Lewis Mumford Quotes

Having viewed slum clearance projects in most major cities of the world may I state that you have conceived and created in the Johannesburg townships what is probably the most impressive and adequate resettlement activity in existence.

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

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

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.

The pursuit of the vibrant seems to be the universal job description of the nation's city planners nowadays. It is also part of the Obama administration's economic recovery strategy for the nation.

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

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

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

I started my career as an urban planner, working for the city, doing what I would call 'do-gooder' things, particularly for low-income neighborhoods.

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.

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.

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.

Our cities need to change, fast. Tactical Urbanism is a guided tour of solutions created when local people decide they can't wait for politics to catch up before they improve their neighborhoods. This weathervane book deserves a place on any urbanist's bookshelf.

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

Denser cities are smarter and more productive

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.

It is hereby earnestly proposed that the USA would be much better off if that big, sprawling, incoherent, shapeless, slobbering civic idiot in the family of American communities, the City of Los Angeles, could be declared incompetent and placed in charge of a guardian like any individual mental defective.

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.

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.

Transformed people transform cities.

Cities never flourish alone. They have to be trading with other cities. My new hypothesis shows why. But also in trading with each other they can't be in too different stages of development, and they can't copy one another.

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

I think we should want all of our cities to become more compassionate places, frankly.

Chicago's such a great city because it's got so many different brilliantly architecturally looking buildings, and you can really modify that 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.