Ted Wheeler Quotes

The job of Seoul mayor is as important as that of president.

We haven't had an agenda for American cities probably since at least Jimmy Carter. We have left cities to fend for themselves.

I can sign all of the emergency proclamations I want, but that's not going to fix the infrastructure in urban Honolulu.

We cannot afford merely to sit down and deplore the evils of city life as inevitable, when cities are constantly growing, both absolutely and relatively. We must set ourselves vigorously about the task of improving them; and this task is now well begun.

Hillary Clinton's been talking about the inner cities for 25 years. Nothing's going to ever happen.

I've worked on the urban agenda all my life. All. My. Life.

As a rule, our largest cities are the worst governed.

A mayor is a symbol and a public face of what a city bureaucracy provides its citizens.

Planning cities is a necessary but risky business.

A lot of the stories about urban America tend to be written on the margins. We focus a lot on these big global cities - New York, San Francisco - or we focus on cities that are having the toughest time - Detroit, Newark, Camden.

Washington, D.C., has for too long ignored the reality that if we do not invest in infrastructure in urban America we are doing so at the jeopardy of the economy.

A city is in many respects a great business corporation, but in other respects it is enlarged housekeeping. ... may we not say that city housekeeping has failed partly because women, the traditional housekeepers, have not been consulted as to its multiform activities?

We will neglect our cities to our peril, for in neglecting them we neglect the nation.

Population growth and the proliferation of mega-cities around the world redefines the entire global security agenda.

The city is not the problem; the city is the solution.

We must kill the street. We shall truly enter into modern town planning only after we have accepted this preliminary determination.

I felt that there's an obligation when writing a piece about an urban expressway made in the 50s to acknowledge the context, and Robert Moses is sort of an iconic figure in New York, and he influenced the shape of the city more than anyone else before or after him. He was one of the most powerful and influential civic architects in the world, because of how much he transformed the city. He built multiple bridges and highways and parks and recreational spaces, beaches - in the course of a few decades, he completely changed the city

Let's make Oakland a model city.

I used to walk in the Bowery in the early 1980s, and it was not safe. It went from this to Disneyland under Giuliani and Bloomberg. This is now one of the best-run big cities in the world.

I definitely think New York is a very, very vibrant, wonderful city, but I certainly, of course, can't help but miss a lot of the stuff that's no longer there.

The City gets more and more beautiful every time I come home.

Infrastructure deficit is an issue in all urban areas.

I think Giuliani started a trend that Bloomberg continued with rampant gentrification, and I think it's tough because why would any city choose not to do that?

I've done eight years as mayor of London. I enjoyed it hugely; it was a massive privilege.

The one thing politicians will always vote for is more politics, so in 2000 they invented the post of mayor of London without ever really thinking what it was a mayor would do.