Thomas Frank Quotes

I have always believed that every great city in history needs a vibrant center.

Besides infrastructure, there is a huge opportunity in housing and urbanisation of cities - not only building new ones, but also renewing the infrastructure of old cities to make them more livable. This provides tremendous scope for large investments to fuel growth.

What kind of town do we want in the future, and how are we going to plan on that?

I want Baltimore to be the coolest city in the world.

Transit builds a city that people choose to live in.

We should concentrate our work not only to a separated housing problem but housing involved in our daily work and all the other functions of the city.

Vibrancy is so universally desirable, so totemic in its powers, that even though we aren't sure what the word means, we know the quality it designates must be cultivated. The vibrant, we believe, is what makes certain cities flourish.

The pursuit of the vibrant seems to be the universal job description of the nation's city planners nowadays. It is also part of the Obama administration's economic recovery strategy for the nation.

After working in cities for nearly 40 years, I am telling you that every city can improve its quality of life in less than three years, no matter the scale or the financial conditions.

Livable neighborhoods with a vibrant street life will stimulate our economic life as well.

The negotiation of city space has been made more difficult with the idea that redevelopment is an improvement for some vague future - but it's never like that, is it? Once you get there, for economic reasons you have to generate the next project - so you're immediately starting to dig up something else, and so it goes on.

As mayor of San Francisco, I will provide the vision and work hard to make San Francisco a beautiful, well-planned city with excellent housing and transportation options.

The key to truly rebuilding our central city on a vital and sustainable foundation is people.

If, instead of hiring half-baked revolutionary planners to fill our college undergraduates with ingenious schemes to disperse populations, split up big cities into little ones, go underground or into distant places to escape bombs and congestion, abandon large urban areas in favor of roadside villages, we were to publish reliable, simply written, common-sense information to control the building boom, what a country this would be!

Detroit's really important to the success of our state. You know, you can't have a successful Michigan if the biggest city isn't a success as well.

I am committed to ensuring that, as Portland grows, the things we love about our city grow along with us.

The city of Rio de Janeiro is setting an example to the world of how to recover quality urban spaces through drastic intervention and the creation of cultural facilities such as the Museum of Tomorrow.

As a planning board commissioner, I have to review the applications for development throughout the city, and the bulk of those applications have been for the waterfront. I think the progress the waterfront has made is amazing.

There are many beautiful and resource-rich areas all over the Philippines that are still undeveloped or under-developed. These areas offer opportunities for better master-planning and the emergence of better communities as well as cities.

Stockholm is surely an urban planner's dream. Everything works. Everything looks good.

Cities are not problems. They are solutions.

New York is the perfect model of a city, not the model of a perfect city.

I have realized after all these years that a city that has a good quality of life attracts jobs. People don't want to invest in places if there is no quality of life.

In urbanization, you think big because you are thinking decades ahead.

I believe the challenge the city faces is attracting continued development into the inner and western part of Jersey City. Nobody should be left behind as Jersey City continues to prosper and grow.