100+ of the Best Urban Planning Quotes: Cities, Community, Urbanisation & Inspiration
Looking for the best urban planning quotes? You’ve come to the right place. A good quote can provide insight into another person’s way of thinking, inspire your own work, support research, or add some depth to your urbanism presentation or essay.
You may also find some headscratchers here, and some things that make you laugh. For those times when someone else’s words are what you need, this post pulls together the best quotes:
- Urban planning
- Futuristic cities
- Jane Jacobs quotes
- Suburbia
- Architecture
- Gentrification
- Life in the city
- Building community
- Urban sustainability and nature
- Art and creative practice
- Transport
Quotes about urban planning
“It is difficult to design a place that will not attract people. What is remarkable is how often this has been accomplished.”
William H. Whyte
Source: Cities Back from the Edge: New Life for Downtown
“We need to draw lines in the ground and say, ‘The concrete stops here.’ That forces people to build in and up, rather than out – and there’s nothing wrong with high, dense urban environments as long as they’re planned correctly. They can be extremely livable. They tend to require less transportation, fewer sewer lines, fewer power lines, fewer roads, and more tightly packed structures, which in and of themselves are more energy efficient.”
Patrick Moore
By Patrick Moore: Confessions of a Greenpeace Dropout and Fake Invisible Catastrophes and Threats of Doom
“I’ve often though that if our zoning boards could be put in charge of botanists, of zoologists and geologists, and people who know about the earth, we would have much more wisdom in such planning than when we leave it to the engineers.”
William O. Douglas
About William O. Douglas: Citizen Justice: The Environmental Legacy of William O. Douglas
“Don’t focus so much on single buildings as fabric. If fabric is lost, we have a few heroic buildings in parking lots.”
Stephen Mouzon
By Stephen Mouzon: The Original Green: Unlocking the Mystery of True Sustainability
“Stop texting me saying you’re having a city planning emergency. There’s no such thing as a city planning emergency.”
Mark Brendanawicz, Parks and Recreation
Watch Parks and Recreation on Amazon Prime
“The mark of a great city isn’t how it treats its special places – everybody does that right – but how it treats its ordinary ones.”
Aaron M. Renn
By Aaron M. Renn: The Urban State of Mind: Meditations on the City
“Urbanism works when it creates a journey as desirable as the destination.”
Paul Goldberger
Source: 101 Things I Learned in Urban Design School
“We need more insurgency in the city in order to break unsustainable and privatizing patterns of urban development.”
Jeffrey Hou
By Jeffrey Hou: City Unsilenced: Urban Resistance and Public Space in the Age of Shrinking Democracy and Messy Urbanism: Understanding the “Other” Cities of Asia
“Neither cities nor places in them are unordered, unplanned; the question is only whose order, whose planning, for what purpose?”
Peter Marcuse
“We don’t want a plan based on land uses. We want a plan based on experiences. Who visits downtown to see land uses?”
Mitchell Silver
Source: Urban Memory in City Transitions: The Significance of Place in Mind
“Growth is inevitable and desirable, but destruction of community character is not. The question is not whether your part of the world is going to change. The question is how.”
Edward T. McMahon
Source: The City in Need: Urban Resilience and City Management in Disruptive Disease Outbreak Events
Quotes about futuristic cities and the future of urban planning
“A smart city is a city where humans, trees, birds and other animals can grow with all their glories, imperfections, freedom, and creativity. They are not just cities of technology but cities of love, life, beauty, dignity, freedom and equality.”
Amit Ray
Source: The Srinagar Smart City
“I thought digital technology would eventually reverse urbanisation, and so far that hasn’t happened. But people always overestimate how much will change in the next three years, and underestimate how much will change over the next ten years.”
Bill Gates
By Bill Gates: How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need and How to Prevent the Next Pandemic
“The last great technological advancement that reshaped cities was the automobile (some might argue it was the elevator). In both cases, these technologies reshaped the physical aspects of living in cities – how far a person could travel or how high a building could climb. But the fundamentals of how cities worked remained the same. What’s different about the information age that has been ushered in by personal computers, mobile phones and the Internet is its ability to reshape the social organization of cities and empower everyday citizens with the knowledge and tools to actively participate in the policy, planning and management of cities.”
Christian Madera
Source: Me++ The Cyborg Self and the Networked City
“A smart city is all about building connections which transcend geography—something more deep-rooted and emotional. Better infrastructure is an integral part of building smart cities, but first comes building awareness about existing resources and then preparing for easier accessibility and navigation.”
