Planning The Best Possible Cities To Work, Play and Live.

Thoughts and Observations about City Planning (Urban, Suburban and Rural):

“When you look at a city, it’s like reading the hopes, aspirations and pride of everyone who built it.” Hugh Newell Jacobsen – U.S. architect.

“Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody. … 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.” ?Jane Jacobs - U.S./Canadian journalist, author, theorist, and activist who influenced urban studies, sociology, and economics.

“Smart habitation is an integrated area of villages and a city working in harmony and where the rural and urban divide has (been) reduced to (a) thin line.”?A. P. J. Abdul Kalam – Indian statesman. ?Indian aerospace scientist and statesman, former president of India.

“There is no one-size-fits-all solution to the challenges facing our cities or to the housing crisis, but the two issues need to be considered together. From an urban design and planning point of view, the well-connected open city is a powerful paradigm and an engine for integration and inclusivity.” Richard Rogers – U.K. architect, Former Member of the House of Lords of the United Kingdom.

“There are three key attributes that make people happy in their communities and cause them to develop a solid emotional attachment to the place they live in. The first is the physical beauty and the level of maintenance of the place itself - great open spaces and parks, historic buildings, and an attention to community aesthetics. The second is the ease with which people can meet others, make friends, and plug into social networks. The third piece of the happiness puzzle is the level of diversity, open-mindedness, and acceptance: Is there some equality of opportunity for all? Can anyone - everyone - contribute to and take pleasure from the community?”?Richard Florida - U.S. urban studies theorist focusing on social and economic theory, professor at the 加拿大多伦多大学 - 罗特曼管理学院 and a Distinguished Fellow at 美国纽约大学 's School of Professional Studies.

“Urbanization is not about simply increasing the number of urban residents or expanding the area of cities. More importantly, it's about a complete change from rural to urban style in terms of industry structure, employment, living environment and social security.” Li Keqiang – Chinese politician, outgoing premier of China, economist by profession.

“Privacy, self-reliance, choice -- all these can and must remain core American values. Yet so too must we remember that other core American value, the value of community. And we must redefine community more broadly to include not just our street or our tract, but our town, our metropolis, our region.” William Fulton – U.S. author, urban planner, politician, formerly mayor of Ventura, California and planning director for the city of San Diego, and head of the Kinder Institute for Urban Research at Rice University in Houston.

?“In the planning and designing of new communities, housing projects, and urban renewal, the planners both private and public, need to give explicit consideration to the kind of world that is being created for the children who will be growing up in these settings. Particular attention should be given to the opportunities which the environment presents or precludes for involvement of children both older and younger than themselves.” Urie Bronfenbrenner - Russian-/U.S. psychologist.

“The last great technological advancement that reshaped cities was the automobile (some might argue it was the elevator). In both cases, these technologies reshaped the physical aspects of living in cities – how far a person could travel or how high a building could climb. But the fundamentals of how cities worked remained the same. What’s different about the information age that has been ushered in by personal computers, mobile phones and the Internet is its ability to reshape the social organization of cities and empower everyday citizens with the knowledge and tools to actively participate in the policy, planning and management of cities.” Christian Madera – U.S. marketing/communications executive, Global Director for Digital Communications · World Resources Institute .

“The smallest patch of green to arrest the monotony of asphalt is as important to the value of real estate as streets, sewers and convenient shopping.” James Felt – U.S. real estate developer, former chairman of the New York City Planning Commission.

“Bringing nature back into the city is a way to deal with urban sprawl. If cities feel a little more natural, people like to live there rather than moving out and dividing up another piece of land that shouldn’t be touched.” Stone Gossard – U.S. musician, guitarist and songwriter for the rock band Pearl Jam.

“I’ve often thought that if our zoning boards could be put in charge of botanists, of zoologists and geologists, and people who know about the earth, we would have much more wisdom in such planning than when we leave it to the engineers.” William O. Douglas - U.S. jurist, served as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States.

“A smart city is a city where humans, trees, birds and other animals can grow with all their glories, imperfections, freedom, and creativity. They are not just cities of technology but cities of love, life, beauty, dignity, freedom and equality.” Amit Ray - Indian author, known for books on meditation, yoga, peace and compassion.

“From 50 centuries, we can learn about the close relationship between garden design and urban design, because both arts involve the composition of buildings with paving, landform, water, vegetation and climate.” Tom Turner - U.S. architect.

