{"quotes":[{"text":"From the time I arrived in British East Africa at the indifferent age of four and went through the barefoot stage of early youth hunting wild pig with the Nandi, later training racehorses for a living, and still later scouting Tanganyika and the waterless bush country between the Tana and Athi Rivers, by aeroplane, for elephant, I remained so happily provincial I was unable to discuss the boredom of being alive with any intelligence until I had gone to London and lived there for a year. Boredom, like hookworm, is endemic.","author":"Beryl Markham","tags":["adventure","boredom","england","ennui","london","urban-life","urbanism"],"id":44235,"author_id":"Beryl+Markham"},{"text":"I delve into the mysterious and counterintuitive world of helmets and high-visibility gear later in the book. But it's worth immediately noting this: while they're not inherently bad, they're less a safety device for cycling than a symptom of a road network where no cyclist can truly feel safe.","author":"Peter Walker","tags":["cycling","helmet","helmets","road","roads","safety","urbanism"],"id":45599,"author_id":"Peter+Walker"},{"text":"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 us to the point of somnolence?","author":"Tom McDonough","tags":["156","city","situationist","urban","urbanism"],"id":46677,"author_id":"Tom+McDonough"},{"text":"Everything good in New York used to be something awful, I guess.'And everything awful used to be something good.","author":"Brian K. Vaughan","tags":["evolution","new-york-city","urbanism"],"id":52641,"author_id":"Brian+K.+Vaughan"},{"text":"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 intensive portions of cities, whatever they are called) is related to the mixture possible in other part of cities.","author":"Jane Jacobs","tags":["164","city","downtown","planning","urbanism"],"id":103295,"author_id":"Jane+Jacobs"},{"text":"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.","author":"Jane Jacobs","tags":["201","cities","diversity","urbanism"],"id":120646,"author_id":"Jane+Jacobs"},{"text":"A CITY IS AS much a state of mind as a place—a set of perceptions of place. On the last train home to Mullaghbrack or Gortyfarnham or half a hundred other BallyBogMans, two farmers fall to reviewing their experiences of the big city. One has walked the streets and avenues and come away with memories of glistening steeples and dreaming spires, monuments to men of bearing and import, Palladian porticos and grand civic cupolas, pillars, piers, and palisades, and the air full of singing birds. The other has walked the same streets, yet his memories are of grey brick tenements shouldering against each other like nervous thugs; cracked fanlights, windows boarded over with card, baby carriages full of coal or potatoes, tramps in doorways, cabbage leaves underfoot, the perfume of urine and porter, pressing people with voices like flatirons. They might have visited cities continents apart, but it is the same city.","author":"Ian McDonald","tags":["cities","travel","urbanism"],"id":151989,"author_id":"Ian+McDonald"},{"text":"By far the greatest and most admirable form of wisdom is that needed to plan and beautify cities and human communities.","author":"Socrates","tags":["cities","city","communities","community","socrates","urban-life","urban-planning","urbanism","wisdom"],"id":231802,"author_id":"Socrates"},{"text":"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 than two...2. Most blocks must be short; that is, streets and opportunities to turn corners must be frequent.3. The district must mingle buildings that vary in age and condition, including a good proportion of old ones so that they vary in the economic yield they must produce. This mingling must be fairly close-grained.4. There must be a sufficiently dense concentration of people, for whatever purposes they may be there...","author":"Jane Jacobs","tags":["151","city","planning","urbanism"],"id":245404,"author_id":"Jane+Jacobs"},{"text":"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 its potential for generating diversity.","author":"Jane Jacobs","tags":["160","city","diversity","planning","urbanism"],"id":255240,"author_id":"Jane+Jacobs"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":14,"pages":2,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}