Lewis Mumford Quotes

I grew up in a small town that was absolutely a perfect embodiment of new urbanism.

As a teenager, my father took me to the shows at the Architectural Association and to places like Milton Keynes back when it was first being built. But I couldn't find anything for me. There seemed to be despair at the possibility of the built environment possessing any imagination in the real world.

But in practice master plans fail - because they create totalitarian order, not organic order. They are too rigid; they cannot easily adapt to the natural and unpredictable changes that inevitably arise in the life of a community.

If, instead of hiring half-baked revolutionary planners to fill our college undergraduates with ingenious schemes to disperse populations, split up big cities into little ones, go underground or into distant places to escape bombs and congestion, abandon large urban areas in favor of roadside villages, we were to publish reliable, simply written, common-sense information to control the building boom, what a country this would be!

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

Our future can't be separated from the fact that we are all going to be increasingly compacted into urban areas, though we're different in race and culture and religion. And what we make of that will determine the American future.

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.

The more successfully a city mingles everyday diversity of uses and users in its everyday streets, the more successfully, casually (and economically) its people thereby enliven and support well-located parks that can thus give back grace and delight to their neighborhoods instead of vacuity.

I would love to see no more ghettos but the things is, there's no diplomacy in the ghetto. They want to tell you something, they tell you straight!

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

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.

San Francisco is 49 square miles surrounded by reality.

Hot weather opens the skull of a city, exposing its white brain, and its heart of nerves, which sizzle like the wires inside a lightbulb. And there exudes a sour extra-human smell that makes the very stone seem flesh-alive, webbed and pulsing.

I like to call it 'the national automobile slum.' You can call it suburban sprawl. I think it's appropriate to call it the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world.

Why do people have to build such depressing places? I'm not saying that every nook and cranny of the world has to be beautiful, but does it have to be this ugly?

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

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.

Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else.

If a policeman must know the Constitution, then why not a planner?

Modern building has become so universally conditioned by optimized technology that the possibility of creating significant urban form has become extremely limited.

Walking through the city streets... Is it by mistake or design?

Our building practices for the past century have been plain stupid - especially the glorification of the single-family house in a subdivision, at the expense of all other typologies and arrangements.

What kind of city we wish to build should reflect our personal wishes and needs.

Design does matter. And not necessarily in a way that people realize. A lot of what you do, people take for granted - that a park has always been here, that a bicycle lane has always been there, that the street is safe or clean.

It is still the arena of those who dream of the City of Man and those who envision a City of Things. The battle appears to be forever joined. The armies, ignorant and enlightened, clash by day as well as night. Chicago is America's dream, writ large. And flamboyantly.