“
These letters are all I have left.
26 friends to tell my stories to.
26 letters are all I need. I can stitch them together to create oceans and ecosystems. I can fit them together to form planets and solar systems. I can use letters to construct skyscrapers and metropolitan cities populated by people, places, things, and ideas that are more real to me than these 4 walls.
I need nothing but letters to live. Without them I would not exist.
Because these words I write down are the only proof I have that I’m still alive.
”
”
Tahereh Mafi (Destroy Me (Shatter Me, #1.5))
“
From space, astronauts can see people making love as a tiny speck of light. Not light, exactly, but a glow that could be confused for light - a coital radiance that takes generations to pour like honey through the darkness to the astronaut's eyes.
In about one and a half centuries - after the lovers who made the glow will have long since been laid permanently on their backs - the metropolitan cities will be seen from space. They will glow all year. Smaller cities will also be seen, but with great difficulty. Towns will be virtually impossible to spot. Individual couples invisible.
”
”
Jonathan Safran Foer (Everything Is Illuminated)
“
26 letters are all I need. I can stitch them together to create oceans and ecosystems. I can fit them together to form planets and solar systems. I can use letters to construct skyscrapers and metropolitan cities populated by people, places, things, and ideas that are more real to me than these 4 walls
”
”
Tahereh Mafi (Destroy Me (Shatter Me, #1.5))
“
Hi. I’m Spider Jerusalem. I smoke. I take drugs. I drink. I wash every six weeks. I masturbate constantly and fling my steaming poison semen down from my window into your hair and food. I’m a rich and respected columnist for a major metropolitan newspaper. I live with two beautiful women in the city’s most expensive and select community. Being a bastard works.
”
”
Warren Ellis (Transmetropolitan, Vol. 4: The New Scum)
“
Sometimes she’d just walk around the city alone. Watch the people, smell the food, the bus exhaust, the smoke coming up through the grating. She’d feel protected somehow, found a sense of belonging in the hectic sprawl. And the next minute she’d feel like the one who couldn’t break the code, hit the right stride, catch the wave. Potholes and traffic and bums, oh my. With all the honking and the hum of movement, the living, breathing blur of noise gently pressing in on her, the great purr of the Metropolitan Cat turning into a dull roar. She’d feel so silent on the inside, her head as quiet as a stretch of sand, a cathedral silently worshipping the life that was all around her, storing it up for later when she needed some 'too much' to draw upon.
”
”
Carrie Fisher (Surrender the Pink)
“
This metropolitan world, then, is a world where flesh and blood is less real than paper and ink and celluloid. It is a world where the great masses of people, unable to have direct contact with more satisfying means of living, take life vicariously, as readers, spectators, passive observers: a world where people watch shadow-heroes and heroines in order to forget their own clumsiness or coldness in love, where they behold brutal men crushing out life in a strike riot, a wrestling ring or a military assault, while they lack the nerve even to resist the petty tyranny of their immediate boss: where they hysterically cheer the flag of their political state, and in their neighborhood, their trades union, their church, fail to perform the most elementary duties of citizenship.
Living thus, year in and year out, at second hand, remote from the nature that is outside them and no less remote from the nature within, handicapped as lovers and as parents by the routine of the metropolis and by the constant specter of insecurity and death that hovers over its bold towers and shadowed streets - living thus the mass of inhabitants remain in a state bordering on the pathological. They become victims of phantasms, fears, obsessions, which bind them to ancestral patterns of behavior.
”
”
Lewis Mumford (The Culture of Cities (Book 2))
“
But that is who we are, that is where we come from. We are the offspring of metropolitan annihilation and destruction, of the war of all against all, of the conflict of each individual with every other individual, of a system governed by fear, of the compulsion to produce, of the profit of one to the detriment of others, of the division of people into men and women, young and old, sick and healthy, foreigners and Germans, and of the struggle for prestige. Where do we come from? From isolation in individual row-houses, from the suburban concrete cities, from prison cells, from the asylums and special units, from media brainwashing, from consumerism, from corporal punishment, from the ideology of nonviolence, from depression, from illness, from degradation, from humiliation, from the debasement of human beings, from all the people exploited by imperialism.
”
”
Ulrike Marie Meinhof
“
At intersections and crowded areas between sedans and trucks the gutter reflected the bitter pastels of metropolitan neon, rainbows hacked down to earth and dirt.
”
”
Colson Whitehead (The Intuitionist)
“
This is not mere sentimentality. The triumph of twentieth-century metropolitan life is, in a real sense, the triumph of one image over the other: the dark ritual of deadly epidemics replaced by the convivial exchanges of strangers from different backgrounds sharing ideas on the sidewalk.
”
”
Steven Johnson (The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic--and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World)
“
Therefore, she decided that her leaving home would not be just running from somewhere but would be running to somewhere. To a large place, a comfortable place, an indoor place, and preferably a beautiful place. And that’s why she decided upon the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.
”
”
E.L. Konigsburg (From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs Basil E. Frankweiler)
“
Too often the survivor is seen by [himself or] herself and others as "nuts," "crazy," or "weird." Unless her responses are understood within the context of trauma. A traumatic stress reaction consists of *natural* emotions and behaviors in response to a catastrophe, its immediate aftermath, or memories of it. These reactions can occur anytime after the trauma, even decades later. The coping strategies that victims use can be understood only within the context of the abuse of a child. The importance of context was made very clear many years ago when I was visiting the home of a Holocaust survivor. The woman's home was within the city limits of a large metropolitan area. Every time a police or ambulance siren sounded, she became terrified and ran and hid in a closet or under the bed. To put yourself in a closet at the sound of a far-off siren is strange behavior indeed—outside of the context of possibly being sent to a death camp. Within that context, it makes perfect sense. Unless we as therapists have a good grasp of the context of trauma, we run the risk of misunderstanding the symptoms our clients present and, hence, responding inappropriately or in damaging ways.
”
”
Diane Langberg (Counseling Survivors of Sexual Abuse (AACC Counseling Library))
“
Our difficulty is no longer how to contain people densely in metropolitan areas and avoid the ravages of disease, bad sanitation and child labor. To go on thinking in these terms is anachronistic. Our difficulty today is rather how to contain people in metropolitan areas and avoid the ravages of apathetic and helpless neighborhoods.
”
”
Jane Jacobs (The Death and Life of Great American Cities)
“
We live, all of us, in sprung rhythm. Even in cities, folk stir without knowing it to the surge in the blood that is the surge and urgency of season. In being born, we have taken seisin of the natural world, and as ever, it is the land which owns us, not we, the land. Even in the countryside, we dwell suspended between the rhythms of earth and season, weather and sky, and those imposed by metropolitan clocks, at home and abroad.
When does the year begin? No; ask rather, When does it not? For us – all of us – as much as for Mr Eliot, midwinter spring is its own season; for all of us, if we but see it, our world is as full of time-coulisses as was Thomas Mann’s.
Countrymen know this, with the instinct they share with their beasts. Writers want to know it also, and to articulate what the countryman knows and cannot, perhaps, express to those who sense but do not know, immured in sad conurbations, rootless amidst Betjeman’s frightful vision of soot and stone, worker’s flats and communal canteens, where it is the boast of pride that a man doesn’t let the grass grow under his feet.
As both countryman and writer, I have a curious relationship to time.
”
”
G.M.W. Wemyss
“
Charlie Black: Fourierism was tried in the late nineteenth century… and it failed. Wasn’t Brook Farm Fourierist? It failed.