“Public spaces that work tend to have a handful of magic ingredients: water, a mix of different scales, greenery. Their designs are attentive to sound, provide a feeling of being open and sheltered at the same time, and, above all, give people places to pause and watch others. New York has no shortage of incredible public spaces, but, often, longtime residents are displaced by shiny new spaces that attract only visitors. An ideal design process should involve residents to help design spaces that can become more than tourist destinations.” Victoria Tentler-Krylov - Russian/U.S. artist, architect.

“Probably the most important element in intricacy is centering. Good small parks typically have a place somewhere within them commonly understood to be the center—at the very least a main crossroads and pausing point, a climax. (….) the presence of buildings around a park is important in design. They enclose it. They make a definite shape out of the space, so that it appears as an important event in the city scene, a positive feature, rather than a no-account leftover.” Jane Jacobs - ?U.S./Canadian journalist, author, theorist, and activist who influenced urban studies, sociology, and economics.

“I believe that the idea of the totality, the finality of the master-plan, is misguided. One should advocate a gradual transformation of public space, a metamorphic process, without relying on a hypothetical time in the future when everything will be perfect.” Daniel Libeskind – Polish/U.S. architect.

“Neither cities nor places in them are unordered, unplanned; the question is only whose order, whose planning, for what purpose?” Peter Marcuse - German/U.S. lawyer, professor of urban planning.

“Growth is inevitable and desirable, but destruction of community character is not. The question is not whether your part of the world is going to change. The question is how.”?Edward T. McMahon – U.S. urban planner.

“The mark of a great city isn’t how it treats its special places – everybody does that right – but how it treats its ordinary ones.” Aaron M. Renn – U.S. journalist, contributing editor of City Journal, economic development columnist for Governing magazine.

“We must redefine the American dream so that it does not rest on the assumption that we can throw old places away and create new ones in the middle of nowhere.” William Fulton – U.S. author, urban planner, politician, formerly mayor of Ventura, California and planning director for the city of San Diego, and head of the Kinder Institute for Urban Research at Rice University in Houston.

“We need to define gentrification as separate from the process of displacement.” Justin Davidson – U.S. journalist, architecture and classical music critic for New York Magazine , 纽约时报 , Los Angeles Times , Smithsonian Magazine and The New Yorker

“Excessive gentrification destroys the biodiversity and ecosystem of a community.” Khang Kijarro Nguyen – U.S. photographer, artist, performer.

“This thing is such a ripple, the way lives are affected by gentrification. On one hand, yes, you're cleaning up this area, you're making it more livable for people. But you're not saying anything about the people that live there.” Brian Azzarello – U.S. writer.

“The neighborhood is a social construct that enables people to live, work and play together in close quarters with a feeling of engagement and security beyond their existence as individuals. (...) a sense of scale and community that is manageable, more village-like than urban. The most attractive neighborhoods [are] the ones where there’s a palpable sense of an open, rather than closed community. Being a good neighbor is not about watching from behind your curtains and reporting any suspected misdemeanor to the police - it’s about inhabiting your neighborhood beyond the curtains, bringing life to your street with open arms, not closed minds.” Hugo Macdonald – U.K. design critic, curator consultant, former design editor at Monocle and brand director of Ilse Crawford's design studio.

“And in every afflicted city, the story is the same: luxury condos, mass evictions, hipster invasions, a plague of tourists, the death of small local businesses, and the rise of corporate monoculture.” Jeremiah Moss, pseudonym of Griffin Hansbury, a U.S. poet, writer, psychoanalyst, social worker, social critic. Author of the blog “Jeremiah's Vanishing New York”.

“Over a decade of citywide rezonings, land speculations, and corporate bidding wars for available commercial space has produced a Darwinian habitat where corporate retail proliferates, and where mom-and-pops have become an endangered species.”?Alessandro Busà – U.K. urban planner.

“Gentrifiers focus on aesthetics, not people. Because people, to them, are aesthetics.” Sarah Kendzior – U.S. journalist.

“In great cities, spaces as well as places are designed and built: walking, witnessing, being in public, are as much part of the design and purpose as is being inside to eat, sleep, make shoes or love or music. The word citizen has to do with cities, and the ideal city is organized around citizenship -- around participation in public life.”??Rebecca Solnit – U.S. writer, historian, activist.