Vaibhav Belgaonkar
Quotes about urban planning by Jane Jacobs
“Why do planners fix on the block and ignore the street? The answer lies in a short cut in their analytical techniques. After planners have mapped building conditions, uses, vacancies, and assessed valuations, block by block, they combine the data for each block, because this is the simplest way to summarize it, and characterize the block by appropriate legends. No matter how individual the street, the data for each side of the street in each block is combined with data for the other three sides of its block. The street is statistically sunk without a trace.”
Jane Jacobs
“The second mode [to deal with unsafe cities] is to take refuge in vehicles. This is the technique practiced in the big wild-animal reservations of Africa, where tourists are warned to leave their cars under no circumstances until they reach a lodge. It is also the technique practiced in Los Angeles.”
Jane Jacobs
“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.”
Jane Jacobs
“Being human is itself difficult, and therefore all kinds of settlements (except dream cities) have problems. Big cities have difficulties in abundance, because they have people in abundance.”
Jane Jacobs
Source: The Death and Life of Great American Cities
Quotes about suburbia
“I’ve got no dark secrets, I wasn’t beaten up, my parents were kind to me and there was a low crime rate where we lived. Maybe that’s where the comedy comes from, as some sort of reaction to the safe, boring suburbs.”
Will Ferrell
“The two elements of the suburban pattern that cause the greatest problems are the extreme separation of uses and the vast distances between things.”
James Howard Kunstler
Source: The Geography of Nowhere
“The modern city is probably the most unlovely and artificial site this planet affords. The ultimate solution is to abandon it. We shall solve the City Problem by leaving the city.”
Henry Ford
“Defining sprawl is a little bit like defining pornography. You know it when you see it.”
Ellen Dunham-Jones
By Ellen Dunham-Jones: Case Studies in Retrofitting Suburbia: Urban Design Strategies for Urgent Challenges
“I would sum up my fear about the future in one word: boring. And that’s my one fear: that everything has happened; nothing exciting or new is ever going to happen again… The future is just going to be a vast, conforming suburb of the soul.”
J. G. Ballard
By J. G. Ballard: Concrete Island and The Drowned World
“People here can’t realize there are poor people in the world. They can’t think about the needs of other people.”
Bill Owens
Source: Suburbia
“What’s bad about sprawl is not its uniformity but that it is uniformly bad.”
James Howard Kunstler
By James Howard Kunstler: The Geography of Nowhere
Quotes about architecture
“Architecture is, and always will be concerned, roughly speaking, with carefully balancing horizontal things on top of vertical things.”
Reyner Banham
Source: Archigram: Architecture without Architecture
“We Japanese do not perceive our small, one-room spaces as something that’s been forced upon us.”
Makoto Yokomizo
About Japanese architecture: Contemporary Japanese Architecture: Tracing the Next Generation
“For the majority of individuals the necessities of life are the same. It is therefore logical and consistent with an economic approach to satisfy these homogenous needs uniformly and consistently. Hence it is not justifiable for each house to have a different floor plan, a different shape, different building materials, and a different ‘style.’ To do this is to practice waste and to put a false emphasis on individuality.”
Walter Gropius
About Walter Gropius: Bauhaus. Updated Edition
“We’re moving from a generation who gave little thought as to the built environment and accepted housing that was neither pleasant to look at, nor to live in or around, to a new century where there’s a real desire for housing that’s affordable, flexible, and places community at the heart of its thinking. For architects and the public it’s an enticing prospect.”
Will Gompertz
By Will Gompertz: Think Like an Artist: . . . and Lead a More Creative, Productive Life
“My friends have asked me why I don’t patent my low-cost houses, but they’ve completely missed the point. I actually want my designs to be copied. I want Indonesian society to rethink its attitudes towards urban architecture.”
Ahmad Djuhara
About Indonesian architecture: New Indonesian House
“I am of the opinion that architecture should exist quietly with nature, never opposing it. I am positive that a choice between these alternatives no longer applies. Architecture and nature should be integrated. Both should be part of our daily life.”
Yasuhiro Yamashita
Quotes about gentrification and urban planning
“Gentrification, at its deepest level, is really about reorienting the purpose of cities away from being spaces that provide for the poor and middle classes and toward being spaces that generate capital for the rich.”
Peter Moskowitz
Source: How to Kill a City: Gentrification, Inequality, and the Fight for the Neighborhood
“Gentrified thinking is like the bourgeois version of Christian fundamentalism, a huge, unconscious conspiracy of homogenous patterns with no awareness about its own freakishness. The gentrification mentality is rooted in the belief that obedience to consumer identity over recognition of lived experience is actually normal, neutral, and value free.”
Sarah Schulman
Source: The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination
“Cities are gentrified by the following types of people in sequence: first the risk-oblivious (artists), then the risk-aware (developers), finally the risk adverse (dentists from New Jersey).”