Tom Townsend: That’s debatable.
Charlie Black: Whether Brook Farm failed?
Tom Townsend: That it ceased to exist, I’ll grant you, but whether or not it failed cannot be definitively said.
Charlie Black: Well, for me, ceasing to exist is — is failure. I mean, that’s pretty definitive.
Tom Townsend: Well, everyone ceases to exist. Doesn’t mean everyone’s a failure.
”
”
Whit Stillman (Barcelona and Metropolitan: Tales of Two Cities (2 Screenplays))
“
If we're going to survive as a planet with more than 6 billion people without destroying the complex balance of our natural ecosystems, the best way to do it is to crowd as many of those humans into metropolitan spaces and return the rest of the planet to Mother Nature.
”
”
Steven Johnson (The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic—and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World)
“
During the school year, I practically lived in Dongguk’s modern, glass-walled library, with its stacks of tantalizing books and its high-speed Internet access. It became my playground, my dining room, and sometimes my bedroom. I liked the library best late at night, when there were fewer students around to distract me. When I needed a break, I took a walk out to a small garden that had a bench overlooking the city. I often bought a small coffee from a vending machine for a few cents and just sat there for a while, staring into the sea of lights that was metropolitan Seoul. Sometimes I wondered how there could be so many lights in this place when, just thirty-five miles north of here, a whole country was shrouded in darkness. Even in the small hours of the morning, the city was alive with flashing signs and blinking transmission towers and busy roadways with headlights traveling along like bright cells pumping through blood vessels. Everything was so connected, and yet so remote. I would wonder: Where is my place out there? Was I a North Korean or a South Korean? Was I neither?
”
”
Yeonmi Park (In Order to Live: A North Korean Girl's Journey to Freedom)
“
If you visit London, you’ll occasionally cross paths with young men (and less often women) on motor scooters, blithely darting in and out of traffic while studying maps affixed to their handlebars. These studious cyclists are training to become London cabdrivers. Before they can receive accreditation from London’s Public Carriage Office, cabbies-in-training must spend two to four years memorizing the locations and traffic patterns of all 25,000 streets in the vast and vastly confusing city, as well as the locations of 1,400 landmarks. Their training culminates in an infamously daunting exam called “the Knowledge,” in which they not only have to plot the shortest route between any two points in the metropolitan area, but also name important places of interest along the way. Only about three out of ten people who train for the Knowledge obtain certification.
”
”
Joshua Foer (Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything)
“
The first black borough presidents of Manhattan were West Indians. As late as 1970, the highest ranking blacks in New York’s police department were West Indians, as were all the black federal judges in the city. The 1970 census showed that black West Indian families in the New York metropolitan area had 28 percent higher incomes than the families of American blacks. The incomes of second-generation West Indian families living in the same area exceeded that of black families by 58 percent. Neither race nor racism can explain such differences. Nor can slavery, since native-born blacks and West Indian blacks both had a history of slavery.
”
”
Thomas Sowell (Black Rednecks and White Liberals)
“
Ebenezer Howard’s vision of the Garden City would seem almost feudal to us. He seems to have thought that members of the industrial working classes would stay neatly in their class, and even at the same job within their class; that agricultural workers would stay in agriculture; that businessmen (the enemy) would hardly exist as a significant force in his Utopia; and that planners could go about their good and lofty work, unhampered by rude nay-saying from the untrained. It was the very fluidity of the new nineteenth-century industrial and metropolitan society, with its profound shiftings of power, people and money, that agitated Howard so deeply
”
”
Jane Jacobs (The Death and Life of Great American Cities)
“
Jane Jacobs observed many years ago that one of the paradoxical effects of metropolitan life is that huge cities create environments where small niches can flourish. A store selling nothing but buttons most likely won't be able to find a market in a town of 50,000 people, but in New York City, there's an entire button-store district.
”
”
Steven Johnson (The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic—and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World)
“
Oh, all you Stockholmers think the world revolves around your bloody city.” The negotiator laughed. “Listen, I grew up in a village where you had to drive forty minutes if you wanted to buy milk. Back there we used to think your town was metropolitan. To us, you were the Stockholmers.” “Everyone is someone else’s Stockholmer, I guess.
”
”
Fredrik Backman (Anxious People)
“
It is said in those districts that not all the trains which run on the city’s tracks are listed in Metropolitan Transit’s compendious schedule. The residents will tell you that after midnight, on some nights, there will be other trains, trains whose cry is different, the bellow of some great beast fighting for its life. And if you watch those trains go past, behind those bright flickering windows you will see passengers unlike any passengers you have seen when riding the trains yourself: men with wings, women with horns, beast-headed children, fauns and dryads and green-skinned people more beautiful than words can describe. In 1893, a schoolteacher swore that she saw a unicorn; in 1934, a murderer turned himself into the police, weeping, saying that he saw his victims staring at him from a train as it howled past the station platform on which he stood.
These are the seraphic trains. The stories say they run to Heaven, Hell, and Faërie. They are omens, but no one can agree on what they portend. And although you will never meet anyone who has seen or experienced it, there are persistent rumors, unkillable rumors, that sometimes, maybe once a century, maybe twice, a seraphic train will stop in its baying progress and open its doors for a mortal.
Those who know the story of Thomas the Rhymer—and even some who don’t—insist that all these people, blest or damned as they may be, must be poets.
”
”
Sarah Monette (Somewhere Beneath Those Waves)
“
Double the population of a city, and it doesn’t simply double its productivity; it yields productivity and innovation that is more than doubled. These relationships have been found in patents, a city’s gross metropolitan product, research and development budgets, and even the presence of so-called supercreative individuals, such as artists and academics.
”
”
Samuel Arbesman (The Half-life of Facts: Why Everything We Know Has an Expiration Date)
“
But now I speculate re the ants' invisible organ of aggregate thought... if, in a city park of broad reaches, winding paths, roadways, and lakes, you can imagine seeing on a warm and sunny Sunday afternoon the random and unpredictable movement of great numbers of human beings in the same way... if you watch one person, one couple, one family, a child, you can assure yourself of the integrity of the individual will and not be able to divine what the next moment will bring. But when the masses are celebrating a beautiful day in the park in a prescribed circulation of activities, the wider lens of thought reveals nothing errant, nothing inconstant or unnatural to the occasion. And if someone acts in a mutant un-park manner, alarms go off, the unpredictable element, a purse snatcher, a gun wielder, is isolated, surrounded, ejected, carried off as waste. So that while we are individually and privately dyssynchronous, moving in different ways, for different purposes, in different directions, we may at the same time comprise, however blindly, the pulsing communicating cells of an urban over-brain. The intent of this organ is to enjoy an afternoon in the park, as each of us street-grimy urbanites loves to do. In the backs of our minds when we gather for such days, do we know this? How much of our desire to use the park depends on the desires of others to do the same? How much of the idea of a park is in the genetic invitation on nice days to reflect our massive neuromorphology? There is no central control mechanism telling us when and how to use the park. That is up to us. But when we do, our behavior there is reflective, we can see more of who we are because of the open space accorded to us, and it is possible that it takes such open space to realize in simple form the ordinary identity we have as one multicellular culture of thought that is always there, even when, in the comparative blindness of our personal selfhood, we are flowing through the streets at night or riding under them, simultaneously, as synaptic impulses in the metropolitan brain.
