Quotes About Urbanization

Jacob closed his eyes but did not sleep. Instead, he imagined towns where hungry men hung on boxcars looking for work that couldn't be found, shacks where families lived who didn't even have one swaybacked milk cow. He imagined cities where blood stained the sidewalks beneath buildings tall as ridges. He tried to imagine a place worse than where he was.

Charles Dickens, visiting the United States five years earlier, had described Washington as "the City of Magnificent Intentions,"12 with "spacious avenues, that begin in nothing, and lead nowhere; streets, mile-long, that only want houses, roads, and inhabitants; public buildings that need but a public to be complete.

He that builds a city, and does not intend it should increase, commits as great an absurdity, as if he should desire his child might ever continue under the same weakness in which he is born. If it do not grow, it must pine and perish; for in this world nothing is permanent; that which does not grow better will grow worse.

The global securities industry, for example, once overwhelmingly concentrated in the financial districts of London and New York, has gradually shifted an ever larger share of their operations to their respective suburban rings, other smaller cities, and overseas. The headquarters might remain in a midtown high-rise, but more and more the jobs are located elsewhere.

Humankind's greatest creation has always been its cities. They represent the ultimate handiwork of our imagination as a species, testifying to our ability to reshape the natural environment in the most profound and lasting ways. Indeed, today our cities can be seen from outer space. Cities

As automobile registrations soared in the 1920s, suburbanization across the rest of the country also picked up speed, with suburbs growing at twice the rate of cities.

Suburbia, triumphant in the world's leading economy, also swept successfully through virtually every part of the advanced industrial world. Compared with the option of living closely packed in apartment complexes, most human beings seemed to define their personal "better city" as a little more space and privacy, and perhaps even a spot of lawn.

As late as 1850, the United States had only six "large" cities with a population of over one hundred thousand, constituting barely 5 percent of the population. This reality would change dramatically in the next fifty years. By 1900, there were thirty-eight such cities, and they now housed roughly one in every five Americans.23

We are now exposed to ten times the amount of artificial light that people were exposed to just fifty years ago.

The British writer Robert Colville says we are living through "the Great Acceleration," and like Sune, he argues it's not simply our tech that's getting faster—it's almost everything. There's evidence that a broad range of important factors in our lives really are speeding up: people talk significantly faster now than they did in the 1950s, and in just twenty years, people have started to walk 10 percent faster in cities.

Tribal life comes automatically to an end when a primitive people begins to live in a town or a city, for sooner or later a tribal organization is found to be incompatible with life in a city.

Why should one say that the machine does not live? It breathes, for its breath forms the atmosphere of some towns.

I believe we shall come to care about people less and less, Helen. The more people one knows, the easier it becomes to replace them. It's one of the curses of London. I quite expect to end my life caring most for a place.

This famous building had arisen, that was doomed. To-day Whitehall had been transformed; it would be the turn of Regent Street to-morrow. And month by month the roads smelt more strongly of petrol, and were more difficult to cross, and human beings heard each other speak with greater difficulty, breathed less of the air, and saw less of the sky. Nature withdrew; the leaves were falling by midsummer; the sun shone through dirt with an admired obscurity.

They reminded me somehow of the peasants in a book by Steinbeck: they were of the city, but they dressed like peasants, they looked like peasants, and they talked like peasants. Their cows were motor-driven milk floats; their tools were mop and pail and kneeling pad; their farms a forest of steel and concrete. In spite of the hairgrips and headscarves, they had their own kind of dignity. They

Roosevelt remarked on the anomaly whereby man, as he progressed from savagery to civilization, used up more and more of the world's resources, yet in doing so tended to move to the city, and lost his sense of dependence on nature.

When the biggest, richest, glassiest buildings in town are the banks, you know that town's in trouble.

Water, water, water... There is no shortage of water in the desert but exactly the right amount...unless you try to establish a city where no city should be.

They cannot see that growth for the sake of growth is a cancerous madness, that Phoenix and Albuquerque will not be better cities to live in when their populations are doubled again and again. They would never understand that an economic system which can only expand or expire must be false to all that is human.

There is no lack of water here, unless you try to establish a city where no city should be.

More and more agricultural land is being used for non-agricultural purposes. Whether it's any industry, express highway, or expansion of any city, agricultural land is being used.

My first school is gone - turned into flats.

In cities, people go to work and all walk there together, like some arterial flow. And there's a certain desolation about it, an alienation that we all experience.

I don't think the state of California realized there would be this many people here caught up in the freeway system.