'Now the great function of the city is to give a collective form to what Martin Buber has well called the I-and-Thou relation: to permit – indeed to encourage – the greatest possible number of meetings, encounters, challenges, between varied persons and groups, providing as it were a stage upon which the drama of social life may be enacted, with the actors taking their turn, too, as spectators. The social function of open spaces in the city is to bring people together; and as Raymond Unwin demonstrated at Hampstead Garden Suburb – and Henry Wright and Clarence Stein even more decisively at Radburn – when both private and public spaces are designed together, this mingling and meeting may take place, under the pleasantest possible conditions, in the neighbourhood.' (p. 20)
'When I ask myself what immediate improvement would make my own city, New York, even more attractive to live in again, I find two answers: rows of shade trees on every street, and a little park, even a quarter of an acre, in each block, preferably near the middle. When I think of another familiar city, Philadelphia, I would turn the back alleys into green pedestrian malls, threading through the city, now widening into pools of open space surrounded by restaurants, cafes or shops, all insulated from motor traffic. And what applies to individual blocks applies to neighbourhoods. To have any value for recreation they, too, must be insulated from the traffic avenues and motorways: the parts of the neighbourhood should be joined together by green ribbons, pedestrian malls, and pleasances, such as that admirable park Olmsted designed for the Back Bay Fens of Boston, taking advantage of a little river and a swamp to create a continuous band of green, uniting more than one neighbourhood.’ (p. 21)
The one great requirement for open spaces in urban centres is to insulate them from the fumes, the noise, and the distracting movement of motor traffic. The neighbourhood, not the individual building block, is now the unit of urban design, and all fresh schemes for both open spaces and for traffic, to be worthy of approval, must separate the pedestrian completely from the motorcar. When this can be done from the beginning as was first decisively achieved at Radburn, New Jersey, the motor roads that give access to buildings may be reduced in area and partly eliminated; while the space that is so saved within the superblock and the neighbourhood may be dedicated to a public park.’(p. 21)
Lewis Mumford, ‘The Philosophy of Open Space’ [reprinted from The Highway and the City 1960] Whitney North Seymour (ed) Small urban spaces; the philosophy, design, sociology, and politics of vest-pocket parks and other small urban open spaces New York : New York University Press, 1969
