The Death And Life Of Great American Cities Quotes

"Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody."

"This is not the rebuilding of cities. This is the sacking of cities."

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

"Automobiles are often conveniently tagged as the villains responsible for the ills of cities and the disappointments and futilities of city planning. But the destructive effects of automobiles are much less a cause than a symptom of our incompetence at city building."

"A city sidewalk by itself is nothing. It is an abstraction. It means something only in conjunction with the buildings and other uses that border it."

"The bedrock attribute of a successful city district is that a person must feel personally safe and secure on the street among all these strangers."

"The public peace—the sidewalk and street peace—of cities is not kept primarily by the police, necessary as police are. It is kept primarily by an intricate, almost unconscious, network of voluntary controls and standards among the people themselves, and enforced by the people themselves."

"To build city districts that are custom made for easy crime is idiotic. Yet that is what we do."

"No amount of police can enforce civilization where the normal, casual enforcement of it has broken down."

"Los Angeles cannot, any more than any other great city, evade the truth that, being a city, it is composed of strangers not all of whom are nice."

"A well-used city street is apt to be a safe street. A deserted city street is apt to be unsafe."

"The trust of a city street is formed over time from many, many little public sidewalk contacts."

"Cities are full of people with whom, from your viewpoint or mine, a certain degree of contact is useful or enjoyable; but you do not want them in your hair. And they do not want you in theirs either."

"The ballet of the good city sidewalk never repeats itself from place to place, and in any one place is always replete with new improvisations."

"Privacy is precious in cities. It is indispensable. Perhaps it is precious and indispensable everywhere, but most places you cannot get it."

"The privacy of keeping one’s personal affairs to those selected to know them, and the privacy of having reasonable control over who shall make inroads on your time and when, are rare commodities in most of this world."

"Nobody can keep open house in a great city. Nobody wants to. And yet if interesting, useful, and significant contacts among the people of cities are confined to acquaintanceships suitable for private life, the city becomes stultified."

"A good city street neighborhood achieves a marvel of balance between its people’s determination to have essential privacy and their simultaneous wishes for differing degrees of contact, enjoyment or help from the people around."

"This balance is largely made up of small, sensitively managed details, practiced and accepted so casually that they are normally taken for granted."

"Now why do I, and many others, select Joe as a logical custodian for keys? Because we trust him, first, to be a responsible custodian, but equally important because we know that he combines a feeling of good will with a feeling of no personal responsibility about our private affairs."

"A service like this cannot be formalized. The all-essential line between public service and privacy would be transgressed by institutionalization."

"The tolerance, the room for great differences among neighbors—differences that often go far deeper than differences in color—which are possible and normal in intensely urban life, but which are so foreign to suburbs and pseudosuburbs, are possible and normal only when streets of great cities have built-in equipment allowing strangers to dwell in peace together on civilized but essentially dignified and reserved terms."

"Lowly, unpurposeful and random as they may appear, sidewalk contacts are the small change from which a city’s wealth of public life may grow."

"To be sure, all city sidewalks are not under surveillance in this fashion, and this is one of the troubles of the city that planning ought properly to help correct."

"The people of cities who have other jobs and duties, and who lack, too, the training needed, cannot volunteer as teachers or registered nurses or librarians or museum guards or social workers. But at least they can, and on lively diversified sidewalks they do, supervise the incidental play of children and assimilate the children into city society."

"In real life, only from the ordinary adults of the city sidewalks do children learn—if they learn it at all—the first fundamental of successful city life: People must take a modicum of public responsibility for each other even if they have no ties to each other."

"The myth that playgrounds and grass and hired guards or supervisors are innately wholesome for children and that city streets, filled with ordinary people, are innately evil for children, boils down to a deep contempt for ordinary people."

"Sidewalks thirty or thirty-five feet wide can accommodate virtually any demand of incidental play put upon them—along with trees to shade the activities, and sufficient space for pedestrian circulation and adult public sidewalk life and loitering."

"Sidewalk width is invariably sacrificed for vehicular width, partly because city sidewalks are conventionally considered to be purely space for pedestrian travel and access to buildings, and go unrecognized and unrespected as the uniquely vital and irreplaceable organs of city safety, public life and child rearing that they are."

"The livelier and more popular a sidewalk, and the greater the number and variety of its users, the greater the total width needed for it to serve its purposes pleasantly."

"This does not mean we do right in taking unscrupulous advantage of their adaptability. In fact, we wrong both them and cities."

"The whole idea of doing away with city streets, insofar as that is possible, and downgrading and minimizing their social and their economic part in city life is the most mischievous and destructive idea in orthodox city planning."

