Quotes About Urbanization

Quella che lei chiama Bologna, è un cosa grande, che va da Parma fino a Cattolica [...] dove davvero la gente vive a Modena, lavora a Bologna e la sera va a ballare a Rimini [...] è una strana metropoli [...] che s'allarga a macchia d'olio tra il mare e gli Appennini.

Statt Bündel mit ihren wenigen Habseligkeiten trugen die Menschen jetzt Pappbecher mit Starbucks-Kaffee in der einen und Aktenzeichen in der anderen Hand.

San Francisco is the microcosm for what's happening all over the world.

I moved away when I was young, when I was about 19. I'd literally come from an area with dirt roads and stuff like that, right to the centre of a city of about five million people. It's been great. I'm based in New York, and every day, it's amazing.

In the developing world, most people don't yet live in big well-run cities. Given the chance to move to one, hundreds of millions of people would go there to get a job, get an education for their children, and live in a place that is clean, safe, and healthy.

The signs of older times could still be seen on the facades of sealed buildings: Gap, Starbucks, Abercrombie & Fitch - merchants that had sold things people didn't necessarily need but always wanted.

We need to understand how the dynamics of innovation, technological advances, urbanization, financial markets, social networks, and population dynamics are interconnected and how their evolving interrelationships fuel growth and societal change—and, as manifestations of human endeavors, how they are all integrated into a holistic interacting systemic framework . . . and whether such a dynamically evolving system is ultimately sustainable.

So in marked contrast to infrastructure, which scales sublinearly with population size, socioeconomic quantities—the very essence of a city—scale superlinearly, thereby manifesting systematic increasing returns to scale.

In 2006 the planet crossed a remarkable historical threshold, with more than half of the world's population residing in urban centers, compared with just 15 percent a hundred years ago and still only 30 percent by 1950.

lawyers' offices. This scales superlinearly with an exponent close to the canonical 1.15, meaning that there are systematically more lawyers per capita in larger cities.

can any of this be sustainable?

I hated the garb, I hated the surroundings—the big hospital at the back, and that reek of cruelty, drunkenness, and filth, the cattle-market—where every other building was either a slaughter-house, a gin-palace, or a pawnbroker's shop, more than all I hated the gloomy jail opposite, where they sometimes hanged a man in public on a Monday morning.

The troubles of modern life come from being divorced from nature.

All the land surface of Trantor, 75,000,000 square miles in extent, was a single city. The population, at its height, was well in excess of forty billions.

Some day, with all that the Cities could do, the available calories per person would simply fall below basic subsistence level.

un estropicio de obreros haciendo hoyos en el pavimento, quitando árboles para pones postes, quitando postes para poner edificios, quitando edificios para plantar árboles.

the capital city had grown in alarming fashion: cardboard walls, tin roofs, people in rags clearly visible along the road from the airport. Since this made a very bad impression on visitors, for a long time the solution was to put up walls to hide them. As one politician said, 'Where there is poverty, hide it.

We're becoming a planet of a thousand new major cities. The economy of the 21st century is a city-building economy. It's within our power to make it a carbon zero one, too; and to be blunt, civilization depends on our success.

The first cities to create friction-free enterprise zones will get a lot of entrepreneurial traction.

Without a doubt, at the end of the day, Neom will be floated in the markets. The first zone floated in the public markets. It's as if you float the city of New York.

Until the Nineteen-Eighties, when Deng Xiaoping designated the area as China's first special economic zone, Shenzhen had been a tiny fishing village. Suddenly, eleven million people appeared, seemingly out of nowhere; factories sprang up, often housed in hastily constructed tower blocks.

The United States was born in the country and moved to the city in the nineteenth century.

If I wrote in Jacob Riis' time, I'd be writing about teeming slums in our cities and kids dying of tuberculosis or outhouses in Philadelphia or kids losing their toes because they were living in homes without heat. He took on a battle in 'The Battle with the Slums' - and we won.

I have a lot of land. I bought it because I had a very strong feeling. I was in my early twenties, and I had grown up in Los Angeles and had seen that city slide off into the sea from the city I knew as a little kid. It lost its identity - suddenly there was cement everywhere and the green was gone and the air was bad - and I wanted out.