City Revitalization Quotes

I play to lift a city, and raise a banner.

Cities need old buildings so badly it is probably impossible for vigorous streets and districts to grow without them.... for really new ideas of any kind--no matter how ultimately profitable or otherwise successful some of them might prove to be--there is no leeway for such chancy trial, error and experimentation in the high-overhead economy of new construction. Old ideas can sometimes use new buildings. New ideas must use old buildings.

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.

The rebuilding of New Orleans is an important point in the history of the United States.

There's no way New Orleans will ever be the city it was. I think it will have half the population. They may create a sort of Disneyland at the French Quarter for tourists. The rest I don't know.

We want the city back on its feet. We want to have jobs for the city.

If you give me Times Square, I want to give it back to the people.

I think Giuliani started a trend that Bloomberg continued with rampant gentrification, and I think it's tough because why would any city choose not to do that?

When you clean up a city, you destroy it.

So the city [Pittsburgh] was faced with that question of "What to do now?" because it can't turn back the clock and be what it once was. So thematically, it seemed like the perfect location for the movie. And then, it's a matter of how we get that feeling into the picture and make it a part of [Michael] Chabon's story.

Compton is this amazing place with a rich history. I see it as a new Brooklyn.

The city [ LA] is kind of going through an interesting transition; sort of renaissance time where there is so much going on here. I think it's really exciting to be here.

It's nice to get president candidates' attention to infrastructure need which is really a ticking time bomb in America. But as important as the dollar amounts are, we need to know that this money is gonna go directly to cities. So we're gonna be able to put it to use. In previous administrations and in previous efforts on infrastructure, the money has gone through states and it never seems to find its way to the nation's cities.

The electricity is back on in Baghdad. That is a very climactic moment in any country's liberation, when the lights come back on and you get a good look at what you looted.

Inspire other communities and cities to reinvent themselves.

Everybody talks about Pittsburgh reinventing itself and being successful in the 21st century - well, outside the city limits, it means energy jobs and manufacturing.

The current administration has made the decision to cut dollars going for community development block grants, for various incentives to bring cities back.

It is not age which killed Boston, for no cities die of age; it is the youth of other cities.

Politicos talk a big game about bringing jobs to devastated cities like Detroit, but rarely succeed.

Never underestimate the power of a city to regenerate.

Most old cities are now sclerotic machines that dispense known qualities in ever-greater quantities, instead of laboratories of the uncertain. Only the skyscraper offers business the wide-open spaces of a man-made Wild West, a frontier in the sky.

It is hardly fair to blame America for the state of San Francisco, for its population is cosmopolitan and its seaport attracts the floating vice of the Pacific; but be the cause what it may, there is much room for spiritual betterment.

Any city may have one period of magnificence, like Boston or New Orleans or San Francisco, but it takes a real one to keep renewing itself until the past is perennially forgotten.

I was a little lacking in vision as mayor - I failed to understand the significance that housing and the revitalization of housing means for a city.

The city keeps reinventing itself. And each generation thinks, as they enter it, that they've missed the best of it, and then they become the authors of the next "best." And so it goes on and on and on. And New York keeps redefining itself and reinventing itself, and then you look at it and it's pretty much the way it was back in the 1920's., or in the 1930's. Something stylistically different in some ways, but it's still got the same vitality.