Is this a stretch? But think of the contingent human mind, how fast it snaps onto the given subject, how easily it is introduced to an idea, an image that it had not dreamt of thinking of a millisecond before... Think of how the first line of a story yokes the mind into a place, a time, in the time it takes to read it. How you can turn on the radio and suddenly be in the news, and hear it and know it as your own mind's possession in the moment's firing of a neuron. How when you hear a familiar song your mind adopts its attitudinal response to life before the end of the first bar. How the opening credits of a movie provide the parameters of your emotional life for its ensuing two hours... How all experience is instantaneous and instantaneously felt, in the nature of ordinary mind-filling revelation. The permeable mind, contingently disposed for invasion, can be totally overrun and occupied by all the characteristics of the world, by everything that is the case, and by the thoughts and propositions of all other minds considering everything that is the case... as instantly and involuntarily as the eye fills with the objects that pass into its line of vision.
”
”
E.L. Doctorow (City of God)
“
They were properly mad in the Shakespearean sense, talking sense when you least expected it. In North London, where councillors once voted to change the name of the area to Nirvana, it is not unusual to walk the streets and be suddenly confronted by sage words from the chalkfaced, blue-lipped, or eyebrowless. From across the street or from the other end of a tube carriage they will use their schizophrenic talent for seeing connections in the random (for discerning the whole world in a grain of sand, for deriving narrative from nothing) to riddle you, to rhyme you, to strip you down, to tell you who you are and where you’re going (usually Baker Street—the great majority of modernday seers travel the Metropolitan Line) and why. But as a city we are not appreciative of these people. Our gut instinct is that they intend to embarrass us, that they’re out to shame us somehow as they lurch down the train aisle, bulbous-eyed and with carbuncled nose, preparing to ask us, inevitably, what we are looking at. What the fuck we are looking at. As a kind of preemptive defense mechanism, Londoners have learned not to look, never to look, to avoid eyes at all times so that the dreaded question “What you looking at?” and its pitiful, gutless, useless answer —“Nothing”—might be avoided.
”
”
Zadie Smith (White Teeth)
“
Night is the permanent revolution, that of the globe. Every sundown the streets change, becoming sinister or libidinous, or, for that matter, longer or narrower or unexpectedly twisted. The familiar rebels against those who presume to know it. The map is altered and time is telescoped. Daylight restores things to their normal condition, or is that really their normal condition? The map of the city wrinkles and unfolds, wrinkles and unfolds.
”
”
Lucy Sante (Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York)
“
The fighting is never over,” she says. “All truces are temporary. All wars are the same war, with occasional pauses for readjustment. War and politics are different facets of the same phenomenon, which is the conflict of human will, the will for power, for greatness, for enlarged scope. . . . The rest, the medium through which one will challenges another — war or peace, law or politics — that is mere mechanics.” Her green eyes glitter. “Learn that if you wish to survive.
”
”
Walter Jon Williams (City on Fire (Metropolitan #2))
“
About the time that I reentered the Bruce family, an event occurred of disastrous import to the colored people. The slave Hamlin, the first fugitive that came under the new law, was given up by the blood-hounds of the north to the bloodhounds of the south. It was the beginning of a reign of terror to the colored population. The great city rushed on its whirl of excitement, taking no note of the "short and simple annals of the Poor." But while fashionables were listening to the thrilling voice of Jenny Lind in Metropolitan Hall, the thrilling voices of poor hunted colored people went up, in an agony of supplication, to the Lord, from Zion's church. Many families, who had lived in the city for twenty years, fled from it now. Many a poor washerwoman, who, by hard labor, had made herself a comfortable home, was obliged to sacrifice her furniture, bid a hurried farewell to friends, and seek her fortune among strangers in Canada. Many a wife discovered a secret she had never known before—that her husband was a fugitive, and must leave her to insure his own safety. Worse still, many a husband discovered that his wife had fled from slavery years ago, and as "the child follows the condition of its mother," the children of his love were liable to be seized and carried into slavery. Every where, in those humble homes, there was consternation and anguish. But what cared the legislators of the "dominant race" for the blood they were crushing out of trampled hearts?
”
”
Harriet Ann Jacobs (Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl)
“
I’ll tell you a chapter in what will be mine: One day I’m going to go to New York City. I’ll walk up and down the crowded streets. I’ll eat a hot dog from a sidewalk cart. I’ll stand under the lights of Times Square. I’ll take pictures of tourists and roasted chestnuts and the subways going over the Manhattan Bridge. I’ll go to the library with the stone lions outside it and look for the shelf where one day my books will be. I’ll walk across the Brooklyn Bridge at sunset. I’ll sit in a café and write down what I see. And I’ll go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and look at every painting. Not for me, Clarissa. For you. I’ll go each day until I’m done. However long it takes.
”
”
Ripley Jones (Missing Clarissa)
“
Glasgow is more than body and more than head; She is both head and body. Her air of independent and self-contained metropolitanism - different from, and balancing, that of London - is the first thing that strikes the stranger who visits her after seeing the English provincial cities. And though most of the human elements of this metropolitanism [have been drawn from all Scotland, from Ireland, from England, and even from the Continent and Judaea, Glasgow is vitally self supporting to a greater extent than any other very large city; and while, by means of trade, travel, and intellectual sympathy, the sphere of her civic interests is in actuality the whole world, in immediate appearance it is frontiered by the city's wide boundaries.
”
”
William Power (Pavement and Highway: Specimen Days in Strathclyde)
“
...if we are to keep alive the model of sustainable metropolitan life that Snow and Whitehead helped make possible 150 years ago, it is incumbent on us to do, at the very least, two things.
The first is to embrace—as a matter of philosophy and public policy—the insights of science...
The second is to commit ourselves anew to the kinds of public health systems that developed in the wake of the Broad Street outbreak, both in the developed world and the developing: clean water supplies, sanitary waste-removal and recycling systems, early vaccination programs, disease detection and mapping programs. Cholera demonstrated that the nineteenth-century world was more connected
than ever before; that local public-health problems could quickly reverberate around the globe.
”
”
Steven Johnson (The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic—and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World)
“
This city did not deserve what happened to it. Neither does any other shrinking city. Half a century after the Kerner Report tried to inspire a new approach to urban life, we are at another crossroads between how things were once done and how we can choose to do t hem in the future. In a way, public drinking water systems are the perfect embodiment of the ideal that we might reach toward. The sprawling pipelines articulate the shape of a community. House by house, they are a tangible affirmation that each person belongs. They tie the city together, and often the metropolitan region as well. If only some have good, clean water and others do not, the system breaks down. It isn't safe. The community gets sick. But when we are all connected to the water, and to each other, it is life-giving - holy, even.
”
”
Anna Clark (The Poisoned City: Flint's Water and the American Urban Tragedy)
“
A German or a Russian mamaloschen (mother tongue) pedigree made for two wildly different translations of the same verse by the American Yiddish poet H. Leyvik.
"Dos turemdike lebn in der turemdike shtot", translated "The towering life of the towering city" (Yiddish turem, "tower," of German origin) became in another version "The imprisoned life of the prison city" (via turme, "prison", from Russian).
I discovered this old "plot" in a recent lecture, a volume on American Yiddish Poetry, by Benjamin and Barbara Harshav. One of those gentle epiphanies that only apparently obscure footnotes or references could reveal.
In a frivolous gesture, I concocted an improbable rendition based on both translations, a slice of contemporary universal metropolitan spleen:
The imprisoned life of the towering city.
