Quotes About Urbanization

When people ask me what L.A. was like in the sixties, I tell them there wasn't as much terrible stucco as there is today: no mini malls with their approximation of Spanish two-story buildings, no oversized SUVs bulging out of parking-space lines. What used to say "Spanish-style" is now something diseased looking. Nobody seems to know how to stucco anymore.

It may be too soon to tell, but extrapolating from current trends indicates that mobility will play an ever more important role in society and economics in the future than today:

Em 1948, quando começaram a demolir as casas térreas para construir os edifícios, nós, os pobres que residíamos nas habitações coletivas, fomos despejados e ficamos residindo debaixo das pontes. É por isso que eu denomino que a favela é o quarto de despejo de uma cidade. Nós, os pobres, somos os trastes velhos.

I have found by experience that they who have spent all their lives in cities, improve their talents but impair their virtues; and strengthen their minds but weaken their morals.

The chicken is the country's, but the city eats it.

The speed of change makes you wonder what will become of architecture.

The twentieth century was a horrible detour in the evolution of the human habitat. We were building more for cars' mobility than children's happiness. —Enrique Peñalosa, 2008

In a free market and in the absence of planning, developers will flatten every hillside, fill every canyon, obliterate every endangered species, and pave over every wetland they think they can make a buck on.

In the rush of today's world, and with more than half of us now living in cities, the majority of people are less and less connected with the spectacle of nature.

We don't have spittoons on street corners any more. It's no longer acceptable to spit on the street.

I was in Mexico a couple of weeks ago," Avi says. "They have plastic forests there!" "What does that mean?" "Downwind of the city, the trees sort of comb the plastic shopping bags out of the air. They get totally covered with them. The trees die because light and air can't get through to the leaves. But they remain standing, totally encased in fluttering, ragged plastic, all different colors.

Southern California doesn't know whether to bustle or just strangle itself on the spot. Not enough roads for the number of people. Fairlanes, Inc. is laying new ones all the time. Have to bulldoze lots of neighborhoods to do it, but those seventies and eighties developments exist to be bulldozed, right?

vehicles were as likely to move about on legs as wheels, so no one really cared about bumps in pavement. Modern utilities ran underground. Even had those things not been the case, the tax base wasn't there to support all those arborists and pavers. So the trees—all of them deciduous imports from the East Coast or Europe—had been doing as they pleased for decades. And what

bimbo boxes with license plates from all the Burbclaves.

Every fifth link in the Chain was public property. These tended to be parks, though some served as cultural facilities. So you were never more than two links away from green, or at least open, space. The other 576 links were privately owned, and constituted a commercial and residential real estate market that would have been easily recognizable to any pre-Zero property magnate.

We will have very smart cities by the year 2020…

fast-food places, discount stores, car dealers, and what passes for nightclubs hereabouts.

In 1800 seven out of the world's ten biggest cities had still been Asian, and Beijing had still exceeded London in size. By 1900, largely as a result of the Industrial Revolution, only one of the biggest was Asian; the rest were European or American.

by the second decade of the twentieth century the gap in living standards between London and Beijing was around six to one, compared with two to one in the eighteenth century.36

In the 1950s and '60s, America's natural resources were in bad shape. Communities were so polluted that clouds of smog lingered over cities like Los Angeles. Rivers and lakes were filled with chemicals. In my hometown of Boston, the harbor was among the nation's most polluted waterways.

The city becomes a financial battery farm and the suburbs do the same for families.

Have you ever wondered why in the last century all the great metropolises hastened to build subways?" "To solve traffic problems?" "Before there were automobiles, when there were only horse-drawn carriages? From

The great packing machine ground on remorselessly, without thinking of green fields; and the men and women and children who were part of it never saw any green thing, not even a flower. Four or five miles to the east of them lay the blue waters of Lake Michigan; but for all the good it did them it might have been as far away as the Pacific Ocean. They had only Sundays, and then they were too tired to walk. They were tied to the great packing machine, and tied to it for life.

The greater the reduction of these fossil fuel–based services, the greater the need for the labor force to leave the cities to produce food in the old ways.