Ahead of his time, technology historian and urban philosopher Lewis Mumford (1895-1990) grasped the paradoxes of modern life and the long term pitfalls of the urban evolution he witnessed in the 1950s and 1960s.  I stumbled across some great quotes of his today:

• Forget the damned motor car and build the cities for lovers and friends.
  
• Restore human legs as a means of travel. Pedestrians rely on food for fuel and need no special parking facilities. 
• The chief function of the city is to convert power into form, energy into culture, dead matter into the living symbols of art, biological reproduction into social creativity.
• New York is the perfect model of a city, not the model of a perfect city.
• Our national flower is the concrete cloverleaf.  (my favorite)

Much of Mumford’s work is timeless and a treat to read.  Similar to the work of Jane Jacobs, perhaps more applicable now than when he wrote.