Urban Regeneration Quotes

Before 2000, everything was about being contextual, and buildings were supposed to be good citizens.

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

You go down some street - no doubt it's there, and we have to do something about it, and our programmes are designed to do that - but if that's a picture of Newcastle, it's not the one I recognise and I bet none in the North East do either.

Over the last 15 years or so, Manchester has undergone huge transformation - from a city in decline and on its knees to one that is growing, vibrant and confident.

Whenever they rebuild an old building, they must first of all destroy the old one.

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

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've been to Manchester enough to know it's a real place. It's not Factory Records and the Smiths bicycling around. I get it. It's a modern city.

We see buildings in Britain mostly as freestanding objects. They are not meant to have a dialogue with anything around them, or with history, or with ideas of any kind beyond the self-referential. What we call 'regeneration' is largely an excuse for building for maximum profit with a bit of sculptural design thrown in to catch the eye of the media.

When you clean up a city, you destroy it.

Former brownfields, depressed urban areas, and hard-hit rural towns blossom as eco-industrial parks, green enterprise zones, and eco-villages. Farmers' markets, community co-ops, and mobile markets get fresh, organic produce to the people who can't afford to shop at health-food stores.

My 2018 ended with a hate storm, in response to my appointment as chair of the government's Building Better, Building Beautiful Commission.

We must kill the street. We shall truly enter into modern town planning only after we have accepted this preliminary determination.

Inspire other communities and cities to reinvent themselves.

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

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.

The 1980s were tough for most of Britain, but nowhere more so than Tottenham.

That has been another interesting discovery: that basically a city [Lagos] could recover from a really deep, deep, deep pit.

I was ecstatic when we won - to host the Olympics is one of the biggest opportunities in living memory. It will help change the lives of young people and transform east London.

People think that Detroit is this barren wasteland. While there are parts that are not as nice as others, the misconception is not true. It is definitely not a thriving community in Detroit, but it is getting there. There is a lot of heart and love in this city.

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

I certainly notice the vitality in Belfast, which wasn't there in the Seventies. There was a war going on then. Now there are cranes everywhere. There really is a sense of renewal and hope.

At that time [90th in Lagos], if you drove through the city, you drove through a foreground that always seemed to be incredibly dramatic and incredibly agonised - smoking, burning, incredible compression. In the first year we stayed on the ground and went everywhere. But then in order to discover whether this was the whole story, we rented a helicopter. And we began to understand that this is not chaos but a highly modern system that had been abandoned, then at some point went into reversal, then slowly came out of it.