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.

…Americans didn’t stick to cities, which makes us different from the people in other industrialized countries. We no sooner arrived in town, turning those towns into great mid-century metropolises, than we decided to take off...

Toward the end of the Second World War, anew consciousness arose amongst the publicand policy makers of the Western World. Afterten years of crippling economic depressionand another five at war, the public demandedsomething new from...

The dodo itself stands as the best emblem of this general truth – that insular evolution often involves transforming an adventurous, high-flying ancestor species into a grounded descendant, no longer capable of going anywhere but...

Urbanism is the most advanced, concrete fulfillment of a nightmare. Littre defines nightmare as ‘a state that ends when one awakens with a start after extreme anxiety.’ But a start against whom? Who has stuffed...

Everything good in New York used to be something awful, I guess.””And everything awful used to be something good.

Architecture and urban design, both in their formal and spatial aspects, are seen as fundamentally configurational in that the way the parts are put together to form the whole is more important than any of...

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...

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...

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...

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...