Arthur Erickson Quotes

Without land, how can you have development of roads, highways, townships, etc?

Out of the Slow Food movement has grown something called the Slow Cities movement, which has started in Italy but has spread right across Europe and beyond. And in this, towns begin to rethink how they organize the urban landscape so that people are encouraged to slow down and smell the roses and connect with one another.

The World Trade Center was for me not only out of scale vertically, but it was also out of scale in plan. It occupied several blocks that were all massed together.

I don't know how many of you have been to New York, but if a building is two blocks away from anything, you can't see it.

I am all for greening tall buildings, but I'm also very keen to note that greening a building doesn't cope with the problem of the tall building in the texture of the city.

I think water transport will see a revival. However, we're not going to replay the 20th century. The industrial city of that era will not be revived. Our cities are going to contract. Many of them will contract as a whole but densify at their core.

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

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.

New York has always been a city of change and a city about change, and it is a back-leading development. Nobody's going to want to come to New York if it looks like another strip mall.

The denser places get, the lower the amount of energy people use to get around it.

Most cities have a centre surrounded by suburbs, but London has numerous centres: it's the model of a twenty-first century metropolis.

I walk out my front door in New York and I'm out on the street and there are people everywhere. L.A. is so much more spread out, so it's really easy in L.A. to have a little more isolation and to just not see as many people.

No city should be too large for a man to walk out of in a morning.

The tall building, concentrating man in one place more densely than ever before, similarly concentrates the dilemma of our public architecture at the end of the twentieth century: whether the new forms made possible by technology are doomed by the low calculations of modern patrons and their architects.

Less cars on the road means productivity and jobs growth, as it allows for the more efficient movement of goods and services and encourages greater urban population density.

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

For carbon-neutral cities, there are things worth talking about in how our consumption patterns can change - sharing goods, etc. - but those are a fraction of the impacts of transportation and building energy use. If we need to choose priority actions, the most important things are to densify, provide transit, and green the buildings.

Carpooling is important for urban density, air pollution and other reasons, but carpooling is not the kind of thing that actually changes the energy equation.

The bigger the city is, the less infrastructure you need per capita.

New York City is as much on the perpendicular as on the horizontal plane …. Americans have practically added a new dimension to space. When they find themselves a little crowded, they simply tilt a street on end and call it a skyscraper …. Aerial suburbs …. Mansions in the sky.

The site for the school house is generally the most neglected, because [it is] the cheapest, spot in town ...

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.

The utilization of flat roofs as 'grounds' offers us a means of re-acclimatizing nature amidst the stony deserts of our great towns; for the plots from which she has been evicted to make room for buildings can be given back to her up aloft.

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

Most cities are eclectic. There's a bit of medieval, Georgian, some Victorian and some 20th century. That's fine. Bath is different because it was built within 100 years or less. It has a homogeneity.