Wise words with novels of knowledge and trails, to those know them, and to those who live them. For the famous and dutiful voices of urban building and design, the world moves forward in its contemporary goal to be a metropolitan.
A D A L O U I S E H U X T A B L E …
“Before Ada Louise Huxtable, architecture was not a part of the public dialogue. She was a great lover of cities, a great preservationist and the central planet around which every other critic revolved,” said architect Robert A. M. Stern, dean of the Yale University School of Architecture.
R A Y O L D E N B E R G …
What suburbia cries for are the means for people to gather easily, inexpensively, regularly, and pleasurably — a “place on the corner,” real life alternatives to television, easy escapes from the cabin fever of marriage and family life that do not necessitate getting into an automobile.
J A N E J A C O B S …
“Jane Jacobs’ observations about the way cities work and don’t work revolutionized the urban planning profession. Thanks to Jacobs, ideas once considered lunatic, such as mixed-use development, short blocks, and dense concentrations of people working and living downtown, are now taken for granted.”
– Adele Freedman, The Globe and Mail
J E F F S P E C K …
“The interesting thing for me as a planner was to have focused on this issue from the design perspective for so many years, and actually to kind of be shouting into the wind about why from how these places looked and how they felt and the kind of social environments that they created cities were superior to sprawl.”
E L L E N D U N H A M – J O N E S …
“As the suburbs have been getting older, we’ve been finding all sorts of unintended consequences of suburbanization. As we’re seeing a lot of properties go vacant or become underperforming, especially aging ones, we’re seeing an opportunity to retrofit them into more sustainable places.”
J A N G E H L …
– “the main focus [of urban planning] has been to keep the cars happy”. But Gehl, bolstered by psychological thinking, spent the next 40 years developing principles based on how the shape of cities can impact on the human lives lived within them, rather than on traffic efficiency and parking spaces.
