Quotes About Urbanization

There are too many people for this town. - China, about Roarhaven

S'il en avait découvert le moyen, il aurait fait passer la rue au travers de sa maison.

By 1940, there were about a million cars in Los Angeles, more cars than in forty-one states.

We live today in cities and suburbs whose form and character we did not choose. They were imposed upon us, by federal policy, local zoning laws, and the demands of the automobile.

Even at relatively low population densities, sprawl tends not to pay for itself financially and consumes land at an alarming rate, while producing insurmountable traffic problems and exacerbating social inequity and isolation.

We have soon to have everywhere smoke annihilators, dust absorbers, ozonizers, sterilizers of water, air, food and clothing, and accident preventers on streets, elevated roads and in subways. It will become next to impossible to contract disease germs or get hurt in the city, and country folk will got to town to rest and get well.

In my own young black life, I have done my part to gentrify a half-dozen mixed neighborhoods ranging from Spanish Harlem to Fort Greene to the ninth arrondissement of Paris. Many of my well-educated black, Latino, Asian and Arab friends have done the same.

Taking the entire globe, if North America and Western Europe can be called the 'cities of the world', then Asia, Africa and Latin America constitute 'the rural areas of the world'.

When I look at cities now, I don't see them in the present. This is the decaying infrastructure of our existing cities. Years from now, none of this is going to be here. New cities are going to rise.

I do worry about population growth and the preservation of the green belt space but I don't think these are insurmountable problems.

I don't go to Delhi malls, because malls are the same everywhere.

The simple fact of being a human being is you migrate. Many of us move from one place to the other. But even those who don't move, and you stay in the same city, if you were born in Manhattan 70 years ago, you're born in Des Moines 70 years ago, you've lived in the same place for 70 years, the city you live in today is unrecognizable.

As drivers desert the city I find myself clinging more and more to my father's belief that a man without a car is not really a man.

You can draw any kind of picture you want on a clean slate and indulge your every whim in the wilderness in laying out a New Delhi, Canberra, or Brasilia, but when you operate in an overbuilt metropolis, you have to hack your way with a meat ax. (Robert Moses)

Thirty years ago, the average British household contained enough food to last eight days; today the average is two days. It is no exaggeration to say that London, at any time, exists only six meals away from starvation.

The massive movement of people from low-productivity rural areas to cities with private industry has spurred China's development… When Communist China was governed by socialist ideologues it was an impoverished, totalitarian police state that killed tens of millions of its own people. Now that Communist China practices crony capitalism, it is a prosperous and much more restrained police state.

When the old men kill themselves, the cities are dying.

There can be no doubt that a society rooted in the soil is more stable than one rooted in pavements.

En la historia del mundo, nunca antes los no-lugares han ocupado tanto espacio". Los

las ciudades se han convertido en el basurero de los problemas engendrados globalmente.

Yet our concern is not how to worship in the catacombs but rather how to remain human in the skyscrapers. NOTES 1 Portions of this section are based on Heschel, Man Is Not Alone (New York: Farrar, Straus, 1951).

All roads lead to Johannesburg. If you are white or if you are black they lead to Johannesburg. If the crops fail, there is work in Johannesburg. If there are taxes to be paid, there is work in Johannesburg. If the farm is too small to be divided further, some must go to Johannesburg. If there is a child to be born that must be delivered in secret, it can be delivered in Johannesburg.

Detrás de la fachada de la ciudad moderna, sigue morando el viejo mono desnudo. Sólo los nombres han cambiado: en vez de caza, decimos "trabajo"; en vez de campo de caza, "barrio comercial", en vez de cubil, "hogar", en vez de apareamiento, "matrimonio"; en vez de compañera, "esposa", etcétera.

The peace and seclusion of country life have already been largely undermined by the radio, the car, and the telephone, and by the spread of bureaucracy into almost every department of life; and now if millions of people who can no longer endure the pace and the demands of city life are moving into the country, and if entire industries are dispersed into rural areas, then the urbanization of the country will go ahead fast, and the whole basic structure of life there will be changed.