Quotes About Urbanization

Los Angeles, Houston, Denver, Atlanta: those are all cities that really didn't get big, didn't hit their stride until the 20th century.

I'm in East L.A., like Mount Washington, Highland Park. There's a little strip that they're gentrifying, trying to make a hip spot, but you go there, and it's just kind of barren. Nobody hangs out anywhere in L.A. There's no loitering in L.A., so I don't know what to do with myself.

city of twenty-three million. Half of this huge number of chilangos—as the Mexico City dwellers call themselves—are classified as enduring dire poverty, many enjoying extreme wealth, and an estimated fifteen thousand children live on the street.

The earth is becoming intensely citified. "The megacity will be at the heart of twenty-first-century geography," Robert D. Kaplan writes in The Revenge of Geography.

It was soon clear as we ground through traffic that though Calexico, California, was a small town, Mexicali, on the other side of the thirty-foot fence, was a city of a million people, with an international airport, a large cathedral, a bullring, two museums, hospitals, four universities, a dental school, several public libraries, and industrial areas, sprawling in the desert of Baja

The modern human has mastered the art of building toxic homes and cities.

Between 1000 C.E. and 1945, the longest period of uninterrupted peace in Europe was a fifty-one-year stretch between the Battle of Waterloo and the Austro-Prussian War. That tranquil period came amid the industrial revolution, as millions moved from farm to city. Was it harder, for a while, to find soldiers? Or did people feel too busy to fight?

Creo que la vida tiene sentido y que todas las personas, ricas y pobres, morarán al final en la ciudad de Dios. Porque, desde luego, Manhattan se está volviendo inhabitable.

I think the wolves all died when the great forests were cut down. That howling you hear is only the Londoners.

Hadn't he spoken to the trees? Of course, the entire trailer park and its surroundings might be razed to make way for something even mortal-uglier, the living earth sleeping fitfully under concrete. He might well decide it wasn't worth the effort, or the heartbreak when such careful work was undone.

High rents had priced out the very service sector whose presence at ready hand once helped to justify urban living. For all practical purposes, affluent New Yorkers resided in a crowded, cluttered version of the countryside, where you had to drive five miles for a quart of milk. Florence

In Vancouver, in Sydney and in Orange County, we live among fluorescent stores and streets so brightly lit that you can read a book after dark; in other places across our global body, there are blackouts and curfews every night.

For almost a century since 1918, the centralised nation-state has been the world's default political form. Its various experiments in industrialisation, urbanisation, mass literacy and consumerism have brought more people into public life.

We live in a complicated, oppressive world with enormous cities and vast populations, and I try to contribute by making it more light and open and calm.

Americans were happy to buy vast quantities of relatively inexpensive Chinese manufactured goods, demand for which provided jobs for the tens of millions of Chinese who moved from poor agricultural areas to new or rapidly expanding cities.

Cities are responsible for the vast majority of the creation of the economy. They're also places into which we pour the vast majority of resources, the vast majority of energy and the places where a huge percentage of the decisions about how systems are built and how products designed, etc., happen.

Phoenix and Las Vegas have grim long-term prospects. On top of oil-and-gas problems, they will have terrible problems with water and the ability to produce food locally. I suppose it shows how delusional the public is, and how our institutional controls have decayed - for instance, lending standards.

When I first got here, Vegas still felt like a destination. Now it's become a real city.

People felt they owned the trees. Their dogs had marked them daily. Their children had used them for home plate. The trees had been there when they'd moved in, and had promised to be there when they moved out. But when the Parks Department came to cut them down, it was clear our trees were not ours but the city's. to do with as it wished.

the collapse of the housing market as it relates to an increase in suburban poverty." So there.

She is stunned that in this town there are no sidewalks to speak of, no streetlights, no public transportation, no stores for miles at at a time.

It's really kind of hard to be a suburb of nothing. If you don't have a downtown, you really don't have anything. It's hard to build a community around parking lots and subdivisions.

To me, Los Angeles was the invention of the suburb. They figured it out and perfected it and created a city that was dependent on the automobile.

The suburb in the 1950s was a bedroom community. The father worked in the city, and the mother stayed home. Now people live and work in the suburbs, and businesses have grown up or moved from cities to certain pockets of what was once the suburbs and created these places that are like cities.