”
”
Harshav
“
If government had declined to build racially separate public housing in cities where segregation hadn’t previously taken root, and instead had scattered integrated developments throughout the community, those cities might have developed in a less racially toxic fashion, with fewer desperate ghettos and more diverse suburbs. If the federal government had not urged suburbs to adopt exclusionary zoning laws, white flight would have been minimized because there would have been fewer racially exclusive suburbs to which frightened homeowners could flee. If the government had told developers that they could have FHA guarantees only if the homes they built were open to all, integrated working-class suburbs would likely have matured with both African Americans and whites sharing the benefits. If state courts had not blessed private discrimination by ordering the eviction of African American homeowners in neighborhoods where association rules and restrictive covenants barred their residence, middle-class African Americans would have been able gradually to integrate previously white communities as they developed the financial means to do so. If churches, universities, and hospitals had faced loss of tax-exempt status for their promotion of restrictive covenants, they most likely would have refrained from such activity. If police had arrested, rather than encouraged, leaders of mob violence when African Americans moved into previously white neighborhoods, racial transitions would have been smoother. If state real estate commissions had denied licenses to brokers who claimed an “ethical” obligation to impose segregation, those brokers might have guided the evolution of interracial neighborhoods. If school boards had not placed schools and drawn attendance boundaries to ensure the separation of black and white pupils, families might not have had to relocate to have access to education for their children. If federal and state highway planners had not used urban interstates to demolish African American neighborhoods and force their residents deeper into urban ghettos, black impoverishment would have lessened, and some displaced families might have accumulated the resources to improve their housing and its location. If government had given African Americans the same labor-market rights that other citizens enjoyed, African American working-class families would not have been trapped in lower-income minority communities, from lack of funds to live elsewhere. If the federal government had not exploited the racial boundaries it had created in metropolitan areas, by spending billions on tax breaks for single-family suburban homeowners, while failing to spend adequate funds on transportation networks that could bring African Americans to job opportunities, the inequality on which segregation feeds would have diminished. If federal programs were not, even to this day, reinforcing racial isolation by disproportionately directing low-income African Americans who receive housing assistance into the segregated neighborhoods that government had previously established, we might see many more inclusive communities. Undoing the effects of de jure segregation will be incomparably difficult. To make a start, we will first have to contemplate what we have collectively done and, on behalf of our government, accept responsibility.
”
”
Richard Rothstein (The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America)
“
The Klan had taken root in both the rural side east of the Cascade Mountains and the metropolitan areas in the west, up and down the Willamette Valley. The first American town founded west of the Rocky Mountains, Astoria, at the mouth of the Columbia River, elected a Klan mayor in 1922, and hosted a convention of the order two years later. Ten thousand people attended. Reuben Sawyer, a Portland pastor and a student of Henry Ford’s tracts against Jews, filled churches in the Beaver State with anti-Semitic rants. “In some parts of America,” he warned one crowd, “the kikes are so thick that a white man can hardly find room to walk.” Speaking to 6,000 in Portland, he said Jews were trying to establish “a government within the government.” In the same city, another top Klansman told an audience that “the only way to cure a Catholic is to kill him.
”
”
Timothy Egan (A Fever in the Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan's Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them)
“
A wealth of research confirms the importance of face-to-face contact. One experiment performed by two researchers at the University of Michigan challenged groups of six students to play a game in which everyone could earn money by cooperating. One set of groups met for ten minutes face-to-face to discuss strategy before playing. Another set of groups had thirty minutes for electronic interaction. The groups that met in person cooperated well and earned more money. The groups that had only connected electronically fell apart, as members put their personal gains ahead of the group’s needs. This finding resonates well with many other experiments, which have shown that face-to-face contact leads to more trust, generosity, and cooperation than any other sort of interaction.
The very first experiment in social psychology was conducted by a University of Indiana psychologist who was also an avid bicyclist. He noted that “racing men” believe that “the value of a pace,” or competitor, shaves twenty to thirty seconds off the time of a mile. To rigorously test the value of human proximity, he got forty children to compete at spinning fishing reels to pull a cable. In all cases, the kids were supposed to go as fast as they could, but most of them, especially the slower ones, were much quicker when they were paired with another child. Modern statistical evidence finds that young professionals today work longer hours if they live in a metropolitan area with plenty of competitors in their own occupational niche.
Supermarket checkouts provide a particularly striking example of the power of proximity. As anyone who has been to a grocery store knows, checkout clerks differ wildly in their speed and competence. In one major chain, clerks with differing abilities are more or less randomly shuffled across shifts, which enabled two economists to look at the impact of productive peers. It turns out that the productivity of average clerks rises substantially when there is a star clerk working on their shift, and those same average clerks get worse when their shift is filled with below-average clerks.
Statistical evidence also suggests that electronic interactions and face-to-face interactions support one another; in the language of economics, they’re complements rather than substitutes. Telephone calls are disproportionately made among people who are geographically close, presumably because face-to-face relationships increase the demand for talking over the phone. And when countries become more urban, they engage in more electronic communications.
”
”
Edward L. Glaeser (Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier and Happier)
“
2Do not mistake these multiple trends--the energy flows of metropolitan growth, the new taste for tea, the nascent, half-formed awareness of mass behavior--for mere historical background. The clash of microbe and man that played out on Broad Street for ten days in 1854 was itself partly a consequence of each of these trends, though the chains of cause and effect played out on different scales of experience, both temporal and spatial. You can tell the story of the Broad Street outbreak on the scale of a few human human lives, people drinking water from the a pump, getting sick and dying over a few weeks, but in telling the story that way, you limit its perspective, limits its ability to convey a fair account of what really happened. Once you get to the why, the story has to widen and tighten at the same time: to the long duree of urban development, or the microscopic tight focus of bacterial life cycles, These are causes, too.
”
”
Steven Johnson (The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic—and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World)
“
Such moments are too often lost, the private interludes between the tribal gatherings, the transit between destinations, when the city becomes an intimate landscape, a secret shared by two. This was once their neighborhood and she wants to reclaim it for a little while, to walk past the apartment where they spent so much of their lives, even if it makes her sad thinking of all that transpired there, and all that’s lost. It makes her melancholy to imagine that she might never be here again, that these blocks, their former haunts, and their old building will outlast them; that the city is supremely indifferent to their transit through its arteries, and to their ultimate destination. For now, she wants just to be in between. She knows that later it won’t be the party she will remember so much as this, the walk with her husband in the crisp autumn air, bathed in the yellow metropolitan light spilling from thousands of windows, this suspended moment of anticipation before arrival.
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Jay McInerney (Bright, Precious Days)
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Thus, no matter where you live in New York City, you will find within a block or two a grocery store, a barbershop, a newsstand and shoeshine shack, an ice-coal-and-wood cellar (where you write your order on a pad outside as you walk by), a dry cleaner, a laundry, a delicatessen (beer and sandwiches delivered at any hour to your door), a flower shop, an undertaker's parlor, a movie house, a radio-repair shop, a stationer, a haberdasher, a tailor, a drug-store, a garage, a tearoom, a saloon, a hardware store, a liquor store, a shoe-repair shop. Every block or two, in most residential sections of New York, is a little main street. A man starts for work in the morning and before he has gone two hundred yards he has completed half a dozen missions: bought a paper, left a pair of shoes to be soled, picked up a pack of cigarettes, ordered a bottle of whiskey to be dispatched in the opposite direction against his home-coming, written a message to the unseen forces of the wood cellar, and notified the dry cleaner that a pair of trousers awaits call. Homeward bound eight hours later, he buys a bunch of pussy willows, a Mazda bulb, a drink, a shine-- all between the corner where he steps off the bus and his apartment.