“We need – more urgently than architectural utopias, ingenious traffic disposal systems, or ecological programmes – to comprehend the nature of citizenship, to make serious imaginative assessment of that special relationship between the self and the city; its unique plasticity, its privacy and freedom.” Jonathan Raban – U.K. travel writer.

“A city?… is the pulsating product of the human hand and mind, reflecting man’s history, his struggle for freedom, creativity, genius---and his selfishness and errors.” Charles Abrams – Polish/U.S. lawyer, writer, urbanist, housing expert, created the New York City Housing and Development Administration in the 1960s.

“Urbanization has lured more people to bustling metropolises, but precious little thought has been given to what happens when these cities fail. Over time, the underlying systems and processes of civilization – from lead mining to offshore drilling to car commuting – slowly poison us. Power grids brown out, the climate heats up, and industrial accidents ravage ecosystems and cities alike. For all the famed cities with thousands of years of continuity – Paris, London, Cairo, Athens, Rome, Istanbul – most cities just stop.”?Ben Paynter – U.S. journalist, senior writer at Fast Company .

“Today one marvels at the conversions of old buildings that are now offices and residences or both. Office buildings are apartment houses, mansions are office buildings, manufacturing lofts are apartments, tenement apartments are small factories, everything from a barge to a barn is a restaurant...These buildings were not designed with flexibility in mind, but their manageable scale provided inherent adjustability and their design and quality constriction provided inherent appeal.”?Roberta Gratz – U.S. journalist, urban critic.

““I believe that architecture is a pragmatic art. To become art it must be built on a foundation of necessity. …?Architecture is the very mirror of life. You only have to cast your eyes on buildings to feel the presence of the past, the spirit of a place; they are the reflection of society. … Life is architecture and architecture is the mirror of life.”?I. M. Pei - Chinese-U.S. architect.

“Architecture, of all the arts, is the one which acts the most slowly, but the most surely, on the soul.” Ernest Dimnet – French priest, writer and lecturer.

‘A city can only be reconstructed in the form of urban quarters. A large or a small city can only be reorganized as a large or a small number of urban quarters; as a federation of autonomous quarters. Each quarter must have its own center, periphery and limit. Each quarter must be a city within a city.” Leon Krier - Luxembourgish architect, architectural theorist, urban planner.

“Italian cities have long been held up as ideals, not least by New Yorkers and Londoners enthralled by the ways their architecture gives beauty and meaning to everyday acts.” Rebecca Solnit – U.S. writer, historian, activist.

“Dull, inert cities, it is true, do contain the seeds of their own destruction and little else. But lively, diverse, intense cities contain the seeds of their own regeneration, with energy enough to carry over for problems and needs outside themselves.” Jane Jacobs – U.S.-Canadian journalist, author, theorist, and activist who influenced urban studies, sociology, and economics.

“As people flock to urban centers where ground space is limited, cities with green walls and roofs and skyscraper farms offer improved health and well-being, renewable resources, reliable food supply, and relief to the environment.”?Diane Ackerman - U.S. poet.

?“Cities are not only a place where we live but also a place where humanity evolves.” Planners Realm – Internet media platform for discussing and sharing knowledge for livable and sustainable urban and rural planning

“By far the greatest and most admirable form of wisdom is that needed to plan and beautify cities and human communities.” Socrates - Greek philosopher.

“Infrastructure is always hugely expensive, and there's no clear way to measure the overall future return on investment, whether it's in the form of innovation, development, or new communities or jobs. Infrastructure provides a skeleton on which to grow a new economic model. The infrastructure investments we make now will determine the kind of economy we have in the future.”?Richard Florida -U.S. urban studies theorist focusing on social and economic theory, professor at the 加拿大多伦多大学 - 罗特曼管理学院 and a Distinguished Fellow at 美国纽约大学 's School of Professional Studies.

“How do we slow down what matters the most and speed up what benefits change and progress? We don’t want to impede progress, but we are seeking reconnection to ourselves, to each other, and with the world.”? John Maeda – U.S. technologist, designer, vice president of design and artificial intelligence at 微软 .

“In the end, or society will be defined not only by what we create, but what we refuse to destroy.” John Sawhill – U.S. environmentalist, was president and CEO of The Nature Conservancy and the 12th President of 美国纽约大学 .

#cityplanning #urbanplanning #gentrification #architecture #openspace #urbanization #suburbs #rural #zoning #greenspace #infrastructure