Public Space Design Quotes

I felt that there's an obligation when writing a piece about an urban expressway made in the 50s to acknowledge the context, and Robert Moses is sort of an iconic figure in New York, and he influenced the shape of the city more than anyone else before or after him. He was one of the most powerful and influential civic architects in the world, because of how much he transformed the city. He built multiple bridges and highways and parks and recreational spaces, beaches - in the course of a few decades, he completely changed the city

The importance of pedestrian public spaces cannot be measured, but most other important things in life cannot be measured either: Friendship, beauty, love and loyalty are examples. Parks and other pedestrian places are essential to a city's happiness.

But look what we have built low-income projects that become worse centers of delinquency, vandalism and general social hopelessness than the slums they were supposed to replace. Cultural centers that are unable to support a good bookstore. Civic centers that are avoided by everyone but bums. Promenades that go from no place to nowhere and have no promenaders. Expressways that eviscerate great cities. This is not the rebuilding of cities. This is the sacking of cities.

So here's my advice to city planners. Make your city runnable. Runners are the first wave of troops bringing human activity back to the urban core of any city. Where we go, others will follow. The connection between runnability and livability is so clear (at least to me), that it's surprising that new developments consistently leave pathways out of the plans.

We see buildings in Britain mostly as freestanding objects. They are not meant to have a dialogue with anything around them, or with history, or with ideas of any kind beyond the self-referential. What we call 'regeneration' is largely an excuse for building for maximum profit with a bit of sculptural design thrown in to catch the eye of the media.

We had to build a city not for businesses or automobiles, but for children and thus for people. Instead of building highways, we restricted car use. We invested in high-quality sidewalks, pedestrian streets, parks, bicycle paths, libraries; we got rid of thousands of cluttering commercial signs and planted trees. All our everyday efforts have one objective: Happiness.

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

It is a question of building which is at the root of the social unrest of today: architecture or revolution.

The landscape is best described as 'pedestrian hostile.' It's pointless to try to take a walk, so I generally just stay in the room and think about shooting myself in the head.

I have always stated I designed the stadium as a toilet seat. I don't care if this is a great cultural event or a national symbol. It has nothing to do with me. It deals with the city.

Without a shadow of doubt, Trafalgar Square has to be one of the most crap urban public spaces in the world.

All buildings, large or small, public or private, have a public face, a facade; they therefore, without exception, have a positive or negative effect on the quality of the public realm, enriching or impoverishing it in a lasting and radical manner. The architecture of the city and public space is a matter of common concern to the same degree as laws and language—they are the foundation of civility and civilisation.

A protected bicycle lane in the city in a developing country is a powerful symbol, showing that a citizen on the $30 bicycle is as important as one in a $30,000 car

The freedom to make and remake our cities and ourselves is, I want to argue, one of the most precious yet most neglected of our human rights.

The public realm in America has two roles: it is the dwelling place of our civilization and our civic life, and it is the physical manifestation of the common good. When you degrade the public realm, you will automatically degrade the quality of your civic life and the character of all the enactments of your public life and communal life that take place there.

We think about project's public nature and how that can be enhanced, how the spaces we create can enliven the experience of being there.

Chicago has very few public spaces where people are encouraged to get together. It's partly to prevent riots, and also to segregate a city with a history of racial segregation.

Modernist buildings exclude dialogue, and the void that they create around themselves is not a public space but a desertification

Architecture is an imposed art in some ways, imposed upon the public, so people must be sure about what you're doing. You have to be sure about what you're doing.

Building places that are worth living in and worth caring about require a certain attention to detail, and of a particular kind of detail that we have forgotten how to design and assemble. And that involves the relationship of the buildings to each other, the relationship of the buildings to the public space, which in America, comes mostly in the form of the street. Because it's only the exceptional places in America that have the village square or the New England green. You know. The street is mostly the public realm of America. And we have to design these things so that they reward us.