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• FORM: The life of a city is directly dependent upon its matrix of connections and substructure, because the geometry either encourages or discourages people’s movements and interactions
• A picture of a city made of distinct interacting networks, each of them working on several different scales. Though competing, these networks with very different character have to connect with each other, and cooperate in a seamless fashion to define a living city
• The human mind has a fractal model imprinted in it, so what it intuitively generates will have a fractal structure.
• The mediaeval city was completely connected via direct pedestrian paths. We built such cities precisely so as to allow direct connections among all nodes, and our collective memory has never forgotten the personal freedom of movement and interaction that this gave us.
• We do everything possible we can to connect virtually and by car, but we are disconnected physically on the pedestrian scale (Dupuy, 1991)
• A healthy network requires all levels from the very fast to the very slow.
• An obsession with the largest scales in the car network leads to the disconnected urban geometry seen nowadays.
• A “small-world” network is one where nodes are connected by both long and short links.
• Adding only some connections to one pair-wise connected set of nodes, it changes dramatically its connectivity among the nodes. Is necessary to connect not only with the nearest node, but also with the localised far.
• Under the right conditions, the small scale connections can be generated more or less spontaneously – all we need is some encouragement, guidance and constrains to ensure a partially coherent form.
• We love a city when we can connect to it intimately.
• The “soul” of a city exists precisely on its smallest architectural scales.
• The pedestrian city has something important to offer, which offsets the advantages of the car city, namely – AN EMOTIONALLY NOURISHING PHYSICAL ENVIRONMENT. There is visual excitement, the joy of physical movement.
• In today’s most disconnected, dysfunctional anti-city, people walk daily to and from their car. The short pedestrian paths are not supposed to exist, they are left geometrically ill-defined. The once glorious pedestrian city gas contracted to dreary concrete parking garages and asphalt parking wastelands. Seems that there is no more human-scale, now the distance and most of the urban design are ruled by the car-scale.
• Modernism prefers perfectly flat lawns and bushes trimmed into perfect cubes. Putting a tree into a square planter is a juxtaposition of two mutually exclusive and irreconcilable geometries.