Urbanization Quotes

“There are eyes everywhere. No blind spot left. What shall we dream of when everything becomes visible? We'll dream of being blind.”
― Paul Virilio

“How reprehensible it is when those blessed with commodities insist on ignoring the poor. Better to torment them, force them into indentured servitude, inflict compulsion and blows—this at least produces a connection, fury and a pounding heart, and these too constitute a form of relationship. But to cower in elegant homes behind golden garden gates, fearful lest the breath of warm humankind touch you, unable to indulge in extravagances for fear they might be glimpsed by the embittered oppressed, to oppress and yet lack the courage to show yourself as an oppressor, even to fear the ones you are oppressing, feeling ill at ease in your own wealth and begrudging others their ease, to resort to disagreeable weapons that require neither true audacity nor manly courage, to have money, but only money, without splendor: That’s what things look like in our cities at present”
― Robert Walser, The Tanners

“The City was the acme of efficiency, but it made demands of its inhabitants. It asked them to live in a tight routine and order their lives under a strict and scientific control.”
― Isaac Asimov, The Caves of Steel

“Christianity revitalized life in Greco-Roman cities by providing new norms and new kinds of social relationships able to cope with many urgent urban problems. To cities filled with the homeless and the impoverished, Christianity offered charity as well as hope. To cities filled with newcomers and strangers, Christianity offered an immediate basis for attachments. To cities filled with orphans and widows, Christianity provided a new and expanded sense of family. To cities torn by violent ethnic strife, Christianity offered a new basis for social solidarity. And to cities faced with epidemics, fires, and earthquakes, Christianity offered effective nursing services.”
― Rodney Stark

“The city had grown, implacably, spreading its concrete and alloy fingers wider every day over the dark and feral country. Nothing could stop it. Mountains were stamped flat. Rivers were dammed off or drained or put elsewhere. The marshes were filled. The animals shot from the trees and then the trees cut down. And the big gray machines moved forward, gobbling up the jungle with their iron teeth, chewing it clean of its life and all its living things.
Until it was no more.
Leveled, smoothed as a highway is smoothed, its centuries choked beneath millions and millions of tons of hardened stone.
The birth of a city... It had become the death of a world.”
― Charles Beaumont, Perchance to Dream: Selected Stories

“And the space created by capital is a very seductive space indeed— provided you have the money.”
― Alessandro Busà, The Creative Destruction of New York City: Engineering the City for the Elite

“There was no doubt about it: the City was the culmination of man’s mastery over the environment. Not space travel, not the fifty colonized worlds that were now so haughtily independent, but the City.”
― Isaac Asimov, The Caves of Steel

“Over a decade of citywide rezonings, land speculations, and corporate bidding wars for available commercial space has produced a Darwinian habitat where corporate retail proliferates, and where mom-and-pops have become an endangered species.”
― Alessandro Busà, The Creative Destruction of New York City: Engineering the City for the Elite

“Rent goes up and up and up. The family-owned boedgas keep on closing, replaced by artisanal cupcake shops and overpriced organic grocery stores whose customers hurry past the homeless and the flowers laid on street corners for Black boys shot by the cops. Some people go their whole lives in New York shutting their eyes to the fact that this city was built for the people who took this land from the Lenape.”
― Zeyn Joukhadar, The Thirty Names of Night

“endless strings of people driven into the City to be saved by force and to be whipped into happiness”
― Evgeniij Zamjatin, We

“Cutting trees is not like cutting your nails but like cutting your breathe”
― Sir P.S. Jagadeesh Kumar

“Urban Americans lost the tactile experience of raising food. They neither heard the squeals, nor smelled he offal, nor saw the blood, nor tasted the rage when predators swallowed a cherished investment.”
― Jon T. Coleman, Vicious: Wolves and Men in America

“Gone are the days when roads are built for show off and political cheap points. All our infrastructural development will be targeted at economic revitalisation.”
― Seyi Makinde

“I promised 'omituntun', it is time to experience 'omituntun'. I will not rest until good jobs, thriving businesses and quality education are the standard in Oyo State. Together we can do this!”
― Seyi Makinde

“Laissée à elle-même, la bagnole finit par se détruire. Le temps que sa rapidité nous donne, elle nous le prend aussitôt pour nous expédier ailleurs. Comme le téléphone ou l'avion, pour une corvée qu'elle nous supprime, elle nous en invente mille. Elle nous mène à la campagne, mais bientôt, l'auto aidant, nous ne trouverons plus à cent kilomètres de voiture la baignade ou la verdure qui nous attendaient à cinq minutes de marche.”
― Bernard Charbonneau, L'Hommauto

“we can probably, as a nation, loose all our birds, and there is an increasing number of people who wouldn’t even notice. as we become more urban, we’re loosing out attachment”
― George Monbiot, Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea and Human Life

“we can probably, as a nation, loose all our birds, and there is an increasing number of people who wouldn’t even notice. as we become more urban, we’re loosing our attachment”
― George Monbiot, Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea and Human Life

“English:" Laws designed for the big city destroy the rural areas. "

Česky: „Zákony navržené pro velkoměsto likvidují venkov.”
― Sebastián Wortys