Blog All Documentary Quotes: I Love This Dirty Town

"We could actually live in cities, if we still believed in cities".

Another of the BBC Four Collections videos, I Love This Dirty Town is part of the “London” collection. However, it’s not really about London specifically, and shows a bit of Cambridge and Coventry among other places as it provides what is effectively a good primer on Jane Jacobs’ now classic The Death and Life of Great American Cities. There’ll be a “blog all dog-eared pages” post for that here too when I finish reading it - lots of good stuff in it.

"If you don't look closely you think it works"

As ever, nothing is new - along with the mis-guided large-scale regeneration that I’ve often covered it’s nice to see a guy from a design studio back then reusing the slightly-tired-but-full-of-character properties in the same way that we do today…

"They're packed with handy characters that you can find. Somebody to cut things for you, or make jigs or bolts or blow a little bit of plastic. There's always something, some little firm, some little chap around the corner who has exactly the particular craft you happen to want. You can grow almost any kind of photographic, light-engineering, design industry in these old buildings. And I would've thought that's a social gain."

On businesses in the city…

"There's nothing wrong with the big getting bigger, as long as the small get more numerous"

I do wonder if this is the nub of the problem - an eternal struggle between people who want to bring order to our cities, when the inhabitants are busy optimising for many more smaller and conflicting plans of their own…

"Planners are so paternalistic, don't they know that a lot of people have plans of their own? [...] Streets go up and they go down in the world, it has something to do with people who actually live there"

Blog All Documentary Quotes: I Love This Dirty Town

05 January 2013