"Parks are volatile places. They tend to run to extremes of popularity and unpopularity."

"Neighborhood is a word that has come to sound like a Valentine. As a sentimental concept, "neighborhood" is harmful to city planning."

"A successful city neighborhood is a place that keeps sufficiently abreast of its problems so it is not destroyed by them."

"Good shelter is a useful good in itself, as shelter. When we try to justify good shelter instead on the pretentious grounds that it will work social or family miracles we fool ourselves."

"To hunt for city neighborhood touchstones of success in high standards of physical facilities, or in supposedly competent and nonproblem populations, or in nostalgic memories of town life, is a waste of time."

"To maintain in a neighborhood sufficient people who stay put, a city must have the very fluidity and mobility of use that Reginald Isaacs noted, as mentioned early in this chapter, when he speculated whether neighborhoods can therefore mean anything very significant to cities."

"A city’s collection of opportunities of all kinds, and the fluidity with which these opportunities and choices can be used, is an asset—not a detriment—for encouraging city-neighborhood stability."

"Neighborhood accommodations for fixed, bodiless, statistical people are accommodations for instability. The people in them, as statistics, may stay the same. But the people in them, as people, do not. Such places are forever way stations."

"These networks are a city’s irreplaceable social capital. Whenever the capital is lost, from whatever cause, the income from it disappears, never to return until and unless new capital is slowly and chancily accumulated."

"Real people are unique, they invest years of their lives in significant relationships with other unique people, and are not interchangeable in the least. Severed from their relationships, they are destroyed as effective social beings—sometimes for a little while, sometimes forever."

"In city neighborhoods, whether streets or districts, if too many slowly grown public relationships are disrupted at once, all kinds of havoc can occur—so much havoc, instability and helplessness, that it sometimes seems time will never again get in its licks."

"It is ludicrous to think that with any amount of effort, official or unofficial, even a tolerable school is possible in a neighborhood of such extreme instability. Good schools are impossible in any unstable neighborhoods with high pupil turnover rates, and this includes unstable neighborhoods which also have good housing."

"To understand cities, we have to deal outright with combinations or mixtures of uses, not separate uses, as the essential phenomena."

"A mixture of uses, if it is to be sufficiently complex to sustain city safety, public contact and cross-use, needs an enormous diversity of ingredients."

"Big cities are the natural economic homes of immense numbers and ranges of small enterprises."

"The diversity of whatever kind, that is generated by cities rests on the fact that in cities so many people are so close together, and among them contain so many different tastes, skills, needs, supplies, and bees in their bonnets."

"To generate exuberant diversity in a city's streets and districts, four conditions are indispensable."

"A lively city scene is lively largely by virtue of its enormous collection of small elements."

"Carnegie Hall, on West Fifty-seventh Street in New York, is a striking example of such a primer."

"In a healthy city, there is a constant replacement of less intensive uses by more intensive uses."

"Chessmen—and in downtowns night-use chessmen that can be located by public policy or public pressure—should be placed to fortify and extend existing vitality."

"American downtowns are not declining mysteriously, because they are anachronisms, nor because their users have been drained away by automobiles. They are being witlessly murdered, in good part by deliberate policies of sorting out leisure uses from work uses, under the misapprehension that this is orderly city planning."

"Old ideas can sometimes use new buildings. New ideas must use old buildings."

"But a city area in such a situation is not a failure because of being all old. It is the other way around. The area is all old because it is a failure."

"This economic requisite for diversity is a requisite that vital city neighborhoods can only inherit, and then sustain over the years."

"The last thing we need is new construction. What we need, and a lot of others need, is old construction in a lively district, which some among us can help make livelier."

"For Brooklyn is quite an incubator. Small businesses are constantly being started there. A couple of machinists, perhaps, will get tired of working for someone else and start out for themselves in the back of a garage."

"It is being concentrated which produces convenience."

"Diversity and its attractions are combined with tolerable living conditions in the case of enough dwellings for enough people."

"The very process of increasing densities gradually but continually can result in increasing variety too."

"Intricate minglings of different uses in cities are not a form of chaos. On the contrary, they represent a complex and highly developed form of order."

"No good for cities or for their design, planning, economics or people, can come of the emotional assumption that dense city populations are, per se, undesirable."

"The task is to promote the city life of city people, housed, let us hope, in concentrations both dense enough and diverse enough to offer them a decent chance at developing city life."

"Diversity of uses, on the other hand, while it is too often handled poorly, does offer the decent possibility of displaying genuine differences of content."

