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Quotes About Urbanization

Until almost the 20th century, Central Park was home to a shepherd and a flock of 200 sheep.
~ Bill Bryson
Perhaps it would be an idea to require developers to live on their own estates for five years, as a demonstration of their superb liveability. It's just a thought. I
~ Bill Bryson
Jane Jacobs cites it in her landmark work of 1969, The Economy of Cities)
~ Bill Bryson
Cities need to change the way they grow. Urban areas are home to more than half the people on earth—a proportion that will rise in the years ahead—and they're responsible for more than three-quarters of the world's economy. As they expand, many of the world's fast-growing cities end up building over floodplains, forests, and wetlands that could absorb rising waters during a storm or hold reservoirs of water during a drought.
~ Bill Gates
And I said to myself, what connection shall there be between Power in Manchester and Nature in America?
~ Sven Beckert
Humans turn the places they live into great crowded piles of mud and stone, like the nests termites build--but what happens when in all the world there are only termite hills left but no bush?
~ Tad Williams
It forgot its wild roots Its earth-song In cement and the drum-song of looms.
~ Ted Hughes
CIVILIZATION is the art of living in towns of such size that everyone does not know everyone else.
~ Julian Jaynes
In her mind the U.S. was nothing more and nothing less than a país overrun by gangsters, putas, and no-accounts. Its cities swarmed with machines and industry, as thick with sinvergüencería as Santo Domingo was with heat, a cuco shod in iron, exhaling fumes, with the glittering promise of coin deep in the cold lightless shaft of its eyes.
~ Junot Diaz
The population of Manhattan jumped from about twenty-five thousand in 1780, when Astor arrived there, to about five hundred thousand in 1848, the year he died.
~ Justin Kaplan
In 1828 Broadway, the city's spinal thoroughfare, ended at Tenth Street, according to the grid plan for the city streets. Forty years later Broadway extended northward to 155th Street and beyond that into the Bronx. Only the three rivers that enclosed Manhattan could limit its horizontal growth.
~ Justin Kaplan
If we invest in logistic centers, improve on infrastructure and create a facilitative environment, we can easily turn Dar es Salaam into another Dubai of its kind.
~ Jakaya Kikwete
London is becoming more of a business than a place for families. You can't live here. We're not investing in the future.
~ Michail Antonio
Because there are a lot of big cities in the world, people who live in cities have become more isolated than ever.
~ Toyo Ito
Build the roads and the jobs follow.
~ Tommy Thompson
By the end of that century, Europe saw an enormous shift as peasants left the countryside, cities expanded, and an industrial working class was formed.1 The German social theorist Ferdinand Tönnies described this as the shift from Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft, or what is typically translated in English as "community" and "society."2
~ Francis Fukuyama
We can't return to this preindustrial way of life. We live in societies of a mind-boggling scale and complexity that demand quite a different organization than humans ever enjoyed in their state of nature. Yet, even though we live in cities and are surrounded by cars and computers, we remain essentially the same animals with the same psychological wants and needs.
~ Frans de Waal
Cities balanced on the edge of sustainability, always one step from starvation. When you pressed so many people together, their cultures, ideas, and stenches rubbed off on one another. The result wasn't civilization. It was contained chaos, pressurized, bottled up so it couldn't escape.
~ Brandon Sanderson
We pile one skyscraper next to another, so the squirrels could leap from one top to the next, and pretty soon we're living in the bottom of a well. Psychologically you feel uneasy. Feel in shadow. Something is threatening you. You're trapped inside something that is beyond the human scale, and none of the things we need, like light and air and the sun on our skins is any longer present.
~ Brendan Gill
Visata susitrauk?, liko tik miesto kvartalo dydžio, joje neb?ra žvaigždži?, neb?ra medži?, neb?ra upi?. Žmon?s, kurie ?ia gyvena, yra mir?. Jie dirba k?des, ant kuri? kiti žmon?s s?di sapnuose.
~ Henry Miller
You wouldn't suspect that there was such a thing as a soul if you went to Detroit. Everything is too new, too slick, too bright, too ruthless. Souls don't grow in factories. Souls are killed in factories—even the niggardly ones. Detroit can do in a week for the white man what the South couldn't do in a hundred years to the Negro.
~ Henry Miller
No stone was laid upon· another with love or reverence; no street was laid for dance or joy. One thing has been added to another in a mad scramble to fill the belly, and the streets smell of empty bellies and full bellies and bellies half full. The streets smell of a hunger which has nothing to do with love; they smell of thc belly which is insatiable and of the creations of the cmpty helly which are null and void.
~ Henry Miller
over the dull cranium of Zola the chimneys are belching pure coke, while the Madonna of Sandwiches listens with cabbage ears to the bubbling of the gas tanks, those beautiful bloated toads which squat by the roadside.
~ Henry Miller
Twenty years ago I wanted to move to a nice place so our Charley would grow up a nice boy and learn a profession. But instead we live in a jungle, so he can only be a wild animal. D'you think I picked the East Side like Columbus picked America?
~ Abraham Polonsky