City Management Quotes

Some governments are corrupt but are known for their competency in running the city. Others are incompetent but are considered "clean." [Washington] DC's government is scandalously corrupt and hopelessly incompetent.

Otherwise, I think the building can be bigger, larger, and the city can be much more crazy. The problem is the government structure is so deadly stupid, not really solving problems but creating a lot of problems itself every day.

Obviously as a mayor, I'm in competition with my neighboring cities as well as cities around the country.

We need a mayor who knows how to balance a budget, who understands the urgency of delivering all the services that a great city needs, who understand the need of working families.

We [Chicago] are known as the city that works. You gotta make sure it works for everybody and not just a few.

I think of being the mayor of a big city with so many incredible things happening - but also so many challenges and opportunities - as really being kind of the chief advocate for the people.

We're tying to get Baltimore on the right track.

London is like the tropical bush -- if you don't exercise constant care the jungle, in the shape of the slums, will break in.

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!

New York seems to be thriving, which I'm grateful for. But I would hope that they would figure out how to negotiate the traffic and limit the pedicabs, because it seems to me that it's becoming a more chaotic city.

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.

The credit for much of this rightly belongs to the late Mayor Daley who forged a coalition of business and labor that kept Chicago always moving ahead.

Park City is developing itself, almost to death.

The current situation [in Washington DC] will shortly and irresistibly tempt the Congress to reassert federal control over the nation's capital city. If the mayor [Marion Barry] can't restore order, the federal government must.

It is a miracle that New York works at all. The whole thing is implausible.

Mayors are leaders, doers. We get things done, and we are moving America's cities forward.

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

The object of this edict is to enlighten the present and future citizens of Chandigarh about the basic concepts of planning of the city so that they become its guardians and save it from whims of individuals.

Knowledge and power in the city; peace and decency in the country.

If all of us would require the same level of performance from ourselves as we expect from government, this city will forever be the city that works.

Paris is a city of centralisation--and centralisation and classification are closely allied. In the early times, when centralisation is becoming a fact, its forerunner is classification. All things which are similar or analogous become grouped together, and from the grouping of groups rises one whole or central point. We see radiating many long arms with innumerable tentaculae, and in the centre rises a gigantic head with a comprehensive brain and keen eyes to look on every side and ears sensitive to hear--and a voracious mouth to swallow.

City planning finds its validation in the intuitive recognition that a burgeoning market society can not be trusted to produce spontaneously a habitable, sanitary, or even efficient city, much less a beautiful one.

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.

In 1989, SimCity introduced an entirely new brand of game play.

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