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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.

If managed well, urbanization can create enormous opportunities: allowing innovation and new ideas to emerge, saving energy, land and natural resources, managing climate and the risk of disasters.

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

Besides infrastructure, there is a huge opportunity in housing and urbanisation of cities - not only building new ones, but also renewing the infrastructure of old cities to make them more livable. This provides tremendous scope for large investments to fuel growth.

Planning cities is a necessary but risky business.

Cities have to realize that whatever the federal government is going to do, it's not going to be enough. And cities that proactively take control of their own quality of life initiatives are going to be the cities that ultimately attract the highly talented young people and create the jobs.

Urbanization is not about simply increasing the number of urban residents or expanding the area of cities. More importantly, it's about a complete change from rural to urban style in terms of industry structure, employment, living environment and social security.

I want to buy up a gang of properties in my neighborhood and give people the chance to live in new buildings. We should make our areas nice.

I think ultimately, bringing more nature back into the city is a way to deal with urban sprawl and things like that. If the cities feel a little more natural, people like to live there more rather than moving out and dividing up another piece of land that shouldn't be touched.

Suburbia is where the developer bulldozes out the trees, then names the streets after them.