, and how are we going to plan on that?

Maybe, just maybe, we shall at last come to care for the most important, most challenging, surely the most satisfying of all architectural creations: building cities for people to live in.

In my opinion, further consideration of those views will help us find a way out of the current impasse, and reveal to us the kinds of buildings and cities required by the informational society.

For many years, I have lived uncomfortably with the belief that most planning and architectural design suffers for lack of real and basic purpose. The ultimate purpose, it seems to me, must be the improvement of mankind.

People who call themselves [city] planners ... draw pretty pictures ... but they often don't get anything done.

Urban planning should be done with the mindset that we are determining the city's fabric for 100 years to come.

The object of this edict is to enlighten the present and future citizens of Chandigarh about the basic concepts of planning of the city so that they become its guardians and save it from whims of individuals.

A city should be built to give its inhabitants security and happiness

So here's my advice to city planners. Make your city runnable. Runners are the first wave of troops bringing human activity back to the urban core of any city. Where we go, others will follow. The connection between runnability and livability is so clear (at least to me), that it's surprising that new developments consistently leave pathways out of the plans.

Buildings should serve people, not the other way around.

There is no one-size-fits-all solution to the challenges facing our cities or to the housing crisis, but the two issues need to be considered together. From an urban design and planning point of view, the well-connected open city is a powerful paradigm and an engine for integration and inclusivity.

Cities are not problems. They are solutions.

We're producing spaces that accommodate human activity. And what I'm interested in is not the styling of that, but the relationship of that as it enhances that activity. And that directly connects to ideas of city-making.

Every time you think of a city, you have to think green, green, green. Every time you see concrete jungle, you must find open spaces. And when you find open spaces, make it so people can get to them.

I love cities, I spend most of my life talking about cities. And the design of cities does have an effect on your life. You're lucky if you can see trees out of your window and you have a square nearby, or a bar, a cornershop, a surgery. Then you're living well.

Many of them are doing it because they are concerned about smart growth.