Bill Kraus
Source: Welcome to Braggsville
“We must work together to ensure the equitable distribution of wealth, opportunity, and power in our society.”
Nelson Mandela
“The physical characteristics of walls are not decisive as to their meaning. Rather, the key question is: Who is on which side of the wall? Does the wall perpetuate power, or defend against it? Does it reinforce domination, or shield vulnerability? Does it strengthen hierarchical relationships among people, or does it pave the way towards greater equality?”
Peter Marcuse
Source: Ephemeral Urbanism: Does Permanence Matter?
“Any city, however small, is in fact divided into two. One the city of the poor, the other of the rich. These are at war with one another.”
Plato
Source: The Republic
Quotes about life in the city
“If you can tell a man by his shoes, you can tell a city by its pavements, and London’s indicate a fractured, shambolic, careless body politic.”
Rowan Moore
By Rowan Moore: Why We Build and Slow-Burn City
“Men living in the most densely populated areas of Sweden, for instance, are at a 68 percent higher risk of being admitted for psychosis – often the first sign of schizophrenia – than those who live in the countryside. For women the risk is 77 percent higher. Something about city living seems to spark the harrowing delusions, hallucinations, and disorganized thinking characteristic of a schizophrenic break.”
Ethan Watters
Source: Crazy Like Us: The Globalization of the Western Mind
“Every city has a sex and an age which has nothing to do with demography. Rome is feminine, So is Odessa. London is a teenager, an urchin, and this hasn’t changed since the time of Dickens. Paris, I believe, is a man in his twenties, in love with an older woman.”
John Berger
By John Berger: Ways of Seeing and Hold Everything Dear: Dispatches on Survival and Resistance
“Cities, like cats, will reveal themselves at night.”
Rupert Brooke
Source: Remotely-Sensed Cities
“The one thing that all great cities have in common is that they are all different.”
Cate Blanchett
“I would give the greatest sunset in the world for one sight of New York’s skyline. Particularly when one can’t see the details. Just the shapes. The shapes and the thought that made them. The sky over New York and the will of man made visible. What other religion do we need?”
Ayn Rand
Source: Skyscraper Cinema: Architecture and Gender in American Film
“Typically we don’t think of cities as being particularly extreme environments, but few places on earth get as hot as a rooftop or as dry as the corner of a heated living room.”
Adam Rogers
“Cities were always like people, showing their varying personalities to the traveler. Depending on the city and on the traveler, there might begin a mutual love, or dislike, friendship or enmity. Where one city will rise a certain individual to glory, it will destroy another who is not suited to its personality.”
Roman Payne
“For those who are lost, there will always be cities that feel like home.”
Simon Van Booy
“Not to find one’s way in a city may well be uninteresting and banal. It requires ignorance – nothing more. But to lose oneself in a city – as one loses oneself in a forest – that calls for quite different schooling. Then, signboard and street names, passers-by, roofs, kiosks, or bars must speak to the wanderer like a cracking twig under his feet in the forest.”
Walter Benjamin
Source: Walter Benjamin: 1938-1940 v. 4: Selected Writings
“All cities are mad but the madness is gallant. All cities are beautiful but the beauty is grim.”
Christopher Morley
Source: The Routledge Companion to Environmental Ethics
Quotes about building community and urban planning
“How do we slow down what matters the most and speed up what benefits change and progress? We don’t want to impede progress, but we are seeking reconnection to ourselves, to each other, and with the world.”
John Maeda
By John Maeda: The Laws of Simplicity (Simplicity: Design, Technology, Business, Life)
“Happiness is having a large, loving, caring, close-knit family in another city.”
George Burns
Source: Social happiness: Theory into Policy and Practice
“When you look at a city, it’s like reading the hopes, aspirations and pride of everyone who built it.”
Hugh Newell Jacobson
“We need – more urgently than architectural utopias, ingenious traffic disposal systems, or ecological programmes – to comprehend the nature of citizenship, to make serious imaginative assessment of that special relationship between the self and the city; its unique plasticity, its privacy and freedom.”
Jonathan Raban
Source: The Freedom of the City
“They can print statistics and count the population in hundreds of thousands, but to each man a city consists of no more than a few streets, a few houses, a few people.”
Graham Green
Source: A Few Streets, a Few People: Photographs from the Havana Neighbourhood of Cayo Hueso
“Everyone claims to want a city, but no one here wants city living. City living by its definition is crowded. It is tolerant of other people. It is dependant on a sophisticated population that makes a hundreds compromises daily so that they can benefit from the collective energy that a city generates.”
