James P. Cannon Quotes

We are producing urban places which are disjointed and disconnected and not worthy of our civilisation

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

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

City planning finds its validation in the intuitive recognition that a burgeoning market society can not be trusted to produce spontaneously a habitable, sanitary, or even efficient city, much less a beautiful one.

Children are a kind of indicator species. If we can build a successful city for children, we will have a successful city for all people.

Let's invent a new tomorrow and then make it happen. Let's invent the city of tomorrow, the home of tomorrow, the transportation of tomorrow.

The modern city is ugly not because it is a city but because it is not enough of a city, because it is a jungle, because it is confused and anarchic, and surging with selfish and materialistic energies.

Californians have brought suburb-making almost to an art. Their cities and their country-side are equally suburban. No-one has a country house in California; no-one has a city house. It is good to see trees always from city windows, but it is not so good always to see houses from country windows.

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.

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

If we wish to rebuild our cities, we must first rebuild our neighborhoods.

By far the greatest and most admirable form of wisdom is that needed to plan and beautify cities and human communities.

We form cities in order to enhance interaction, to facilitate growth, wealth creation, ideas, innovation, but in so doing, we create from - from a physicist's viewpoint, entropy, meaning all of those bad things that we feel are engulfing us.

I say we don't need art in nature, because it's so perfect without us. We need it in the cities. But the cities have absolutely lost their own center. They think having ten cars and a big bridge is the way to happiness. It's not.

In every detail a city should reflect that human beings are sacred and that they are equal.

If there's a group like Amish people, that want to live their own lifestyle – they don't want to live in our city – they want to live out in the country, with their own projects. We’ll put up the buildings for them, design the buildings for them, design the food production systems for them – if they want us to. But we don’t control them.

That is what is so marvelous about Europe; the people long ago learned that space and beauty and quiet refuges in a great city, where children may play and old people sit in the sun, are of far more value to the inhabitants than real estate taxes and contractors' greed.

...frequent streets and short blocks are valuable because of the fabric of intricate cross-use that they permit among the users of a city neighbouhood.

We must start... rebuilding our cities around energy efficiency and human needs, rather than around the car and wasted energy.

The only sustainable city - and this, to me, is the indispensable ideal and goal - is a city in balance with its countryside.

There is no logic that can be superimposed on the city; people make it, and it is to them, not buildings, that we must fit our plans.

Cities give not the human senses room enough. We go out daily and nightly to feed the eyes on the horizon, and require so much scope, just as we need water for our bath.

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

Note for Americans and other aliens: Milton Keynes is a new city approximately halfway between London and Birmingham. It was built to be modern, efficient, healthy, and, all in all, a pleasant place to live. Many Britons find this amusing.

In Bogotá, our goal was to make a city for all the children. The measure of a good city is one where a child on a tricycle or bicycle can safely go anywhere. If a city is good for children, it will be good for everybody else. Over the last 80 years we have been making cities much more for cars' mobility than for children’s happiness.