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.

Some men tend to cling to old intellectual excitements, just as some belles, when they are old ladies, still cling to the fashions and coiffures of their exciting youth.

There are fashions in building. Behind the fashions lie economic and technological reasons, and these fashions exclude all but a few genuinely different possibilities in city dwelling construction at any one time.

Play on lively, diversified sidewalks differs from virtually all other daily incidental play offered American children today: It is play not conducted in a matriarchy.Most city architectural designers and planners are men. Curiously, they design...

The point of cities is multiplicity of choice.

Googie architecture could…be seen in its finest flowering among the essentially homogeneous and standardized enterprises of roadside commercial strips: hot-dog stands in the shape of hot dogs, ice-cream stands in the shape of ice-cream cones....

As children get older, this incidental outdoor activity–say, while waiting to be called to eat–becomes less bumptious, physically and entails more loitering with others, sizing people up, flirting, talking, pushing, shoving and horseplay. Adolescents are...

To generate exuberant diversity in a city’s streets and districts four conditions are indispensable:1. The district, and indeed as many of its internal parts as possible, must serve more than one primary function; preferably more...

Neue Ideen brauchen alte Gebäude

What is more dramatic, even romantic, than the tumbled towers of lower Manhattan, rising suddenly to the clouds like a magic castle girdled by water? Its very touch of jumbled jaggedness, its towering-sided canyons, are...

I have been dwelling upon downtowns. This is not because mixtures of primary uses are unneeded elsewhere in cities. On the contrary they are needed, and the success of mixtures downtown (on in the most...

We expect too much of new buildings, and too little of ourselves.

To seek “causes” of poverty in this way is to enter an intellectual dead end because poverty has no causes. Only prosperity has causes.

No neighbourhood or district, no matter how well established, prestigious or well heeled and no matter how intensely populated for one purpose, can flout the necessity for spreading people through time of day without frustrating...

[Public housing projects] are not lacking in natural leaders,’ [Ellen Lurie, a social worker in East Harlem] says. ‘They contain people with real ability, wonderful people many of them, but the typical sequence is that...

When distance and convenience sets in; the small, the various and the personal wither away.

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...

Under the seeming disorder of the old city, wherever the old city is working successfully, is a marvelous order for maintaining the safety of the streets and the freedom of the city. It is a...

A city street equipped to handle strangers, and to make a safety asset, in itself, our of the presence of strangers, as the streets of successful city neighborhoods always do, must have three main qualities:First,...

You can neither lie to a neighbourhood park, nor reason with it. ‘Artist’s conceptions’ and persuasive renderings can put pictures of life into proposed neighbourhood parks or park malls, and verbal rationalizations can conjure up...

Design is people.

Neighborhood is a word that has come to sound like a Valentine. As a sentimental concept, ‘neighborhood’ is harmful to city planning. It leads to attempts at warping city life into imitations of town or...

There is a quality even meaner than outright ugliness or disorder, and this meaner quality is the dishonest mask of pretended order, achieved by ignoring or suppressing the real order that is struggling to exist...

(The psuedoscience of planning seems almost neurotic in its determination to imitate empiric failure and ignore empiric success.)

Sentimentality about nature denatures everything it touches.

Everyone is aware that tremendous numbers of people concentrate in city downtowns and that, if they did not, there would be no downtown to amount to anything–certainly not one with much downtown diversity.