"There is a wistful myth that if only we had enough money to spend. . .we could wipe out all our slums in ten years, reverse decay in the great, dull, gray belts that were yesterday's and day-before-yesterday's suburbs, anchor the wandering middle class and its wandering tax money, and perhaps even solve the traffic problem.
But look what we have built with the first several billions:
Low-income projects that become worse centers of delinquency, vandalism and general social hopelessness than the slums they were supposed to replace. Middle-income housing projects which are truly marvels of dullness and regimentation, sealed against any buoyancy or vitality of city life. . .Cultural centers that are unable to support a good bookstore. Civic centers that are avoided by everyone but bums, who have fewer choices of loitering places than others. . .This is not the rebuilding of cities. This is the sacking of cities" (p. 4).
"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. . ." (p. 7).
"In New York's East Harlem there is a housing project with a conspicuous rectangular lawn which became an object of hatred to the project tenants. . .Finally one day a tenant more articulate than the others made this pronouncement: 'Nobody cared what we wanted when they built this place. They threw our houses down and pushed us here and pushed our friends somewhere else. We don't have a place around here to get a cup of coffee or a newspaper even, or borrow fifty cents. Nobody cared what we need. But the big men come and look at that grass and say, 'Isn't it wonderful! Now the poor have everything!' ' . . . There is a quality even meaner than outright ugliness or disorder, and this meaner quality is the dishonest mask of pretended order, achieved by ignoring or suppressing the real order that is struggling to exist and to be served" (p. 15).
"Towns, suburbs and even little cities are totally different organisms from great cities. We are in enough trouble already from trying to understand big cities in terms of the behavior, and the imagined behavior, of towns. To try to understand towns in terms of big cities will only compound the confusion" (p. 16).
"His aim was the creation of self-sufficient small towns, really very nice towns if you were docile and had no plans of your own and did not mind spending your life among others with no plans of their own. As in all Utopias, the right to have plans of any significance belonged only to the planners in charge" (p. 17).
Ebenezer Howard's Garden City
"Howard set spinning powerful and city-destroying ideas: He conceived that the way to deal with the city's functions was to sort and sift out of the whole certain simple uses, and to arrange each of these in relative self-containment" (p. 18).
Euclidean Zoning a "city-destroying" idea?
"But unless eyes are there, and unless in the brains behind those eyes is the almost unconscious reassurance of general street support in upholding civilization, lights can do no good. Horrifying public crimes can, and do, occur in well-lighted subway stations when no effective eyes are present. They virtually never occur in darkened theaters where many people and eyes are present. Street lights can be like that famous stone that falls in the desert where there are no ears to hear. Does it make a noise? Without effective eyes to see, does a light cast light? Not for practical purposes" (p. 43).
"As children get older, this incidental outdoor activity. . .becomes less bumptious physically and entails more loitering with others, sizing people up, flirting, talking, pushing, shoving and horseplay. Adolescents are always being criticized for this kind of loitering, but they can hardly grow up without it. The trouble comes when it is done not within society, but as a form of outlaw life" (p. 86).
"Some city sidewalks are undoubtedly evil places for rearing children. They are evil for anybody. . .In defective neighborhoods, shooing the children into parks and playgrounds is worse than useless, either as a solution to the streets' problems or as a solution for the children" (p. 87).
"In orthodox city planning, neighborhood open spaces are venerated in an amazingly uncritical fashion, much as savages venerate magical fetishes. Ask a houser how his planned neighborhood improves on the old city and he will cite, as a self-evident virtue, More Open Space. Ask a zoner about the improvements in progressive codes and he will cite, again as a self-evident virtue, their incentives toward leaving More Open Space. Walk with a planner through a dispirited neighborhood and though it be already scabby with deserted parks and tired landscaping festooned with old Kleenex, he will envision a future of More Open Space.
More Open Space for what? For muggings? For bleak vacuums between buildings? Or for ordinary people to use and enjoy? But people do not use city open space just because it is there and because city planners or designers wish they would" (p. 90).
"Los Angeles, which needs lung help more than any other American city, also happens to have more open space than any other large city; its smog is partly owing to local eccentricities of circulation in the ocean of air, but also partly to the city's very scatter and amplitude of open space itself" (p.91).
"Philadelphia's Washington Square--the one that became a pervert park. . .Its rim is dominated by huge office buildings, and both this rim and its immediate hinterland lack any equivalent to the diversity of Rittenhouse Square--services, restaurants, cultural facilities. . .[it has] only one significant reservoir of potential users: the office workers. . .They all enter the district at once. They are then incarcerated all morning until lunch, and incarcerated again after lunch. They are absent after working hours. Therefore, Washington Square, of necessity, is a vacuum most of the day and evening. Into it came what usually fills city vacuums--a form of blight. . .
Far in the past, Washington Square did have a good population of users. But although it is still the 'same' park, its use and essence changed completely when its surroundings changed. Like all neighborhood parks, it is the creature of its surroundings and of the way its surroundings generate mutual support from diverse uses, or fail to generate such support.
It need not have been office work that depopulated this park. Any single, overwhelmingly dominate use imposing a limited schedule of users would have had a similar effect" (p. 97, 98).
"In cities, liveliness and variety attract more liveliness; deadness and monotony repel life. And this is a principle vital not only to the way cities behave socially, but also to the ways they behave economically.
There is however, one important exception to the rule that it takes a wide functional mixture of users to populate and enliven a neighborhood park through the day. There is one group in cities which, all by itself, can enjoy and populate a park long and well--although it seldom draws other types of users. This is the group of people with total leisure, the people who lack even the responsibilities of home. . .these are the people of. . .the Skid Row park" (p. 99).
" (p. 99).
"But there is no point in bringing parks to where people are, if in the process the reasons that the people are there are wiped out and the park substituted for them" (p. 101).
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