Quotes About Urbanization

Or, maybe it would be better to slam seven or eight elevated superhighways across the island, knocking down everything in the way, like Robert Moses wanted.

You wanna know what's happening to New York?" he asked. "I tell you what you do. You go to a used-magazine store, you look at the covers of science fiction magazines from the thirties. That's what's happening to New York.

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

The last free place in America is a parking spot.

As the firm grew, so did the city. It got bigger, taller, and richer; but it also grew dirtier, darker, and more dangerous. A miasma of cinder-flecked smoke blackened its streets and at times reduced visibility to the distance of a single block, especially in winter, when coal furnaces were in full roar.

No one knows who coined the term, but it fit, and the Montauk became the first building to be called a skyscraper.

Never before in civilization have such numbers of young girls been suddenly released from the protection of the home and permitted to walk unattended upon the city streets and to work under alien roofs.

Black flies, no-see-ums, deer flies, gnats and mosquitoes were instituted by the devil to force people to live in cities where he could get at them better. If it weren't for them everybody would live in the bush and he would be out of work. It was a rather successful invention.

That's Manhattan today—all the money goes up top, while the infrastructure wastes away from neglect. The famous skyline is a cheap trick now, a sleight-of-hand to draw your eye from the truth, as illusory as a bodybuilder with osteoporosis.

I get heartbroken flying into L.A. It's just this feeling of unspecific loss. Can you imagine what the San Fernando Valley was when it was all wheat fields? Can you imagine what John Steinbeck saw?

The tallest building in the world is now in Dubai, the biggest factory in the world is in China, the largest oil refinery is in India, the largest investment fund in the world is in Abu Dhabi, the largest Ferris wheel in the world is in Singapore.

As people flock to urban centers where ground space is limited, cities with green walls and roofs and skyscraper farms offer improved health and well-being, renewable resources, reliable food supply, and relief to the environment.

Ultimately we need to recognize that while humans continue to build urban landscapes, we share these spaces with others species.

When Welwyn Garden City was planned, the workers homes were placed in the east, downwind from the factories in the middle, whilst the bosses got the larger westside homes in Handside. This sort of social engineering, including the absence of a pub, would not be acceptable today.

'The Devil in the White City' - the 'White City' was the nickname for the World's Fair of 1893, the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago.

By the time I was leaving school, there were no factories. There was no industry.

The more urbanized, the more educated, and even the more enlightened the world becomes, counterintuitively, the more politically unstable it becomes, too.*42 This is what techno-optimists and those who inhabit the world of fancy corporate gatherings are prone to miss: They wrongly equate wealth creation—and unevenly distributed wealth creation at that—with political order and stability.

But the cable cars did not last long. They had disappeared from the streets of most cities by 1900 and from Chicago by 1906, and they remain to this day only in the single city of San Francisco, where they are primarily a tourist attraction.

The consequences of dependence on the horse in 1870 involved negative externalities unrecognized by GDP, including manure and urine distributed on the streets and the cost of the unlucky laborers assigned to clean up the tons of horse waste, not to mention the diversion of a substantial part of agricultural production to feed the ubiquitous horses, in 1870 numbering 8.6 million, or roughly one horse for every five people.

Naypyidaw, built almost secretly in Myanmar.11

The Aquarium is gone. Everywhere,giant finned cars nose forward like fish;a savage servilityslides by on grease.

What chance has a Saint Francis, if his Assisi is a multicultured, financial, unyieldingly secular northern city, whose lepers and other detrimentals are charges on the public purse?

City of prose and fantasy, of capitalist automation, its streets a triumph of cubism, its moral philosophy that of the dollar. New York impressed me tremendously because, more than any other city, it is the fullest expression of our modern age.

Our national flower is the concrete cloverleaf