Robert N. Davis
“An increasing number of middle and high-income groups have looked to security measures, such as cameras, fences, walls and gates, to separate themselves from other people in the city. These physical measures, in combination with hired guards, replace the ‘older’ social control mechanisms, which are based on social cohesion within the community.”
Peer Smets
By Peer Smets: Mobilities and Neighbourhood Belonging in Cities and Suburbs
“A city’s environment is shaped not only by people who have an important influence, but by everyone who lives or works there.”
Robert Cowan
Source: Theories and Models of Urbanization: Geography, Economics and Computing Sciences
“The city shows the good and evil in human nature in excess. It is this fact, more than any other, which justifies the view that would make of the city a laboratory or clinic in which human nature and social processes may be most conveniently and profitably studied.”
Robert E. Park
By Robert E. Park: The City
“A city is simply a passel of people, packed in a pot like pickles.”
David Detzert
Source: Allegiance: Fort Sumter, Charleston, and the Beginning of the Civil War
Quotes about sustainability, nature and urban planning
“City growth has caused climate change, but that growth is also what’s going to get us out of it.”
Matthew Kahn
Source: The Routledge Handbook on Spaces of Urban Politics
“One thing is sure. The earth is now more cultivated and developed than ever before. There is more farming with pure force, swamps are drying up, and cities are springing up on unprecedented scale. We’ve become a burden to our planet. Resources are becoming scarce, and soon nature will no longer be able to satisfy our needs.”
Quintus Septimus Florens Tertullianus, Roman theologian, 200 AD
Source: Massive Change: A Manifesto for the Future of Global Design
“If the earth was an apartment, we wouldn’t be getting our security deposit back.”
Jim Shubert
“Anyone who believes in indefinite growth on a finite planet is either mad, or an economist.”
David Attenborough
Source: Food or War
“To be young and aware is to know you’re being lied to; to know that a bright green future is possible; to know that we can reimagine the world, rebuild our cities, redesign our lives, retool our factories, distribute innovation and creativity and all live in a world that is not only better than the alternative, but much better than the world we have now.”
Alex Steffen
By Alex Steffen: Carbon Zero: Imagining Cities That Can Save the Planet
“Urbanization has lured more people to bustling metropolises, but precious little thought has been given to what happens when these cities fail. Over time, the underlying systems and processes of civilization – from lead mining to offshore drilling to car commuting – slowly poison us. Power grids brown out, the climate heats up, and industrial accidents ravage ecosystems and cities alike. For all the famed cities with thousands of years of continuity – Paris, London, Cairo, Athens, Rome, Istanbul – most cities just stop.”
Ben Paynter
“In a future that portends stronger and more-frequent hurricanes striking North America’s Atlantic coast, ferocious winds will pummel tall, unsteady structures. Some will topple, knocking down others. Like a gap in the forest when a giant tree falls, new growth will rush in. Gradually, the asphalt jungle will give way to a real one.”
Alan Weisman
Source: The World Without Us
“The smallest patch of green to arrest the monotony of asphalt is as important to the value of real estate as streets, sewers and convenient shopping.”
James Felt
“Cities and human settlements are part of the environment and have been for a long time now. Wilderness is a cultural artifact of the environmental movement – an artifact worth defending – but the idea that our landscape has not been used by humans is old thinking.”
Hank Dittmar
By Hank Dittmar: DIY City: The Collective Power of Small Actions
“Urbanization, one of humankind’s most successful and ambitious programs, is the triumph of the unnatural over the natural, the grid over the organic… Underway on a scale never before witnessed, one side effect of urbanization is the liberation of vast depopulated territories for the efficient production of ‘nature’.”
Bruce Mau
Source: Massive Change: A Manifesto for the Future of Global Design
“Living around trees is less green than living around concrete. The next time you want to fight for nature, leave Walden Pond alone and start pushing for denser development in downtown.”
Edward Glaeser
By Edward Glaeser: Triumph of the City: How Urban Spaces Make Us Human and Survival of the City: Living and Thriving in an Age of Isolation
“Bringing nature back into the city is a way to deal with urban sprawl. If cities feel a little more natural, people like to live there rather than moving out and dividing up another piece of land that shouldn’t be touched.”
Stone Gossard
“If you love nature, stay the heck away from it. Live in a city, the denser the better.”
Jeff Speck
By Jeff Speck: Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time
Quotes about art, creative practice and the city
“The city is a fact in nature, like a cave, a run of mackerel or an ant-heap. But it is also a conscious work of art, and it holds within its communal framework many simpler and more personal forms of art. Mind takes form in the city; and in turn urban forms condition mind.”