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E.B. White (Here Is New York)
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Hundreds, each with a similar tale to tell, came to Trafalgar Square to lay their head against the paving stones. It did not take long for political agitators to recognize that this congregation of the downtrodden was a ready-made army of the angry with nothing to lose. Londoners had long realized that Trafalgar Square sat on an axis between the east and west of the city, the dividing line between rich and poor; an artificial boundary, which, like the invisible restraints that kept the disenfranchised voiceless, could be easily breached. In 1887, the possibility of social revolution felt terrifyingly near for some, and yet for others it did not seem close enough. At Trafalgar Square, the daily speeches given by socialists and reformers such as William Morris, Annie Besant, Eleanor Marx, and George Bernard Shaw led to mobilization, as chanting, banner-waving processions of thousands spilled onto the streets. Inevitably, some resorted to violence. The Metropolitan Police and the magistrate’s court at Bow Street, in Covent Garden, worked overtime to contain the protesters and clear the square of those whom they deemed indigents and rabble-rousers. But like an irrepressible tide, soon after they were pushed out, they returned once more.
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Hallie Rubenhold (The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper)
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Because the drug war has been waged almost exclusively in poor communities of color, when drug offenders are released, they are generally returned to racially segregated ghetto communities--the places they call home. In many cities, the re-entry phenomenon is highly concentrated in a small number of neighborhoods. According to one study, during a twelve-year period, the number of prisoners returning home to "core counties"--those counties that contain the inner city of a metropolitan area--tripled. The effects are felt throughout the United States. In interviews with one hundred residents of two Tallahassee, Florida communities, researchers found that nearly every one of them had experienced or expected to experience the return of a family member from prison. Similarly, a survey of families living in the Robert Taylor Homes in Chicago found that the majority of residents either had a family member in prison or expected one to return from prison within the next two years. Fully 70 percent of men between the ages of eighteen and forty-five in the impoverished and overwhelmingly black North Lawndale neighborhood on Chicago's West Side are ex-offenders, saddled for life with a criminal record. The majority (60 percent) were incarcerated for drug offenses. These neighborhoods are a minefield for parolees, for a standard condition of parole is a promise not to associate with felons. As Paula Wolff, a senior executive at Chicago Metropolis 2020 observes, in these ghetto neighborhoods, "It is hard for a parolee to walk to the corner store to get a carton of milk without being subject to a parole violation.
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Michelle Alexander (The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness)
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Preparatory men. I welcome all signs that a more manly, a warlike, age is about to begin, an age which, above all, will give honor to valor once again. For this age shall prepare the way for one yet higher, and it shall gather the strength which this higher age will need one day - this age which is to carry heroism into the pursuit of knowledge and wage wars for the sake of thoughts and their consequences. To this end we now need many preparatory valorous men who cannot leap into being out of nothing - any more than out of the sand and slime of our present civilisation and metropolitanism: men who are bent on seeking for that aspect in all things which must be overcome; men characterised by cheerfulness, patience, unpretentiousness, and contempt for all great vanities, as well as by magnanimity in victory and forbearance regarding the small vanities of the vanquished; men possessed of keen and free judgement concerning all victors and the share of chance in every victory and every fame; men who have their own festivals, their own weekdays, their own periods of mourning, who are accustomed to command with assurance and are no less ready to obey when necessary, in both cases equally proud and serving their own cause; men who are in greater danger, more fruitful, and happier! For, believe me, the secret of the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment of existence is: to live dangerously! Build your cities under Vesuvius! Send your ships into uncharted seas! Live at war with your peers and yourselves! Be robbers and conquerors, as long as you cannot be rulers and owners, you lovers of knowledge! Soon the age will be past when you could be satisfied to live like shy deer, hidden in the woods! At long last the pursuit of knowledge will reach out for its due: it will want to rule and own, and you with it!
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Friedrich Nietzsche (The Portable Nietzsche)
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He found that when the Montreal Canadiens ice hockey team—once described as the national team of French Canada—got knocked out of the playoffs early between 1951 and 1992, Quebecois males aged fifteen to thirty-four became more likely to kill themselves. Robert Fernquist, a sociologist at the University of Central Missouri, went further. He studied thirty American metropolitan areas with professional sports teams from 1971 to 1990 and showed that fewer suicides occurred in cities whose teams made the playoffs more often. Routinely reaching the playoffs could reduce suicides by about twenty each year in a metropolitan area the size of Boston or Atlanta, said Fernquist. These saved lives were the converse of the mythical Brazilians throwing themselves off apartment blocks. Later, Fernquist investigated another link between sports and suicide: he looked at the suicide rate in American cities after a local sports team moved to another town. It turned out that some of the fans abandoned by their team killed themselves. This happened in New York in 1957 when the Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Giants baseball teams left, in Cleveland in 1995–1996 when the Browns football team moved to Baltimore, and in Houston in 1997–1998 when the Oilers football team departed. In each case the suicide rate was 10 percent to 14 percent higher in the two months around the team’s departure than in the same months of the previous year. Each move probably helped prompt a handful of suicides. Fernquist wrote, “The sudden change brought about due to the geographic relocations of pro sports teams does appear to, at least for a short time, make highly identified fans drastically change the way they view the normative order in society.” Clearly none of these people killed themselves just because they lost their team. Rather, they were very troubled individuals for whom this sporting disappointment was too much to bear. Perhaps the most famous recent case of a man who found he could not live without sports was the Gonzo author Hunter S. Thompson. He shot himself in February 2005, four days after writing a note in black marker with the title, “Football Season Is Over”:
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Simon Kuper (Soccernomics: Why England Loses, Why Germany and Brazil Win, and Why the U.S., Japan, Australia, Turkey--and Even Iraq--Are Destined to Become the Kings of the World's Most Popular Sport)
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British / Pakistani ISIS suspect, Zakaria Saqib Mahmood, is arrested in Bangladesh on suspicion of recruiting jihadists to fight in Syria
• Local police named arrested Briton as Zakaria Saqib Mahmood, also known as Zak, living in 70 Eversleigh Road, Westham, E6 1HQ London
• They suspect him of recruiting militants for ISIS in two Bangladeshi cities
• He arrived in the country in February, having previously spent time in Syria and Pakistan
• Suspected militant recruiter also recently visited Australia
A forty year old Muslim British man has been arrested in Bangladesh on suspicion of recruiting would-be jihadists to fight for Islamic State terrorists in Syria and Iraq.
The man, who police named as Zakaria Saqib Mahmood born 24th August 1977, also known as Zak, is understood to be of Pakistani origin and was arrested near the Kamalapur Railway area of the capital city Dhaka.
He is also suspected of having attempted to recruit militants in the northern city of Sylhet - where he is understood to have friends he knows from living in Newham, London - having reportedly first arrived in the country about six months ago to scout for potential extremists.
Militants: The British Pakistani man (sitting on the left) named as Zakaria Saqib Mahmood was arrested in Bangladesh.
The arrested man has been identified as Zakaria Saqib Mahmood, sources at the media wing of Dhaka Metropolitan Police told local newspapers.
He is believed to have arrived in Bangladesh in February and used social media websites including Facebook to sound out local men about their interest in joining ISIS, according Monirul Islam - joint commissioner of Dhaka Metropolitan Police - who was speaking at a press briefing today.
