Quotes About Urbanization

Down the street, the trees are imprisoned equidistantly in square plots of dirt. Everything else is concrete. Lourdes remembers reading somewhere about how Dutch elm disease wiped out the entire species on the East Coast except for a lone tree in Manhattan surrounded by concrete. Is this, she wonders, how we'll all survive?

The bad news in our most cosmopolitan and vibrant cities is that many middle-class people can no longer afford to live in 'middle-class' school districts.

One of Dickens' biggest influences was the growth of London as a Victorian city, and the extremes being created as it expanded.

Sunset Point was one of those boils festering on the face of the planet: a subdivision.

He was thinking that the cities, perhaps, needed to look into the future even more than the country did. They should look ahead for forty, eighty, one hundred and sixty years, to a strong and healthy plain of population - or to an overworked, weakened, underfed, and infertile desert.

Suburbia: where they tear out the trees & then name streets after them

Into this neutral air Where blind skyscrapers use Their full strength of Collective Man.

We build our computer (systems) the way we build our cities: over time, without a plan, on top of ruins

It might have been really cool back in the '50s when it was less populated but I don't know.

Urbanization in India is a slow but sure death for her villages and villagers.

Most of the people I write about have been ambitious outlanders who have been attracted to New York from other parts of the world.

But as urban life accelerated and expanded, it disrupted the old sense of order. This new way of living generated unprecedented social and political conflict and an increase in violence and aggression.

While some distance from the wide sea, smoke rises from factories and Karl Marx does his usual work.

These cities grew in approximately the same places as our cities do now, however different the shape of the continents was. There was even a New York that in some way resembled the New York familiar to all of you, but was much newer, or, rather, more awash with new products, new toothbrushes, a New York with its own Manhattan that stretched out dense with skyscrapers gleaming like the nylon bristles of a brand-new toothbrush.

It's all very well for me to tell myself there are no provincial cities any more and perhaps there never were any: all places communicate instantly with all other places, a sense of isolation is felt only during the trip between one place and the other, that is, when you are in no place.

The future is going to be boring. The suburbanisation of the planet will continue, and the suburbanisation of the soul will follow soon after.

Growing up I was enthralled by the night sky. But now most of us can see only a few faint stars at night, the ones bright enough to make it through the domes of light that enclose our metropolises. For all of human history, the night sky told stories, delineated time, and guided voyagers. Now 30 percent of the people on the planet can't even see the Milky Way from their homes. And in the United States, 80 percent of us can't.

Then came the Industrial Revolution, first in Britain, then in Western Europe and North America. Men and women flocked from the countryside to towns to satisfy factories' growing demand for labor.

In Toledo, people grow out. Out to the suburbs. Out to the parts of America where the economy is more vigorous. And all too often, out to 48-inch waistbands.

This is going to make me sound ancient, but I remember Juhu Beach when there weren't any buildings on it. You'd go through countryside and arrive at this amazing beach. I remember driving from Delhi to the Qutab Minar through countryside. Mehrauli was a little village - that's all gone.

Rules about public sanitation are a simple and familiar example. Without them, a city can't be a healthy place to live; but these rules don't just happen. The rules for a city are different from the ones for a village, but as a village slowly gets bigger, a city may be stuck with the rules of the village.

We have to convince our youth that the nation does not need the white-collared class only. We have to find work for the rural young people in the village itself and stop the exodus to the cities.

Hong Kong never had prestige. It's gone from fishing village to where it is today.

Chennai has changed a lot. I knew Adyar as a village which has now become the heart of the metropolis. But my heart still beats for the old Madras.