Alex Steffen Quotes

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

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

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!

Incentives and infrastructure should encourage development and that development needs to contain the right types of housing in the right places.

As a planning board commissioner, I have to review the applications for development throughout the city, and the bulk of those applications have been for the waterfront. I think the progress the waterfront has made is amazing.

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.

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

I have realized after all these years that a city that has a good quality of life attracts jobs. People don't want to invest in places if there is no quality of life.

In urbanization, you think big because you are thinking decades ahead.

Besides infrastructure, there is a huge opportunity in housing and urbanisation of cities - not only building new ones, but also renewing the infrastructure of old cities to make them more livable. This provides tremendous scope for large investments to fuel growth.

The Dallas model, prominent in the South and Southwest, sees a growing population as a sign of urban health. Cities liberally permit housing construction to accommodate new residents. The Los Angeles model, common on the West Coast and in the Northeast Corridor, discourages growth by limiting new housing.

Fifty years ago people were talking about Sydney's sprawl, but nobody does anything about it.

Every city is either vibrant these days or is working on a plan to attain vibrancy soon. The reason is simple: a city isn't successful - isn't even a city, really - unless it can lay claim to being 'vibrant.'

Any urbanist has to appreciate New York City and the way it works. The public transit is astonishing.

We can build new housing while preserving the quality and character of adjacent residential districts and ensuring infill development strengthens the surrounding neighborhood.

As Mayor, I will lead city government, businesses, and community groups to support innovative projects that will make San Francisco streets and public places vibrant and healthy.

All it takes is an understanding that humans, not buildings come first when designing a city.

We need to create planned communities: whole new towns with the infrastructure and amenities they need, communities where people genuinely want to live, and built where demand is high.

We need to reform our land use policies to build more housing in urban centers and near transit.

By scrapping the government's centrally dictated density targets we'll ensure that the right type of new homes are built where they're needed, ending the glut of one- and two-bedroom flats.

Cities around the United States do not have land use planning like we have in Oregon, and they are all struggling with issues like affordable housing.

Transit builds a city that people choose to live in.

I don't think of the New Urbanism as an economic or political train wreck. I think of it as one of these great generational upheavals that's coming.

There's something really interesting about current urbanism: the only model is the universal model, and there is increasingly incapacity to consider the virtues and the qualities that are there, and then to build on them. The only thing is complete transformation.

We should concentrate our work not only to a separated housing problem but housing involved in our daily work and all the other functions of the city.