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Quotes About Urbanization

Chinese buildings are like American buildings, with big footprints. People don't care about daylight or fresh air.
~ Helmut Jahn
overcrowding and poverty, that defied description, as
~ Frances Hodgson Burnett
A lot of money could be saved if we ate urban wildlife.
~ Louis Theroux
Human civilization has been changing the Earth's environment for millennia, often to our detriment. Dams, deforestation and urbanization can alter water cycles and wind patterns, occasionally triggering droughts or even creating deserts.
~ Jamais Cascio
Fast food is the one thing everyone can relate to. It's depressing, but also interesting, that people desire to eat the same sandwich in every single city in the world. But the biggest bummer is when you see a Subway in Berlin. Just devastating.
~ Patrick Carney
Expanding urbanization often trapped people at the margins of settlements into becoming landless and unable to use their skills and thus gradually forced them into performing lowly tasks.
~ Romila Thapar
I had been sleepin there for a long time hwen the Fort Worth police put up no-loiterin signs all over the place and made me have to move my sleepin spot. I found out later some rich white folks was "revitalizin" downtown. Raggedy black fellas sleepin ont he sidwalks wadn't part of the plan.
~ Ron Hall
The vertical dimension reflects the transition from agrarian societies to industrial societies, which brings secularization, bureaucratization, urbanization, and rationalization. These changes are linked with a polarization between traditional and secular-rational values.
~ Ronald Inglehart
Those people were pushing life and night and day in front of them. Life hides everything from people. Their own noise prevents them from hearing anything else. They couldn't care less. The bigger and taller the city, the less they care. Take it from me. I've tried. It's a waste of time.
~ Louis-Ferdinand Celine
We must not only protect the country side and save it from destruction, we must restore what has been destroyed and salvage the beauty and charm of our cities ... Once our natural splendor is destroyed, it can never be recaptured. And once man can no longer walk with beauty or wonder at nature, his spirit will wither and his sustenance be wasted.
~ Lyndon B. Johnson
restaurants and bars opened along Garibaldi Avenue. More than a dozen factories sprang up making blouses for the garment trade. Neighboring Bangor
~ Malcolm Gladwell
Louis and Regina found a tiny apartment on Eldridge Street, on Manhattan's Lower East Side, for $8 a month. Louis then took to the streets, looking for work. He saw peddlers and fruit sellers and sidewalks crammed with pushcarts. The noise and activity and energy dwarfed what he had known in the Old World. He was first overwhelmed, then invigorated. He went
~ Malcolm Gladwell
First, from this side of the twentieth century, après strip malls, fast-food franchises, glass boxes, housing projects, and other architectural gaffes, it's fun to look back on this dilemma of to-column-or-not-to-column, because honestly, the only question most Americans ask about a new building at this point is basically: Is it a soul-sucking eyesore of cheap-ass despair? It's not? Whew.
~ Sarah Vowell
the daily life of city dwellers today is technically a form of mild but persistent torture, in which victims and victimisers are equally affected. And all call it 'progress'.
~ John Anthony West
Say no to asphalt!
~ John Bytheway
There was Babylon and Nineveh; they were built of brick. Athens was gold marble columns. Rome was held up on broad arches of rubble. In Constantinople the minarets flame like great candles round the Golden Horn… Steel, glass, tile, concrete will be the materials of the skyscraper. Crammed on the narrow island the millionwindowed buildings will just glittering, pyramid on pyramid like the white cloudhead above a thunderstorm.
~ John Dos Passos
The urbanized life has lead to the destruction of the legends.
~ Orhan Pamuk
Cities don't make people poor; they attract poor people. The flow of less advantaged people into cities from Rio to Rotterdam demonstrates urban strength, not weakness.
~ Edward Glaeser
Historically, most people were far too poor to let their tastes in entertainment guide where they chose to live, and cities were hardly pleasure zones. Yet as people have become richer, they have increasingly chosen cities based on lifestyle—and the consumer city was born.
~ Edward L. Glaeser
Much like the giant sucking sound of London hoovering up the UK's talent, Chicago now takes the best and the brightest from the small towns of America and plugs them into the global economy. Chicago's success is no longer symbiotic with its rural neighbours. It comes at their expense. Like London, Chicago's erstwhile middle classes also find it increasingly hard to keep up with rising costs. As
~ Edward Luce
To the West's economic losers, cities like London and Chicago are not so much magnets as death stars.
~ Edward Luce
You have all these people in the city and everything has become centralized. If you live outside the city and you need a birth certificate or some official paper from the government, you have to travel to the city.
~ Edwidge Danticat
Se non c'e' amore, non solo inaridisce la vita delle persone, ma anche quella delle citta' ". Non mi ricordo come si espresse di preciso, ma il concetto era quello, e io lo associai alle nostre strade sporche, ai giardinetti polverosi, alla campagna scempiata dai palazzi nuovi, alla violenza in ogni casa, in ogni famiglia.
~ Elena Ferrante
A city that outdistances man's walking powers is a trap for man.
~ Arnold Toynbee