Marcus Terentius Varro Quotes

Divine Nature gave the fields, human art built the cities.

Cities are an immense laboratory of trial and error, failure and success, in city building and city design.

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.

If in a city we had six vacant lots available to the youngsters of a certain neighborhood for playing ball, it might be "development" to build houses on the first, and the second, and the third, and the fourth, and even the fifth, but when we build houses on the last one, we forget what houses are for.

All through organized history, if you wanted prosperity you had to have cities. Cities are places that attract new people with new ideas.

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.

What kind of city are we living in, if we encourage the development or ownership of large, expensive properties for investment and land banking... while people are sleeping on the streets?

The city is not the problem; the city is the solution.

When we deal with cities we are dealing with life at its most complex and intense. Planners are guided by principles derived from the behaviour and appearance of suburbs, tuberculosis sanatoria, fairs and imaginary dream cities - from anything but cities themselves.

Hope and the future for me are not in lawns and cultivated fields, not in towns and cities, but in the impervious and quaking swamps.

My ideal city would be one long main street with no cross streets or side streets to jam up traffic. Just a long one-way street.

More than its utilitarian and technocratic transparency, it is the opaque ambivalence of its oddities that makes the city livable.

One cannot completely avoid this landmark character with large buildings such as these. But the city itself is also gigantic.

Any city has to give some thought to its ambition and brand in order to set sustainability goals.

Man doesn't change. He keeps his habits. Instinctively, all those people found the same corner for their kitchen. To build a city, don't men choose the same sites? Under cities you always find other cities; other churches under churches, and other houses under houses.

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

That the sight of people attracts still other people, is something that city planners and city architectural designers seem to find incomprehensible. They operate on the premise that city people seek the sight of emptiness, obvious order and quiet. Nothing could be less true. The presences of great numbers of people gathered together in cities should not only be frankly accepted as a physical fact... they should also be enjoyed as an asset and their presence celebrated.

The streets of a modern city are depressing. They are so aimless and so weak in their lines and their masses, that the mind and senses jog on their way like passengers in a train with blinds down in an overcrowded carriage.

All buildings, large or small, public or private, have a public face, a facade; they therefore, without exception, have a positive or negative effect on the quality of the public realm, enriching or impoverishing it in a lasting and radical manner. The architecture of the city and public space is a matter of common concern to the same degree as laws and language—they are the foundation of civility and civilisation.

One important role for the city is to conduct studies to document areas of greatest need, and to facilitate coordination between our public and private transportation options to weave it into a dense tapestry of accessible and reliable transportation.

Parks are but pavement disguised with a growth of grass.

The city of Chandigarh is planned to human scale. It puts us in touch with the infinite cosmos and nature. It provides us with places and buildings for all human activities by which the citizens can live a full and harmonious life. Here the radiance of nature and heart are within our reach.

Whyte's work remains a living and usable handbook for improving our cities, our countryside, and our lives.

The test of civilization is the power of drawing the most benefit out of cities.

Cities like Detroit exist because they occupy important sites. In the case of Detroit, it sits on a river between two great lakes - very important and strategic.