Nature, sentimentalized Nature, sentimentalized and considered as the antithesis of cities, is apparently assumed to consist of grass, fresh air and little else, and this ludicrous disrespect results in the devastation of nature even formally and publicly preserved in the form of a pet. Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities respectnature
Think better of it This is, of course, the best way to salvage any kind of sorted-out project, up to the time it is actually built: Think better of it. Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities respect
The assumption of equality Classic writing, with its assumption of equality between writer and reader, makes the reader feel like a genius. Bad writing makes the reader feel like a dunce. Steven Pinker, The Sense of Style Long, unwieldy sentences respect
Ideas for linear cities Arturo Soria y Mata, who proposed a linear streetcar suburb for Madrid in 1882 and managed to build something like three miles’ worth of an intended thirty. Likewise, the project by Edgar Chambless for Roadtown, published in 1910, depicted an infinitely long, two-room-wide building atop three levels of underground rail lines for express, local, and freight traffic. In the late 1920s, N. A. Miliutin proposed a Soviet Union–spanning linear plan that—following Soria y Mata’s rhetoric—would have solved the old Marxian chestnut of city/country contradiction at a stroke. Le Corbusier’s Algiers scheme of 1933—a highway-topped fourteen-story building meant to stretch miles along the Mediterranean and house 180,000 people—was surely the most immediate precursor of Rudolph’s “City Corridor.” Michael Sorkin, 20 Minutes in Manhattan The linear city