Design of Cities, first published in 1967, is an illustrated account of the development of urban form, written by Edmund Bacon (1910–2005), who was the Executive Director of the Philadelphia City Planning Commission from 1949 to 1970. The work looks at the many aspects that influence city design, including spatial form, interactions between humans, nature and the built environment, perception of favorable environments, color, and perspective. Bacon also explores the growth of cities from early Greek and Roman times to Philadelphia's design in the 1960s. It is considered a seminal text on urban planning.
The Ed Bacon Foundation was established in 2004 to advance and preserve his vision and legacy as set forth in this book.
Famous quotes containing the words design of, design and/or cities:
“Humility is often only the putting on of a submissiveness by which men hope to bring other people to submit to them; it is a more calculated sort of pride, which debases itself with a design of being exalted; and though this vice transform itself into a thousand several shapes, yet the disguise is never more effectual nor more capable of deceiving the world than when concealed under a form of humility.”
—François, Duc De La Rochefoucauld (1613–1680)
“For I choose that my remembrances of him should be pleasing, affecting, religious. I will love him as a glorified friend, after the free way of friendship, and not pay him a stiff sign of respect, as men do to those whom they fear. A passage read from his discourses, a moving provocation to works like his, any act or meeting which tends to awaken a pure thought, a flow of love, an original design of virtue, I call a worthy, a true commemoration.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Again and again I am brought up against it, and again and again I resist it: I don’t want to believe it, even though it is almost palpable: the vast majority lack an intellectual conscience; indeed, it often seems to me that to demand such a thing is to be in the most populous cities as solitary as in the desert.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)