Quotes About Urbanization

But when the social entity grows large, becomes a megalopolis, a state, a federation, then the governing machine grows remote, impersonal, even inhuman. It takes money from us for purposes we do not seem to sanction; it treats us as abstract statistics; it controls an army; it supports a police force whose function does not always appear to be protective.

As soon as anyone on Earth could see and talk to anyone else by pressing a button, most of the need for cities vanished.

In a saturated population life is always cheap.

we tear down the places where birds live, and put up places where people live, or places where people work to earn the money to pay for the places they live. We don't ask the birds for permission, nor do they complain about it. To a bird there is no tearing down or putting up.

The new American finds his challenge and his love in the traffic-choked streets, skies nested in smog, choking with the acids of industry, the screech of rubber and houses leashed in against one another while the town lets wither a time and die.

At what point does the brown cloud over an industrial city become a problem as opposed to a sky-high banner proclaiming good times? When does the ration of clear-cuts and Christmas tree farms to healthy, intact forest begin to cause aesthetic and moral discomfort, or real environmental damage?

all over the world...the past was being wiped out by condominiums.

Where to go? Where to live? And what to seek in the uproar of a Babylonized planet?

Parking was well on the way to becoming the British population's greatest spiritual need.

Town-scapes are changing. The open-plan city belongs in the past — no more ramblas, no more pedestrian precincts, no more left banks and Latin quarters. We're moving into the age of security grilles and defensible space. As for living, our surveillance cameras can do that for us. People are locking their doors and switching off their nervous systems.

Civilization is come. It has shut up a million of men within an area of four square leagues; it has stalled them in streets, houses, apartments, rooms, and chambers eight feet square; after a time it will make them shut up one upon another like the tubes of a telescope.

Concentration of wealth was moving upward in the 14th century and enlarging the proportion of the poor, while the catastrophes of the century reduced large numbers to misery and want. The poor had remained manageable as long as their minimum subsistence could be maintained by charity, but the situation changed when urban populations were swelled by the flotsam of war and plague and infused by a new aggressiveness in the plague's wake.

Roads are necessary, but the fact that we don't fully recognize that when you build a road you're doing more than building a road - you're building the future development of your city. And, that's what's never dawned on people. It still doesn't, in a way.

We can't have Harlem become one borough for the rich.

You know, the environment is fragmenting, and the environment is, in many places, absolutely hideous!

Without land, how can you have development of roads, highways, townships, etc?

Americans trash the planet not because we're evil, but because the industrial systems we've devised leave no other choice. Our ranch houses and high-rises, factories and farms, freeways and power plants were conceived before we had a clue how the planet works.

I don't mourn the old, romantic, dirty Times Square, although it was more unique.

Farmers and people who make a living from the land are finding it impossible to survive. So the first step is to get out of that place. Come to the city where there are opportunities.

The use of refined petroleum as fuel, which began in the 1850s, freed hundreds of millions of people from the toil of centuries, gave hundreds of millions more a life of ease and plenty, and, by allowing great cities to feed themselves from every corner of the world, multiplied the population of the earth fivefold.

I was very happy to be living in New York at that time, more than in the present time. Now it's all commerce.

Capital creates space-time.

The hardhearted person never sees people as a people, but rather as mere objects or as impersonal cogs in an ever-turning wheel. In the vast wheel of industry, he sees men as hands. In the massive wheel of big city life, he sees men as digits in a multitude. In the deadly wheel of army life, he sees men as numbers in a regiment. He depersonalizes life.

The storm came pretty soon, said John. They won't have got much further before it caught them. We may find them any minute. They'll have got off the ice the moment the snow began. If only they had sense, said Susan. But they haven't got any, not that sort. People oughtn't to be allowed to be brought up in towns.