Quotes About Urbanization

By the 1890s, New York was catching up with Chicago, and true skyscrapers were being erected. The city had the twenty-four-story St. Paul Building on Broadway at Fulton Street, and the twenty-six-story American Surety Building at 100 Broadway (the Bank of Tokyo Building in 1995, and still standing). By the end of the 1890s, New York City had the tallest skyscraper in the world, the now largely ignored Park Row Building at 15 Park Row—a 29-story building

Our building practices for the past century have been plain stupid - especially the glorification of the single-family house in a subdivision, at the expense of all other typologies and arrangements.

It was divine nature which gave us the country, and man's skill that built the cities.

The victims of highway building tended to be overwhelmingly poor and black.

Moscow has changed. I was here in 1982, during the Brezhnev twilight, and things are better now. For instance, they've got litter. In 1982 there was nothing to litter with.

This country is so urbanized we think low-fat milk comes from cows on Nutri/System weight-loss plans.

The car is the cigarette of the future.

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

Our national flower is the concrete cloverleaf.

The car has become the carapace, the protective and aggressive shell, of urban and suburban man.

Puesto que la mayoría de la gente no tiene que enfrentarse a tales decisiones para ganarse el sustento, las visiones animistas del mundo siguen siendo más atrayentes que las nociones contrarias a ella, incluso en civilizaciones urbanas altamente tecnificadas.

Very few towns or cities are founded at a stroke, by a single individual. They are usually the product of gradual changes in population, in patterns of settlement, social organisation and sense of identity. Most 'foundations' are retrospective constructions, projecting back into the distant past a microcosm, or imagined primitive version, of the later city.

La pression de la ville : de toutes parts. Les maisons ne sont pas là pour qu'on y demeure, mais pour qu'il y ait des rues et, dans les rues, le mouvement incessant de la ville.

The glitz and glamour of the megapolis and modern times had become the golden calves that were being worshipped throughout the planet.

The fourth and final explanation for the rich biodiversity of cities is the sheer diversity of habitat patches.

In other words, Passer domesticus has become an urban species because it was already adapted to a lifestyle that, purely by accident, prepared it for the niches that we have created in cities. The urban environment offers conditions that happen to resemble one or more aspects of a species' way of living in pre-urban times. And it is those species that are pre-adapted to the novel niches in the city. They are the first to move in.

Cities are the world's new vacant niches, and the blackbird is one species that has embarked on the road toward speciating to maximize its profits from this horn of plenty,

What all this means is that the ecosystems of cities around the world are growing more and more alike; their communities of plants and animals, fungi, single-celled organisms, and viruses are slowly inching toward a single globalized, multi-purpose urban biodiversity. And even if the exact species across cities may not be identical, you will find similar species playing similar roles.

o espaço nunca é tão urbanizado que não se acabe por descobrir um local imprevisto onde o tempo se liberta dos constrangimentos normais

il y a dans les villes deux fonctions, l'une primaire d'habitation, l'autre secondaire de circulation, et on voit aujourd'hui partout l'habitation méprisée, sacrifiée à la circulation, de telle sorte que nos villes, privées d'arbres, de fontaines, de marchés, de berges, pour être de plus en plus «circulables», deviennent de moins en moins habitables.

South Central Los Angeles, for example, is a data and media black hole, without local cable programming or links to major data systems. Just as it became a housing-and-jobs ghetto in the postwar period, it is now evolving into an off-net electronic ghetto.

Los Angeles, it should be understood, is not a mere city. On the contrary, it is, and has been since 1888, a commodity; something to be advertised and sold to the people of the United States like automobiles, cigarettes and mouth wash. Morrow Mayo

Thus, the cities of the future, rather than being made out of glass and steel as envisioned by earlier generations of urbanists, are instead largely constructed out of crude brick, straw, recycled plastic, cement blocks, and scrap wood. Instead of cities of light soaring toward heaven, much of the twenty-first-century urban world squats in squalor, surrounded by pollution, excrement, and decay.

we live in the age of the city. The city is everything to us it consumes us and for that reason we glorify it" -Onookome Okome