The Death and Life of Great American Cities

As Gruen pointed out here, the more space that is provided cars in cities, the greater becomes the need for use of cars, and hence for still more space for them.

Our cities contain people too poor to pay for the quality of shelter that our public conscience (quite rightly, I think) tells us they should have.

Credit-blacklisting maps, like slum-clearance maps, are accurate prophecies because they are self-fulfilling prophecies.

The way to raise a city’s tax base is to expand the city’s territorial quantity of successful areas. A strong city tax base is a by-product of strong city magnetism, and one of its necessary ingredients

CONDITION 1: The district, and indeed as many of its internal parts as possible, must serve more than one primary function; preferably more than two. These must insure the presence of people who go outdoors on different schedules and are in the place for different purposes, but who are able to use many facilities in common.

When distance inconvenience sets in, the small, the various and the personal wither away

Neighborhood accommodations for fixed, bodiless, statistical people are accommodations for instability.

A city’s very wholeness in bringing together people with communities of interest is one of its greatest assets, possibly the greatest. And, in turn, one of the assets a city district needs is people with access to the political, the administrative, and the special interest communities of the city as a whole.

Why are there so often no people where the parks are and no parks where the people are?

Few sidewalks of this luxurious width can be found. 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