Lewis Mumford
By Lewis Mumford: The Culture of Cities and The Story of Utopias
“When creative people gather together, it attracts other young creative people. If you look at demographics, the downtown area is much younger than it was a few years ago. There’s this competition that’s good. It isn’t about making art anymore. It’s about making good art.”
Courtney Hammond
“Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head. You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs.”
Banksy
Source: Banksy Completed
“The chief function of the city is to convert power into form, energy into culture, dead matter into the living symbols of art, biological reproduction into social creativity.”
Lewis Mumford
Source: Philosophy and the City: Classic to Contemporary Writings
“As an artificial world, the city should be so in the best sense: made by art, shaped for human purposes.”
Kevin Lynch
“Art is an evolutionary act. The shape of art and its role in society is constantly changing. At no point is art static. There are no rules.”
Raymond Salvatore Harmon
Source: Bomb: A Manifesto Of Art Terrorism
“In the end, or society will be defined not only by what we create, but what we refuse to destroy.”
John Sawhill
Quotes about transport and urban planning
A real patriot is the fellow who gets a parking ticket and rejoices that the system works.
Bill Vaughan
“What if we chose to live close enough to work and the grocery store that we didn’t need gas at all? What if we chose to reject gas as a necessity, therefore placing the power back in our own hands? The only real freedom is freedom from want. Let’s stop wanting gasoline.”
Sierra Elizabeth
“The right to have access to every building in the city by private motorcar in an age when everyone possesses such a vehicle is actually the right to destroy the city.”
Lewis Mumford
Source: Beyond Mobility: Planning Cities for People and Places
“If you demolish the whole city for the flow of traffic, what destination for that traffic would be left?”
Marc van Woudenberg
“Parking is a narcotic and ought to be a controlled substance. It is addictive and one can never have enough.”
Victor Dover
Source: The High Cost of Free Parking
Life is a journey, but don’t worry, you’ll find a parking spot at the end.
Isaac Asimov
“Adding lanes to solve traffic congestion is like loosening your belt to solve obesity.”
Glen Hemistra
Source: Green Engineering: Innovation, Entrepreneurship and Design
“Planning of the automobile city focuses on saving time. Planning for the accessible city, on the other hand, focuses on time well spent.”
Robert Cevero
Source: The High Cost of Free Parking
“Life is like a 10-speed bicycle. Most of us have gears we never use.”
Charles M. Schulz
By Charles M. Schulz: The Bumper Book of Peanuts: Snoopy and Friends
“Cycling is possibly the greatest and most pleasurable form of transport ever invented. It is like walking only with one-tenth of the effort. Ride through a city and you can understand its geography in a way that no motorist, contained by one-way signs and traffic jams, will ever be able to. It truly is one of the greatest feelings of freedom once can have in a metropolitan environment. Amazingly, you can feel this free in a modern city.”
Daniel Pemberton
Source: The Book of Idle Pleasures
“It’s amazing how I’m able to ride around on a bike. People kind of see it’s me but since I’m on a bike, they think, ‘No, it’s not her.’ And by the time they realize it’s me, I’m already gone.”
Beyoncé
“Cycling starts to become as much a way of life and a philosophy as it does a form of transport. It spreads from work to weekends to holidays. They nominate themselves for sponsored rides and charity marathons. They stop thinking in miles and start thinking in kilometres. Almost by mistake, they find themselves in possession of a whole fleet of bikes: one for work, one for speed, one for the wet, one for annoying other people who know about bikes. They arrive at work early every day now, radiant with sweat and self-satisfaction. At home, they talk about getting rid of the car. In the evenings, they admire their newly altered profile in the mirror; the helmet hair, the buns of steel, the bloody knees.”
Bella Bathurst
Source: The Bicycle Book
“We are realising that if you have people walk and bicycle more, you have a more lively, more liveable, more attractive, more safe, more sustainable and more healthy city. And what are you waiting for?”
Jan Gehl
Source: Bike Nation: How Cycling Can Save the World
“I’m not a big fan of capitalism or business, but it’s pretty obvious that if we build a beautiful system of bike boulevards, bicyclists will come to ride them by the tens of thousands. When they do, they spend a lot of money and keep a lot of our local economy going.”
Chris Carlsson
“A protected bicycle lane in a city in a developing country is a powerful symbol, showing that a citizen on a $30 bicycle is as important as one in a $30,000 car.”
Enrique Peñalosa
By Enrique Peñalosa: Ciudad, Igualdad, Felicidad
“Give a man a fish and feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and feed him for a lifetime. Teach a man to cycle and he will realize fishing is stupid and boring.”
Desmond Tutu
Photo: Matheus Bertelli.
