Sri Mulyani Indrawati Quotes

Business was bound to come; light industries were already shopping for land. The quiet country farms were already going, and developments would take over... Eventually, of course, we will have to have some sort of plan to guide future development.

I like to call it 'the national automobile slum.' You can call it suburban sprawl. I think it's appropriate to call it the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world.

It was almost a desecration to put a building on the Boulder Turnpike, which is now U.S.-36 and is almost backyards and even junkyards all the way up. We didn't have to put development just cheek to jowl all the way up to Boulder. There's enough room in Colorado! But we did.

Many of them are doing it because they are concerned about smart growth.

Fifty years ago people were talking about Sydney's sprawl, but nobody does anything about it.

Down in the south, it's how we find the brownfield sites without taking too much land take to meet the tremendous demand for housing, and that's what I've done.

Every state has the right to take the necessary steps to maintain under public control the use, possession, disposal and reservation of land. Every state has the right to plan and regulate the use of land, which is one of its most important resources, in such a way that the growth of population centers both urban and rural are based on a comprehensive land use plan.

Land use is becoming more and more a general national interest and should be as much a study in the cities as in the country. For with the proper use of land, many of our greatest troubles—dust storms, floods, over-production of this and that, would at least be measurably controlled.

Annexation is probably the most valuable tool a city has to ensure orderly growth and development.

As cities have grown rapidly across the nation, many have neglected infrastructure projects and paved over green spaces that once absorbed rainwater.

I'm very stodgy. I'm always looking at old photos of California and Los Angeles, knowing that what I'm looking at is now full of houses. There used to be vacant lots in Los Angeles, now all taken up by three-storey boxes - it's all getting infilled.

Sewage works that serve big cities run into trouble when the cities grow up around them.

I'd like to see an arrested growth of development. You can't stop it, but it's important we do something about the developers having the upper hand.

Aside from its parks and nature areas, Singapore is intensively developed, and due to the shortage of land, is building up, down and on manmade islands and landfills.

We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us.

The loss of land for food security has to be measured not only in quantitative terms but also in respect of land use.

I do worry about population growth and the preservation of the green belt space but I don't think these are insurmountable problems.

The sugar industry doesn't want to see more of the agricultural areas turned into storm-water treatment areas. Ultimately they want to develop that land for houses and a shopping center.

It is progress when a centuries-old oak is cut down to give space for a road sign.

China is building cities for a 20 to 40 percent increase in population. India is quickly growing. The carbon footprints of that and other development around the world are overwhelming.

Study how a society uses its land, and you can come to pretty reliable conclusions as to what its future will be.

Cities and landscapes are illustrations of our spiritual and material worth. They not only express our values but give them a tangible reality. They determine the way in which we use or squander our energy, time, and land resources.

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.

Our engineering departments build freeways which destroy a city or a landscape, in the process.

After all the fertile land in the immediate neighbourhood of the first settlers were cultivated, if capital and population increased, more food would be required, and it could only be procured from land not so advantageously situated.