Urbanization Quotes

“Urbanization is not about simply increasing the number of urban residents or expanding the area of cities. More importantly, it's about a complete change from rural to urban style in terms of industry structure, employment, living environment and social security.”

“Climate change. Urbanization. Biotechnology. Those three narratives, still taking shape, are developing a long arc likely to dominate this century.”

“Development of states, urbanization, mechanization and industrialisation have all brought phenomenal strides to growth and prosperity of economies and their populace. They have also brought with them the insatiable need for energy resources with the related offspring of instability, conflict, war and corruption.”

“Great things are done when men and mountains meet; This is not done by jostling in the street. -William BlakeThis admirable couplet should be posted in conspicuous places all over England. The truth it embodies is threatened by two parties of opinion: on the one hand by those who hold it as a sin against nature to try and control the increase of population in any way and on the other by those who believe in 'growth', the pursuit at all costs of a standard of living which entails more and more industrialization and urbanization. If the believers in nature have their way, England will in the end be so full of people that they will be jostling each other even on mountains: if the believers in 'growth' have their way, the whole country will be covered with streets and we shall hardly be aware that mountains exist.”

“Throughout the history of the Kensington Rune Stone in the twentiethcentury, memories of an ancient battle were repeatedly evoked toaddress the concerns about more recent battles. The skræling enduredas a convenient symbol of the threats posed by secularization, urbanization,and diversification. As sociologist Richard K. Fenn observes,“Any society is a reservoir of old longings and ancient hatreds. Theseneed to be understood, addressed, resolved and transcended if a societyis to have a future that is different from its past.” Furthermore, whena society does not adequately confront its past, it perpetually finds “anew target that resembles but also differs from the source of originalconflict.” If Fenn is correct, old enemies will continue to emerge inthe face of new enemies unless Minnesotans can understand, address,resolve, and transcend the state’s original sin: the unjust treatment ofthe region’s first inhabitants.”

“Ecology is beginning to slowly shift focus with tentative explorations of what the world would look like if process, rather than matter were the basis for reality What if we defined a species in terms of its life processes? We might seriously doubt whether the California condor or the tall grass prairie can be 'saved' or even 'restored.' Perhaps we can re-create some local conditions that foster a few nests of condors or a few acres of prairie. But the life process of the condor ended with the urbanization of the California foothills and the living ebb and flow of the tall grass prairies died with the plowing of the Great Plains. What if we suggested that a thing is what it does? In this light, the Rocky Mountain locust was a immense aperiodic energy flow that linked life processes on a continental scale.This notion of life-as-process might seem unusual in a society in which material existence is primary. But such a perception informs our deepest understanding of life. Indeed, life-as-process underlies our notion of euthanasia. When loved ones are simply bodies, devoid of the capacity to care, respond, or relate again a away that we can recognize as being "them," we understand that they are gone even before they are dead.”

“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”

“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.”