Aga Khan IV Quotes

The movement toward a holistic approach to community development has been long in the making, but the housing crisis has motivated further progress.

If you try to put social and cultural development ahead of economic development, it doesn't work. You have to do it all together.

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.

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

We saw hundreds of programs to redevelop the central city, the neighborhoods, in the past.

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.

The biggest thing growing cities need to do is minimize barriers to development so that as long as someone is doing good urbanism, they can get permitted quickly and get building quickly.

I'm completely taken and impressed by the planning authority of Singapore and its Urban Redevelopment Authority (URA). It's the most cutting-edge agency in the world. They have very effective guidelines for development, and they review design as it evolves.

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

I see my buildings as pieces of cities, and in my designs I try to make them into responsible and contributing citizens.

I feel however, that we architects have a special duty and mission... (to contribute) to the socio-cultural development of architecture and urban planning.

Urban design as a discipline barely exists in most American and Canadian cities. In Singapore, there are innovative transportation strategies at work.

I've spent my entire life working to invest in human beings and human communities, to help them move down the path of economic development.

Any urbanist has to appreciate New York City and the way it works. The public transit is astonishing.

The secret to the city is integration. Every area of the city should combine work, leisure and culture. Separate these functions and parts of the city die.

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.

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.

There has been much talk referencing what I consider conceptual reports like the Landscape of Choice and documents created as a result of the Great Valley Center.

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

We will focus on the Zambian people as both the end and the means of development

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!

All it takes is an understanding that humans, not buildings come first when designing a city.

There is one thing that I have learned about Economic Development—that it has to do with a lot more than economics.

Let's make Oakland a model city.

Everything needs to work at the same time. But what keeps society vibrant permanently is jobs, industry, business, and stuff like that. It pays for everything else. If you just build affordable housing, and those people don't have jobs, it'll no longer be affordable soon. So you really have to build around the business community.