Lewis Mumford Quotes

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.

What if we fail to stop the erosion of cities by automobiles? ... In that case America will hardly need to ponder a mystery that has troubled men for millennia. What is the purpose of life? For us, the answer will be clear, established and for all practical purposes indisputable. The purpose of life is to produce and consume automobiles.

I'd ban all automobiles from the central part of the city. You see, the automobile was just a passing fad. It's got to go. It's got to go a long way from here.

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

The energy crisis has given new urgency to the need to improve public transportation, not only in our cities but in rural areas as well…. Mass transit is an essential element of the improvement of life in our cities and towns.

Most old cities are now sclerotic machines that dispense known qualities in ever-greater quantities, instead of laboratories of the uncertain. Only the skyscraper offers business the wide-open spaces of a man-made Wild West, a frontier in the sky.

But look what we have built low-income projects that become worse centers of delinquency, vandalism and general social hopelessness than the slums they were supposed to replace. Cultural centers that are unable to support a good bookstore. Civic centers that are avoided by everyone but bums. Promenades that go from no place to nowhere and have no promenaders. Expressways that eviscerate great cities. This is not the rebuilding of cities. This is the sacking of cities.

And no matter how serious an environmental problem the automobile poses in today's big city, the horse was dirtier, smelled worse, killed and maimed more people, and congested the streets just as much.

The automobile is the greatest catastrophe in the entire history of City architecture.

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

You cannot separate the buildings out from the infrastructure of cites and the mobility of transit.

When they show the destruction of society on color TV, I want to be able to look out over Los Angeles and make sure they get it right.

Cities perform most functions in a very Industrial Age model.

If we're talking about transportation, the best thing a city can do is densify as quickly as it can. That needs to be said every time this issue comes up, because it's the only universal strategy that works.

I know well the opportunities and the challenges of maintaining and improving infrastructure and providing good transportation choices.

What Paris has done right is to make it awful to get around by car and awfully easy to get around by public transportation or by bike.

Urban design as a discipline barely exists in most American and Canadian cities. In Singapore, there are innovative transportation strategies at work.

Mixed use is what cities are all about. If you don't have mixed use, you don't have cities.

Every city has to deal with the problem of cars and public transport.

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

As go our cities so goes our country.

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

I can't support bike lanes.

We need a first-class transportation system.

Regardless of our political stance, we cannot afford to perpetuate the Western car-centric model.