Zakaria has openly shared Islamist extremist materials on his Facebook and other social media links.
An example of Zakaria Saqib Mahmood sharing Islamist materials on his Facebook profile
He targeted Muslims from Pakistan as well as Bangladesh, Mr Islam added, before saying: 'He also went to Australia but we are yet to know the reason behind his trips'.
Zakaria saqib Mahmood trip to Australia in order to recruit for militant extremist groups
'From his passport we came to know that he went to Pakistan where we believe he met a Jihadist named Rauf Salman, in addition to Australia during September last year to meet some of his links he recruited in London, mainly from his weekly charity food stand in East London, ' the DMP spokesperson went on to say.
Police believes Zakaria Mahmood has met Jihadist member Rauf Salman in Pakistan
Zakaria Saqib Mahmood was identified by the local police in Pakistan in the last September. The number of extremists he has met in this trip remains unknown yet.
Zakaria Saqib Mahmood uses charity food stand as a cover to radicalise local people in Newham, London.
Investigators: Dhaka Metropolitan Police believe Zakaria Saqib Mhamood arrived in Bangladesh in February and used social media websites including Facebook to sound out local men about their interest in joining ISIS
The news comes just days after a 40-year-old East London bogus college owner called Sinclair Adamson - who also had links to the northern city of Sylhet - was arrested in Dhaka on suspicion of recruiting would-be fighters for ISIS.
Zakaria Saqib Mahmood, who has studied at CASS Business School, was arrested in Dhaka on Thursday after being reported for recruiting militants.
Just one day before Zakaria Mahmood's arrest, local police detained Asif Adnan, 26, and Fazle ElahiTanzil, 24, who were allegedly travelling to join ISIS militants in Syria, assisted by an unnamed Briton.
It is understood the suspected would-be jihadists were planning to travel to a Turkish airport popular with tourists, before travelling by road to the Syrian border and then slipping across into the warzone.
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Zakaria Zaqib Mahmood
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The coming back of these amphitheatres and stadiums into the modern city signifies not merely the revival of athletics, but of more brutalized forms of sport, in partial compensation for the emasculated, over-regimented existence of the metropolitan economy.
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Lewis Mumford (The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects)
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While much of the world is just now rapidly urbanising and coming to grips with its repercussions, over 75 percent of Europeans already live in cities, and dense ones at that. Paris has a density of 56,000 people per square mile (21,500 per square km), while New York City, the most densely settled US city, has less than half that amount. In fact, in spite of the many high-rise towers over Manhattan, the greater New York metropolitan area falls well behind the densities even of smaller European cities such as Athens, Munich and Lyon.
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Lukas Neckermann (Smart Cities, Smart Mobility: Transforming the Way We Live and Work)
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People often point to the London Metropolitan Police, who were formed in the 1820s by Sir Robert Peel,” Vitale said when we met. “They are held up as this liberal ideal of a dispassionate, politically neutral police with the support of the citizenry. But this really misreads the history. Peel is sent to manage the British occupation of Ireland. He’s confronted with a dilemma. Historically, peasant uprisings, rural outrages were dealt with by either the local militia or the British military. In the wake of the Napoleonic Wars, in the need for soldiers in other parts of the British Empire, he is having more and more difficulty managing these disorders. In addition, when he does call out the militia, they often open fire on the crowd and kill lots of people, creating martyrs and inflaming further unrest. He said, ‘I need a force that can manage these outrages without inflaming passions further.’ He developed the Peace Preservation Force, which was the first attempt to create a hybrid military-civilian force that can try to win over the population by embedding itself in the local communities, taking on some crime control functions, but its primary purpose was always to manage the occupation. He then exports that model to London as the industrial working classes are flooding the city, dealing with poverty, cycles of boom and bust in the economy, and that becomes their primary mission. “The creation of the very first state police force in the United States was the Pennsylvania State Police in 1905,” Vitale went on. “For the same reasons. It was modeled similarly on U.S. occupation forces in the Philippines. There was a back-and-forth with personnel and ideas. What happened was local police were unable to manage the coal strikes and iron strikes. . . . They needed a force that was more adherent to the interests of capital. . . . Interestingly, for these small-town police forces in a coal mining town there was sometimes sympathy. They wouldn’t open fire on the strikers. So, the state police force was created to be the strong arm for the law. Again, the direct connection between colonialism and the domestic management of workers. . . . It’s a two-way exchange. As we’re developing ideas throughout our own colonial undertakings, bringing those ideas home, and then refining them and shipping them back to our partners around the world who are often despotic regimes with close economic relationships to the United States. There’s a very sad history here of the U.S. exporting basically models of policing that morph into death squads and horrible human rights abuses.” The almost exclusive reliance on militarized police to deal with profound inequality and social problems is turning poor neighborhoods in cities such as Chicago into failed states. The “broken windows” policy, adopted by many cities, argues that disorder produces crime. It criminalizes minor infractions, upending decades of research showing that social dislocation leads to crime. It creates an environment where the poor are constantly harassed, fined, and arrested for nonsubstantive activities.
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Chris Hedges (America: The Farewell Tour)
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Trust is the bedrock on which cities grow and thrive. Modern metropolitan cities depend on our ability to think beyond the family and tribe and to trust the people who look, dress, and act nothing like us to treat us fairly, to honor commitments and contracts, to consider our well-being along with their own, and, most of all, to make sacrifices for the general good. Collective problems such as pollution and climate change demand collective responses. Civilization is a shared project.
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Charles Montgomery (Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design)
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The Metropolitan Health Act was the first of its kind in the United States. Many consider it a turning point in the history of American city life.
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David M. Oshinsky (Bellevue: Three Centuries of Medicine and Mayhem at America's Most Storied Hospital)
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Irony of the statement: The progress is defined by its wealth in the metropolitan cities and not the interiors where the details lie
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Dhanur Goyal
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Carlton Church review – Why Tokyo is populated?
How Tokyo became the largest city?
Apparently Tokyo Japan has been one of the largest global cities for hundreds of years. One of the primary reasons for its growth is the fact that it has been a political hotspot since they Edo period. Many of the feudal lords of Japan needed to be in Edo for a significant part of the year and this has led to a situation where increasing numbers of the population was attracted to the city. There were many people with some power base throughout Japan but it became increasingly clear that those who have the real power were the ones who were residing in Edo. Eventually Tokyo Japan emerged as both the cultural and the political center for the entire Japan and this only contributed to its rapid growth which made it increasingly popular for all people living in Japan. After World War II substantial rebuilding of the city was necessary and it was especially after the war that extraordinary growth was seen and because major industries came especially to Tokyo and Osaka, these were the cities where the most growth took place. The fact remains that there are fewer opportunities for people who are living far from the cities of Japan and this is why any increasing number of people come to the city.
There are many reasons why Japan is acknowledged as the greatest city
The Japanese railways is widely acknowledged to be the most sophisticated railway system in the world. There is more than 100 surface routes which is operated by Japan’s railways as well as 13 subway lines and over the years Japanese railway engineers has accomplished some amazing feats which is unequalled in any other part of the world. Most places in the city of Tokyo Japan can be reached by train and a relatively short walk. Very few global cities can make this same boast. Crossing the street especially outside Shibuya station which is one of the busiest crossings on the planet with literally thousands of people crossing at the same time. However, this street crossing symbolizes one of the trademarks of Tokyo Japan and its major tourism attractions. It lies not so much in old buildings but rather in the masses of people who come together for some type of cultural celebration. There is also the religious centers in Japan such as Carlton Church and others. Tokyo Japan has also been chosen as the city that will host the Olympics in 2020 and for many reasons this is considered to be the best possible venue.
