Town Planning Quotes

The form of a town changes more swiftly alas! Than the heart of a mortal.

When a certain spring, at some distance from the town is (excepting the rivers which are an hundred feet below the level of the town, with a very steep bank) the only resource for water --- a sufficient quantity of ground ought to be reserved round it and between it and the town, for conducting it into the town. There is also a stone quarry near it which ought not to be suffered to become private property. Both these ought to be vested in trustees for the use of the town. The most proper trustees would be an incorporation to be made of the town, to take place as soon as a sufficient number of inhabitants should be in it. Many will settle there next summer.

Modernist architecture and town planning is inimical to human beings... based on the Darwinian concept that evolution is open ended, that there must always be something new and better.

What kind of town do we want in the future, and how are we going to plan on that?

There's a lot of labor involved in the birth of a new town.

We must kill the street. We shall truly enter into modern town planning only after we have accepted this preliminary determination.

Hippodamus, son of Euryphon, a native of Miletus, invented the art of planning and laid out the street plan of Piraeus.

There are local interests peculiar to every town, whether great or small, and common to all its inhabitants: every town, therefore, without distinction of size, ought to have its municipal council.

In the case of European towns, the passing of centuries provides an enhancement; in the case of American towns, the passing of years brings degeneration. It is not simply that they have been newly built; they were built so as to be renewable as quickly as they were put up, that is, badly.

Neither claimed any responsibility for Milton Keynes, but both reported it as a success.

Without land, how can you have development of roads, highways, townships, etc?

Out of the Slow Food movement has grown something called the Slow Cities movement, which has started in Italy but has spread right across Europe and beyond. And in this, towns begin to rethink how they organize the urban landscape so that people are encouraged to slow down and smell the roses and connect with one another.

Every town has an Elm Street.

The utilization of flat roofs as 'grounds' offers us a means of re-acclimatizing nature amidst the stony deserts of our great towns; for the plots from which she has been evicted to make room for buildings can be given back to her up aloft.

It would be worth the while if in each town there were a committee appointed to see that the beauty of the town received no detriment. If we have the largest boulder in the county, then it should not belong to an individual, nor be made into door-steps.

Every place is given its character by certain patterns of events that keep on happening there. These patterns of events are locked in with certain geometric patterns in the space. Indeed, each building and each town is ultimately made out of these patterns in the space, and out of nothing else; they are the atoms and molecules from which a building or a town is made.

We need to create planned communities: whole new towns with the infrastructure and amenities they need, communities where people genuinely want to live, and built where demand is high.

My plans are still in embryo, a town on the edge of wishful thinking.

We can appreciate but not really understand the medieval town. We cannot comprehend its compactness, the contiguity of all its buildings as a single uninterrupted whole.

I think our failure in the production of good town churches of distinctive character must have struck you often, as it has me, when contrasted with our comparative success in country churches.

The site for the school house is generally the most neglected, because [it is] the cheapest, spot in town ...