"Being human, human beings are what interest us most. In architecture as in literature and the drama, it is the richness of human variation that gives vitality and color to the human setting…"

"Considering the hazard of monotony…the most serious fault in our zoning laws lies in the fact that they permit an entire area to be devoted to a single use."

"City diversity is not innately ugly. That is a misconception, and a most simple-minded one. But lack of city diversity is innately either depressing on the one hand, or vulgarly chaotic on the other."

"By its nature, the metropolis provides what otherwise could be given only by traveling; namely, the strange. Since the strange leads to questions and undermines familiar tradition, it serves to elevate reason to ultimate significance…"

"The trouble represented by junk yards goes deeper than the Blight Fighters can plumb. It achieves nothing to cry 'Take them away! They shouldn’t be there!' The problem is to cultivate an economic environment in the district which makes more vital uses of the land profitable and logical."

"The great shibboleth in land use was formerly the glue factory. 'Would you want a glue factory in your neighborhood?' was the clincher. Why a glue factory I do not know, except possibly that glue then meant dead horses and old fish, and the reference could be counted upon to make nice people shudder and stop thinking."

"No special form of city blight is nearly so devastating as the Great Blight of Dullness."

"The presence of an end product in the milieu of a cell causes the machinery that produces the end product to slow down or to stop. This form of cell behavior Dr. VanR.Van R.VanR. Potter oftheUniversityofWisconsinMedicalSchoolof the University of Wisconsin Medical SchooloftheUniversityofWisconsinMedicalSchool characterized as 'intelligent.' In contrast, a cell that has changed or mutated behaves like an 'idiot' in that it continues without feedback regulation to produce even materials that it does not require."

"In killing successful diversity combinations with money, we are employing perhaps our nearest equivalent to killing with kindness."

"In short, the demand for lively and diversified city areas is too great for the supply."

"If outstandingly successful city localities are to withstand the forces of self-destruction—and if the nuisance value of defense against self-destruction is to be an effective nuisance value—the sheer supply of diversified, lively, economically viable city localities must be increased."

"Massive single uses in cities have a quality in common with each other. They form borders, and borders in cities usually make destructive neighbors."

"Borders, they sometimes reason, are a feasible means of heightening intensity, and of giving a city a sharp, clear form, as medieval town walls apparently did with medieval towns."

"Slums and their populations are the victims (and the perpetuators) of seemingly endless troubles that reinforce each other."

"Our present urban renewal laws are an attempt to break this particular linkage in the vicious circles by forthrightly wiping away slums and their populations, and replacing them with projects intended to produce higher tax yields."

"The foundation for unslumming is a slum lively enough to be able to enjoy city public life and sidewalk safety."

"The constant hope of the builders of these planned slums that they will surely improve as 'a community has time to form.'"

"Only unslumming overcomes American city slums, or ever has overcome them."

"When discrimination is appreciably broken down outside a ghetto by its more successful progeny, then the old neighborhood has a great burden lifted from it."

"The effective breaking down of residential discrimination outside a slum, and the less dramatic self-diversification within an unslumming slum, proceed concurrently."

"Successful unslumming means that enough people must have an attachment to the slum that they wish to stay, and it also means that it must be practical for them to stay."

"Nothing in the training of planners, architects or government officials contradicts these temptations to destroy unslumming slums."

"The processes that occur in unslumming depend on the fact that a metropolitan economy, if it is working well, is constantly transforming many poor people into middle-class people."

"It is curious that city planning neither respects spontaneous self-diversification among city populations nor contrives to provide for it."

"Credit blacklisting of city localities is impersonal. It operates not against the residents or businessmen, as persons, but against their neighborhoods."

"City people finance the building of suburbs."

"The remarkable fact, however—and a great testimony to the strength and magnetism of many city neighborhoods in adversity—is the degree to which they resist their financial death decrees."

"Lack of gradual money wastes city districts already inherently fit for city life, and also means there is no hope for districts that lack one or more of the conditions for generating diversity."

"The direct consequence of the exercise of the power of eminent domain on the commercial tenant is drastic and often ruinous."

"The government is not in condemnation acquiring a business but only the premises."

"Although his entire property and his full investment is taken from him, he receives substantially nothing."

"They are subsidizing these schemes, not with a fraction of their tax money, but with their livelihoods, with their children’s college money, with years of their past put into hopes for the future—with nearly everything they have."

"The community as a whole should bear the expense of community progress and that cost should not be imposed upon the unfortunate victim of community progress."

"Project building as a form of city transformation makes no more sense financially than it does socially."