A technological Metropolitan
No other country exports more critical technologies then Japan and therefore it should come as no surprise that the neighborhood electronics store look more like theme parks than electronic stores. At quickly becomes clear when one looks at such a spectacle that the Japanese people are completely infatuated with technology and they make no effort to hide that infatuation. People planning to visit Japan should heed the warnings from travel organizations and also the many complaints which is lodged by travelers who have become victims of fraud. It is important to do extensive research regarding the available options and to read every possible review which is available regarding travel agencies. A safe option will always be to visit the website of Carlton Church and to make use of their services when travelling to and from Japan.
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jessica pilar
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Several years ago, not long after the terror attacks on September 11, our police department managed to bilk Homeland Security out of a few million bucks so it could arm up and join the national craze of ETF—Extreme Terror Fighting. Never mind that our city is far away from the major metropolitan areas, or that there has been absolutely no sign of any jihadists around here, or that our cops already had plenty of guns and ninja gear. Forget all that—we had to be ready! So in the arms race that followed, our cops somehow got a new tank. And once they learned how to drive it, then, hell, it was time to use it.
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John Grisham (Rogue Lawyer)
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From am overall eclsyste,s perspective, if you're going to have 10million human beings trying to share an environment with other life-forms, it's much better to crowd all 10 million of them a hundred square miles than it is to spread them out, edge-city style, over a space ten or a hundred times that size. If we're going to survive as a planet with more than 6 million people without destroying the complex balance of our natural ecosystems, the best way to do it is to crowd as many of those humans into metropolitan spaces and return the rest of the planet to Mother Nature.
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Steven Johnson
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Comparing African and Egyptian circumstances also points to other reasons why churches survived in some regions and failed in others. From earliest times, Christianity had developed in the particular social and economic world of the Mediterranean and the Near East, and networks of church organization and mission followed the familiar routes of trade and travel. Also, this social world was founded upon cities, which were the undisputed centers of the institutionalized church. Mediterranean Christianity was founded upon a hierarchical system of metropolitans and bishops based in cities: even the name metropolitan suggests a fundamentally urban system. Over time, though, trade routes changed and some cities lost power or vanished altogether. Between the fifth century and the ninth, these changes had a special effect on the Mediterranean, as sea routes declined in importance and states tended to look more inland, to transcontinental routes within Asia and Africa. This process was accelerated by the impact of plague, particularly during the 540s, and perhaps of climate change. Cities like Carthage and Antioch shrank to nothing, while Damascus and Alexandria lost influence before the new rising stars of Baghdad and Cairo.11 These changes coincided with the coming of Islam rather than being caused by that event, but they had immense religious consequences. Churches that remained wedded to the old social order found themselves in growing difficulty, while more flexible or adaptable organizations succeeded. Nestorians and Jacobites coped well for centuries with an Eastern world centered in Baghdad and looking east into Asia. Initially, too, the old urban framework adapted successfully to the Arab conquest, and Christian bishops made their peace quite easily. Matters were very different, though, when the cities themselves were faced with destruction. By the seventh century, the decline of Carthage and its dependent cities undermined the whole basis of the North African church, and accelerated the collapse of the colonial social order. Once the cities were gone, no village Christians remained to take up the slack. The Coptic Church flourished because its network of monasteries and village churches allowed it to withstand changes in the urban system.
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Philip Jenkins (The Lost History of Christianity: The Thousand-Year Golden Age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia—and How It Died)
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North of Las Vegas, desert and mountainous scrub land stretches for hundreds of miles. The earth still bears the scars from above-ground nuclear bomb tests at Yucca Flats, the flash of mushroom clouds visible from the early Las Vegas casinos. Secret tests of another sort take place in Area 51, the Air Force’s clandestine base and sprawling testing facility shrouded in mystery and baked by an unrelenting sun. In the 450 miles between Vegas and Reno, ghost towns slowly crumble, Great Basin rattlesnakes hunt for rodents, and US Highway 95 stretches up and down the arid landscape, connecting the state’s only two metropolitan areas.
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Mark S. Bacon (Desert Kill Switch: Nostalgia City Mystery ~ Book 2 (Nostalgia City Mysteries))
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Montreal had a metropolitan population of over 400,000 in January of 1907. It was Canada’s biggest, richest, and most important city. Kenora, with a population of about 6,000 people, was, and will likely forever be, the smallest city ever to win the Stanley Cup.
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Eric Zweig (Art Ross: The Hockey Legend Who Built the Bruins)
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The foundation of the Chosŏn dynasty (1392- 1910), with its pronounced Neo-Confucian sympathies, brought an end to Buddhism's hegemony in Korean religion and upset this ideological status quo. Buddhism's close affiliation with the vanquished Koryŏ rulers led to centuries of persecution during this Confucian dynasty. While controls over monastic vocations and conduct had already been instituted during the Koryŏ period, these pale next to the severe restrictions promulgated during the Chosŏn dynasty. The number of monks was severely restricted—and at times a complete ban on ordination instituted—and monks were prohibited from entering the metropolitan areas. Hundreds of monasteries were disestablished (the number of temples dropping to 242 during the reign of T'aejong [r. 1401-1418]), and new construction was forbidden in the cities and villages of Korea. Monastic land holdings and temple slaves were confiscated by the government in 1406, undermining the economic viability of many monasteries. The vast power that Buddhists had wielded during the Silla and Koryŏ dynasties was now exerted by Confucians. Buddhism was kept virtually quarantined in the countryside, isolated from the intellectual debates of the times. Its lay adherents were more commonly the illiterate peasants of the countryside and women, rather than the educated male elite of the cities, as had been the case in ages past. Buddhism had become insular, and ineffective in generating creative responses to this Confucian challenge.
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Robert E. Buswell Jr. (The Zen Monastic Experience)
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While chapter 2 asks how one-dimensional discourses of queerness underpin liberal capitalism, chapter 3 attends to how those discourses undergirded transformations within US cities. More specifically, this chapter examines how the mainstreaming of queerness and the closeting of race have promoted the development of neoliberal urban space. This version of neoliberalization involves the use of queerness as an alibi for an economic and racial cleansing of disfranchised neighborhoods, a move that requires the ideological separation of sexuality from other struggles. Indeed, if single-issue politics have worked to deradicalize homosexuality and separate it from issues of racial, gender, and class justice, then the neoliberal city is the embodiment of that deradicalization. As a result, the chapter looks at gentrifying practices in metropolitan areas as an instance in which queerness helps to define hipness, a hipness that is established by spatially dislocating working-class communities and people of color.
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Roderick Ferguson (One-Dimensional Queer)
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Investigate New Zealand: Extreme Visit Bundle from Bangalore
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New Zealand is known for its staggering normal magnificence, special untamed life, and inviting society. With scenes going from stunning sea shores and rich rainforests to snow-covered mountains and shining fjords, it's an ideal objective for anybody looking for a blend of experience, unwinding, and social submersion.
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Auckland: The City of Sails
Start your excursion in Auckland, New Zealand's biggest city. Partake in a city visit, investigating features like the Sky Pinnacle, Waitemata Harbor, and clamoring Sovereign Road. For an all encompassing perspective on the city, make a beeline for Mount Eden or take a harbor journey to respect Auckland's horizon and famous milestones from the water.
