Quotes About Urbanization

The nation can no longer afford to continue policies that hasten the flight of persons to the distant suburbs.

In Paris, where I live, the inner neighborhoods are only available to the white elite. The poor and dispossessed are shuffled out to suburbs and never seen.

Money and prices and markets don't give us exact information about how much our suburbs, freeways, and spandex cost. Instead, everything else is giving us accurate information: our beleaguered air and watersheds, our overworked soils, our decimated inner cities. All of these provide information our prices should be giving us but do not.

Compare today to the 1950s. At that time, a typical apartment in New York City rented for about $60 a month, or, adjusting for inflation, about $530 a month. Today you can't find a broom closet in the East Village for that amount. Even

It could be so beautiful here if the Americans themselves had not made it so ugly with their big buildings, their millions of cars, and noise.

Everywhere, giant finned cars nose forward like fish; a savage servility slides by on grease.

The modern suburb is the product of the car, the five-day week, and the "bankers' hours" of the masses.

The car has made our lives more difficult. If not for it, we would have everything we needed within walking distance.

Toshiba and Hitachi made better sets at the time, only they showed them on the Ginza in Tokyo and in the big-city department stores, making it pretty clear that farmers were not particularly welcome in such elegant surroundings. Matsushita went to the farmers and sold its televisions door-to-door, something no one in Japan had ever done before for anything more expensive than cotton pants or aprons.

Just goes to show how life leaks away when you ain't paying attention. One day you look up, look around, and the world is empty. Not empty exactly but something is wrong, there ain't no color left to life." outraged, he glared at Lucius. "Watsons long gone and Coxes moved away, Burdetts and Betheas, too. Ain't none of them good old families left. Died out or gone off to the cities, gone away like they was never here at all.

Gentrification, at its deepest level, is really about reorienting the purpose of cities away from being spaces that provide for the poor and middle classes and toward being spaces that generate capital for the rich.

Though the governments of Sweden, Hong Kong, and Germany are by no means anticapitalist, they have accepted a truth that few in the United States are willing to grapple with: unregulated capitalism cannot provide a complete solution to the housing question.

Nothing is so alien, so bleak and unfriendly, as the strip of gas stations—cut-rate gas stations—and motels on the rim of your own city. You fail to recognize it. And at the same time, you have to clasp it to your bosom. Not just for one night, but as long as you intend to live where you live.

If this place were closer to Terra there'd be empty beer cans and plastic plates strewn around. The trees would be gone. There'd be old jet motors in the water. The beaches would stink to high heaven. Terran Development would have a couple of million little plastic houses set up everywhere.

He built, and the more he built the more he enjoyed building. By now the city was over eighty miles deep and five miles in diameter. The whole island had been converted into a single vast city that honeycombed and interlaced farther each day. Eventually it would reach the land beyond the ocean; then the work would begin in earnest.

Life in Anaheim, California, was a commercial for itself, endlessly replayed. Nothing changed; it just spread out farther and farther in the form of neon ooze. What there was always more of had been congealed into permanence long ago, as if the automatic factory that cranked out these objects had jammed in the on position. How the land became plastic, he thought, remembering the fairy tale How the Sea Became Salt.

percent; in Detroit it reached 50 percent. There

Already in antiquity, Jews had developed a romance with cities, whose size offered them a range of religious, economic, and social opportunities that smaller rural locales did not. In the Middle Ages, Jews played an important role as agents sent by host

As a result, by the early twentieth century, large Jewish concentrations could be found in cities across the globe, including Baghdad (one-third of the population), Salonika (50 percent), Warsaw, ?ód?, Budapest, Vienna, Berlin, Paris, London, New York, and Buenos Aires. Indeed, 25 percent of the world's Jewish population lived in a mere fourteen

Siempre quiso ver en la excitada modernidad de aquellos años en Madrid la explosión de un montón de reprimidos llegados de provincias que en la capital podían arrancase la máscara sin que sus padres, ni sus parientes, ni sus vecinos del pueblo pudieran verlos. El anonimato de la gran ciudad es lo único que nos permitió ser libres.

Land acquisition is a problem in Kerala because the available land is limited.

I looked around, and I saw cottages everywhere. I thought it was time they lived in apartments.

We are in danger of making our cities places where business goes on but where life, in its real sense, is lost.

Our hands are hot and raw with the stones we have laid, We have built a tower of stone high into the sky, We have built a city of towers.