Sunday, November 11, 2007

Great Planning Quotes

Here's the link:
http://www.aboutplanning.org/quotes.html

But let's start with the very first quote on City Planning by Horace Bushnell:

Considering the immense importance of a right location, and a right planning for cities, no step should ever be taken by the parties concerned, without employing some person who is qualifies by a special culture, to assist and direct. Our engineers are trained for a very different kind of service, and are partially disqualified for this by the habit of a study more strictly linear, more rigidly scientific, and less artistic. The qualifications of surveyors are commonly more meagre still...Nothing is more to be regretted, in this view, than that the American nation, having a new world to make, and clean map on which to place it, should be sacrificing their advantage so cheaply, in the extempore planning of towns and cities. The peoples of the old world have their cities built for times gone by, when railroads and gunpowder were unknown. We can have cities for the new age that has come, adopted to its better conditions and ornament. So great an advantage ought not to be thrown away. We want, therefore, a city planning profession..."

Horace Bushnell
"City Plans" 1864

So check out the quotes from the link above and leave a comment about your favorite planning quote.

4 comments:

Zig B Free said...

"A common mistake people make when trying to design something foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools."

- The modern American Zoning Code

Carls said...

I feel like the general theme of the quotes is that by nature city planning is a lost cause???

Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.
- Edward Abbey

Zig B Free said...

Is planning a lost cause? Well at times it feels like planners are fighting aginst money, power and ingnorance.

I remember when I was in undergrad, someone asked the professor what was his greatest accomplishment as a city planner...and he though about it for a long while and said, "stopping two bad plans from destroying a neighborhood."

It's hard to point out the accomplishments of city planning but it is real easy to point out it's failures

Anonymous said...

Regarding the post by donnell:

"A common mistake people make when trying to design something foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools."

I believe that is actually a quote from Douglas Adams' "The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy"