Jane Byrne Quotes

It's hard to kill a city, but easy to kill a company.

We are extraordinarily lucky in the U.K. to have inherited a diverse range of cities that bear the imprints of many centuries of human habitation.

Cities are not static objects to be feared or admired, but are instead a living process that residents are changing all the time.

In Paris, there has to be a presence. History becomes the most interesting when it's compared to the present. I mean there's a whole group of people that want to build new buildings that look like old buildings.

I am crumbling in sync with old Hackney.

What's similar between Britain and America is the lack of good-quality civic buildings.

It is in the genes of cities to bounce back from disasters - whether natural or man made. The denizens of suburbia have no choice but to survive and move on. But it is the manner in which different cities respond to emergencies that sets them apart.

When I came in, the city was on the edge of bankruptcy. I'm proud of what I did. I built the foundation that mayors after me built upon - particularly Bloomberg. But the foundation was essential because if it hadn't occurred, we would have been another Detroit.

When you look at a city, it's like reading the hopes, aspirations and pride of everyone who built it.

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

Planning cities is a necessary but risky business.

For 11 years, I was mayor of Tirana, our capital. We faced many challenges. Art was part of the answer, and my name, in the very beginning, was linked with two things: demolition of illegal constructions in order to get public space back, and use of colors in order to revive the hope that had been lost in my city.

No great nation that ever went off the gold standard ever remained great.

Let Detroit go bankrupt.

Not every town can or should be saved.

Most cities are eclectic. There's a bit of medieval, Georgian, some Victorian and some 20th century. That's fine. Bath is different because it was built within 100 years or less. It has a homogeneity.

If we're talking about the urban landscape as an advanced, forward-thinking art form, there must be some intellectual thinking involved.

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

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.

When I look at cities now, I don't see them in the present. This is the decaying infrastructure of our existing cities. Years from now, none of this is going to be here. New cities are going to rise.

That's the beauty of Mumbai. While some parts have grown rapidly, there are places like Churchgate that have retained their character.

The real story of Detroit [...] can be summed up in seven words. Private enterprise built it, government destroyed it.

Having viewed slum clearance projects in most major cities of the world may I state that you have conceived and created in the Johannesburg townships what is probably the most impressive and adequate resettlement activity in existence.

Every city in the world can be improved in less than three years.

Detroit right now is virtually abandoned at its core to the degree that a lot of what had been slums thirty years ago are now wildflower meadows. The rebuilding of Detroit will occur a much smaller scale. It remains to be seen what will become of Detroit's vast suburbs.