Courteous Reader,
I am tempted to win your favor by declaring I wrote this Almanac for Planners solely for the public good. However, this is insincere and you are too wise for the deception of this pretense. The fact is I am excessively poor and, unfortunately, excessively wifeless. To address both problems, I must begin to make some profit since every potential wife always asks, “What kind of car do you drive?” I always have to reply, “I walk”, and the potential wife thinks I am a deviant.
Indeed, this motive would have been enough to write this Almanac many years ago except for the overwhelming desire of the public and professionals to only hear what they want to hear and my overwhelming desire to secure a salary. I am now of sufficient age to no longer care about telling people what they want to hear but only about what they need to know. This has freed me to write this Almanac for Planners in increments of ten cause it worked for Moses and the Almighty. Hopefully, my Almanac gains your likes and retweets as a means of demonstrating the usefulness of my efforts but also your charity to this poor Friend and Servant,
Richard
On Cities
91. A city is only as strong as its weakest street.
92. A city is as old as it feels and suburban sprawl is as old as it looks.
93. Behind every successful city are good streets.
On the Automobile
94. Don’t put all of your automobiles on one road lest it apt to become a parking lot.
95. Cities designed for the automobile shall only live and die for the automobile.
On Urban Planners and Architects
96. Not all urban planners are created equal and the dumb ones are usually the most dangerous and easily found.
97. Whoever speaks the loudest is often the worst ‘planner’ in the room.
98. What an architect or urban planner is not telling you is usually far more important than what they are saying.
On Great Cities
99. Faint hearts never built great cities.
100. All the great cities of the world predate urban planning’s emergence as a distinct profession in the early 20th century. It is not coincidence.
Editor’s Note: This is the last issue of Poor Richard’s Almanac for Planners posted on The Outlaw Urbanist. Poor Richard wrote about 100 more common sayings and witticisms for urban planners, which will appear in the book version of Poor Richard’s Almanac. Stay tuned for the announcement.
It can only be found in exurban locations, i.e. near to an urban location but not too close. Somehow, it reconciles an inherently contradictory nature into its very function. In short, this magnificent green building is all things to all people.
In the follow-up film, Moonraker (1979), the villain Hugo Drax explicitly engages in large-scale eco-terrorism by hatching a scheme to release a viral toxin on the Earth, which will destroy all human life but leave unharmed all other plant and animal life. Drax takes the position of environmentalists to their logical – and inevitable – conclusion, which is the Earth would be better off without any human beings. Drax attempts to implement his dastardly plan while safely secluded in his moon base lair (also Michael Myers’ satirical inspiration for Dr. Evil’s moon base lair in Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me). Finally, the Bond villain in The Man with the Golden Gun (1974), Francisco Scaramanga, uses solar power for energy at his small-scale lair (in comparison to the Blofeld, Stromberg, and Drax hideouts) on an island in the South China Sea.
