Jaime Lerner Quotes

We cannot afford merely to sit down and deplore the evils of city life as inevitable, when cities are constantly growing, both absolutely and relatively. We must set ourselves vigorously about the task of improving them; and this task is now well begun.

In city planning, there is no limit to be fixed.

Cities are not problems. They are solutions.

Infrastructure deficit is an issue in all urban areas.

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

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.

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.

A culture, we all know, is made by its cities.

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.'

It is pretty well settled that the city is the Negro's great contribution to civilization, for it was in Africa where the first cities grew up.

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

Like all things, cities must change - even a city as enamoured of the past and memory as D.C.

Planning is for the world's great cities, for Paris, London, and Rome, for cities dedicated, at some level, to culture. Detroit, on the other hand, was an American city and therefore dedicated to money, and so design had given way to expediency.

Cities are never random. No matter how chaotic they might seem, everything about them grows out of a need to solve a problem

Taken altogether, Washington as a city is most unsatisfactory, and falls more grievously short of the thing attempted than any other of the great undertakings of which I have seen anything in the United States.

Modern life demands, and is waiting for, a new kind of plan, both for the house and the city.

As in the pseudoscience of bloodletting, just so in the pseudoscience of city rebuilding and planning, years of learning and a plethora of subtle and complicated dogma have arisen on a foundation of nonsense.

I love going to the river not only to enjoy nature, but to think about the Los Angeles River's place in our city's history and to envision its great place in our future.

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.

Whilst we want cities as the centres where the best things are found, cities degrade us by magnifying trifles.

[Ayres] was our city because we were building it. That's how I felt when I walked around town.

There are few jobs in the world that are more fun than being the head of Urban Development for a great and thriving city.

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.

Tower'd cities please us then, And the busy hum of men.