Quotes About Urbanization

The places that thrive today are those with the highest velocity of ideas, the highest density of talented and creative people, and the highest rate of metabolism. "Velocity" and "density" are not words many people use when describing suburbia.

As coal replaced wood, its denser and more toxic smoke became a pestilence. Between 1591 and 1667, coal shipments into London increased from 35,000 tons to 264,000 tons; by 1700, that tonnage had almost doubled to 467,000 tons.27 An adequate supply of fossil fuel kept people warm and sustained the growth of English industry, but it also fouled the London air.

By 1914, the internal combustion engine had swept the field. The Stanley and other steamer companies built a total of only about 1,000 of their cars that year, compared with a total of 569,000 by conventional US automobile manufacturers.16 There were 1.7 million registered motor vehicles in the United States by 1914, up from 8,000 in 1900. Automobiles outnumbered horses in New York City for the first time in 1912, and the difference widened across the decade.

Setting omnibuses on rails increased the number of passengers that horses could haul and improved the ride. In 1856, when New York City's Common Council judged street-level steam locomotives to be dangerous and barred them below Forty-Second Street, horse-drawn street railways replaced them.

The real change away from horse-drawn transportation came with the advent in the late 1880s of the electric streetcar. Frank Julian Sprague, a West Point–trained electrical engineer, installed the first commercial electric streetcar system in Richmond, Virginia, in 1887.

In much of urban and Western civilization today, with no proper tragic sense of life, we try to believe that it is all upward and onward--and by ourselves. It works for so few, and it cannot serve us well in the long run--because it is not true. It is an inherently win-lose game, and more and more people find themselves on the losing side.

People actually seemed to enjoy recalling that on a Saturday afternoon forty years ago Empire Avenue was bustling with people and cars and commerce, whereas now, of course, you could strafe it with automatic weapons and not harm a soul.

Of course, there was also a computer store on Main Street, as well as two video stores and a satellite dish dealership, and just two miles away from the center of town was the very latest thing in movie multiplexes.

Suburbia: a place where they cut down trees and name streets in their memory.

Because all this stuff about military targets is absolute rubbish. There's no point in bombing German factories, because they just rebuild them. So we're targeting large areas of dense working-class housing. They can't replace the workers so fast.

Everything around me was changing so fast—my apartment block, the local shops, the alleys, the roads, the subway lines. Beijing was moving forwards like an express train, but my life was going nowhere. Okay, so I was getting lots of work, but it was all the same. Woman Waiting on the Platform, Lady in Waiting, Bored Waitress. I was only in my twenties, but I felt seventy. I had to do something, ask my brain to start working, so I could match this fast-moving city.

They used to build locomotives in Gateshead, very fine complicated powerful locomotives, but they never seem to have had time to build a town'.

Vast areas of old forest have been cut, or chained down with bulldozers, to make way for cattle ranching and urban sprawl. People have planted orchards, established urban parks, landscaped their yards with blossoming trees, and created other unintended enticements amid the cities and suburbs. 'So bats have decided that, as their native habitat is disappearing, as climate is becoming more variable, and their food source is becoming less diverse, it's easier to live in an urban area.

In America, air conditioning made possible the economic prosperity of the New South. Without it, cities like Atlanta, Houston, and New Orleans would still be sleepy-time towns.

The place where we spend most of our lives moulds our priorities and the way we perceive our surroundings. A human-engineered habitat of asphalt, concrete and glass reinforces our belief that we lie outside of and above nature, immune from uncertainty and the unexpected of the wild.

The mall owes its existence to Level II complexity: malls weren't feasible before there were cars, yet you could not predict their rise just by examining a car.

From the strictest humanitarian viewpoint, any attempt to stop the processes by which over crowded cities purge themselves is not a kindness.

The plan was to create a agrarian buffer between the rapidly enveloping towers of New York and Brooklyn.

But not for Jefferson. "I view cities as pestilent to the morals, the health, and the liberation of man

Les places sont envahies de chaises en plastique et de parasols dédiés au dieu Coca-Cola.

Cities are the abyss of the human species.

There is very little that is natural left in people when they stray from the cities. Day hiking in Gore-Tex with a bag of trail mix and a cell phone in a fanny pack and a bottle of iced chai tea clipped to your belt isn't actually natural, it's tourism, or worse, voyeurism.

the faster a society moves, the more it spreads out and the more time it must spend moving.

We build our computers the way we build our cities—over time, without a plan, on top of ruins.