Olafur Eliasson Quotes

My view is that good community management is like having good municipal government: You should be able to have dissenting opinions and so on, freedom of speech, but your grandmother should also be able to walk down the street at night without having to worry about getting mugged.

If you are running a city you must focus on day-to-day problems.

Maybe we can show government how to operate better as a result of better architecture. Eventually, I think Chicago will be the most beautiful great city left in the world.

Cities are those laboratories of democracy that states used to be.

I have the best job in the world. I wake up every morning energized at the thought of running Rio de Janeiro, the most exciting city on the planet.

My capital budget maintains my commitment to the education of children, health of the Chesapeake Bay, and safety of all Maryland citizens. We will continue to focus on the five pillars of my Administration as we build today and look forward to the projects of the future.

You cannot deal with a city if it's not socially integrated.

If managed well, urbanization can create enormous opportunities: allowing innovation and new ideas to emerge, saving energy, land and natural resources, managing climate and the risk of disasters.

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.

You cannot save wonderful towns. You can only save wonderful towns by building new ones.

If we are to succeed, we must recognize that the community redevelopment is not solely the rehabilitation of housing, or putting a mall in the business strips.

Brazil will change when its cities change.

Human settlements are like living organisms. They must grow, and they will change. But we can decide on the nature of that growth - on the quality and the character of it - and where it ought to go. We don't have to scatter the building blocks of our civic life all over the countryside, destroying our towns and ruining farmland.

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 government only makes restrictive rules, they don't show you what to do so you know, OK, here's where we need this many apartments, with open space, playgrounds, kindergartens.

It's a difficult task to deal with cities. But with some original ways of getting things done, with some basic commandments, you can really get cities to be a great, great place to live.

If you live in a place that you perceive to be a crowded place, you appreciate government; you see it as this thing that protects you against crime, that keeps order, that makes sure that nobody puts a massage parlor next to your house, that keeps other people's dogs from pooping on the sidewalk.

I may not know how to tune a lyre, but I know all that I need to know to make a city great and free.

A mayor is a political leader for a city. He doesn't know anything necessarily about city administration, and furthermore he shouldn't have to.

As go our cities so goes our country.

If you don’t put positive things in the city’s open spaces, they will be filled by negative things.

We need to create planned communities: whole new towns with the infrastructure and amenities they need, communities where people genuinely want to live, and built where demand is high.

If we wish to rebuild our cities, we must first rebuild our neighborhoods. And to do that, we must understand that the quality of life is more important than the standard of living.

There is no manual on how to run a global city like London. But I'm hugely proud of what we've been able to achieve in just the first year.

My studio's passion is improving the public experience of cities for everyone.