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Rotorua is a social and geothermal center point. Witness foaming mud pools, natural aquifers, and the popular Pohutu Fountain at Te Puia. Experience the rich Maori culture through conventional exhibitions and a hangi feast, an exceptional eating experience ready in an earth broiler.
Queenstown: Experience Capital of the World
Queenstown is a heaven for daredevils. Go bungee bouncing, skydiving, fly drifting, or partake in a beautiful voyage on Lake Wakatipu. In winter, Queenstown changes into a skiing safe house, while summer offers climbing and grape plantation visits. Try not to miss the dazzling perspectives from the Horizon Gondola.
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Known as the "Eighth Miracle of the World," Milford Sound is a fjord encircled by transcending precipices, cascades, and rich rainforests. Take a boat journey to investigate this normal wonder, or choose a beautiful trip to observe its glory from a higher place.
Christchurch and Then some
Investigate Christchurch's Botanic Nurseries, noteworthy design, and lively workmanship scene. Require a roadtrip to Akaroa, an enchanting town with French impacts, or visit the close by Banks Promontory for additional picturesque scenes and untamed life experiences.
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With Surfnxt, arranging your New Zealand Tour package from Bangalore is simple and bother free. Our master guides and organized agendas guarantee you outwit New Zealand, from exciting undertakings to social encounters. Thus, gather your sacks and prepare for a remarkable excursion with Surfnxt's New Zealand visit bundle!
Investigate the shocking scenes and energetic culture of New Zealand with Surfnxt's selective visit bundle from Bangalore. Ideal for experienced darlings and nature devotees, this outing guarantees recollections that will endure forever!
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New Zealand Tour Package From Bangalore
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Many of the men we wanted were used to living in cities or near large metropolitan areas and were a bit dubious about the prospects of life in a remote, sparsely populated area. We had somewhat similar trouble with the engineering people, although they were not so concerned at being isolated.
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Leslie R. Groves (Now It Can Be Told: The Story of the Manhattan Project (Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Era of the New Deal))
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Seattle sports had once risen briefly to international prominence, in 1917, when the city’s professional hockey team, the Metropolitans, became the first American team to win the Stanley Cup, defeating the Montreal Canadiens. But the Metropolitans ordinarily played only in the Pacific Coast Hockey Association, and when the owner of their arena did not renew their lease in 1924, the team folded. Given
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Daniel James Brown (The Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics)
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Thus, in the 1850s a lot of London churches did what a lot of American churches have done during the last thirty years: they fled the cities. These churches moved their locations to the outskirts of London. But Metropolitan Tabernacle, pastored by Charles Spurgeon, decided, “We’re not going to do that. We’re going to stay here. We see this as an opportunity for the gospel.”3
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Darrin Patrick (For the City: Proclaiming and Living Out the Gospel (Exponential Series))
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Americans who live in metropolitan areas with more than a million residents are, on average, more than 50 percent more productive than Americans who live in smaller metropolitan areas. These relationships are the same even when we take into account the education, experience, and industry of workers. They’re even the same if we take individual workers’ IQs into account. The income gap between urban and rural areas is just as large in other rich countries, and even
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Edward L. Glaeser (Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier)
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These letters are all I have left. 26 friends to tell my stories to. 26 letters are all I need. I can stitch them together to create oceans and ecosystems. I can fit them together to form planets and solar systems. I can use letters to construct skyscrapers and metropolitan cities populated by people, places, things, and ideas that are more real to me than these 4 walls. I need nothing but letters to live. Without them I would not exist. Because these words I write down are the only proof I have that I’m still alive. It
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Tahereh Mafi (Destroy Me (Shatter Me, #1.5))
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Central government agencies (41): 20 ministries, 18
services, 1 office, and 3 commissions
• Metropolitan governments (17): 17 cities and provinces
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출장안마찾기
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INTRODUCTION THE EXPLOSION ON AN OTHERWISE CALM AND UNEVENTFUL MORNING, A small nuclear weapon explodes in downtown Washington, DC. The device generates a yield of fifteen kilotons, roughly the same force unleashed by the bomb Little Boy over Hiroshima. The casualty count rises to over a hundred thousand, and the destruction is measured in hundreds of billions of dollars. The blast’s electromagnetic pulse burns out electrical components across the metropolitan area. Radiation leaves the center of the city
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Benjamin Schwartz (Right of Boom: The Aftermath of Nuclear Terrorism)
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The many governments within a single metropolitan area are almost designed to fight among themselves because state law makes them largely dependent on locally raised tax revenues...People, pies, cars, rails, and the nebulous entity known as the economy might flow seamlessly across local boundaries, but sales and property tax dollars rarely do.
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Bruce Katz (The Metropolitan Revolution: How Cities and Metros are Fixing our Broken Politics and Fragile Economy)
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There is, of course, a deep irony in the fact that technology, which was supposed to cut the ties between people and places and allow people everywhere to work from almost anywhere, turns out to flourish in fairly compact geographic locations.
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Bruce Katz (The Metropolitan Revolution: How Cities and Metros are Fixing our Broken Politics and Fragile Economy)
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Seattle sports had once risen briefly to international prominence, in 1917, when the city’s professional hockey team, the Metropolitans, became the first American team to win the Stanley Cup,
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Daniel James Brown (The Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics)
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Perhaps he can transfer out, he thinks. There are actually many opportunities for a Saypuri here: the Continent is divided into four regions, each of which has its own regional governor; in the next tier below, there are the polis governors, who regulate each major metropolitan area on the Continent; and in the next tier below that are the embassies, which regulate … well, to be honest, Pitry has never been quite sure what the embassies regulate. Something to do with culture, which seems to involve a lot of parties.
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Robert Jackson Bennett (City of Stairs (The Divine Cities, #1))
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The impact of globalization and deindustrialization was felt most strongly in black inner-city communities. As described by William Julius Wilson, in his book When Work Disappears, the overwhelming majority of African Americans in the 1970s lacked college educations and had attended racially segregated, underfunded schools lacking basic resources. Those residing in ghetto communities were particularly ill equipped to adapt to the seismic changes taking place in the U.S. economy; they were left isolated and jobless. One study indicates that as late as 1970, more than 70 percent of all blacks working in metropolitan areas held blue-collar jobs.78 Yet by 1987, when the drug war hit high gear, the industrial employment of black men had plummeted to 28 percent.79
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Michelle Alexander (The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness)
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The metropolitan area of one-half million people was brought to a standstill. Restaurants, public buildings, and even the city zoo closed. People quickly bought up whatever bottled water was on store shelves. The governor of Ohio declared a state of emergency. The National Guard was enlisted to truck in water and portable water treatment plants. The national and international news media covered the story of a modern American city without the 80 million gallons of water it needed daily. It was not the sort of attention the long-struggling, rust-belt city wanted.
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Sean B. Carroll (The Serengeti Rules: The Quest to Discover How Life Works and Why It Matters)
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one reason why we see so many young people from the North East in Delhi, Bengaluru, Mumbai and other Indian metropolitan cities is because Rajiv Gandhi made the north eastern states feel like part of the Indian mainstream. And
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Vir Sanghvi (MANDATE: WILL OF THE PEOPLE)
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…humanity’s emergence from a second hunter-gatherer stage following the discovery of the Time Capsule failed to disengage the masses from the desire for close community, leading to the creation of mega-cities with wide swaths of sparsely populated regions between… Leaving major metropolitan areas for any reason other than rapid rail transit to other metropolises or major corporate settings has become an accepted sign of incompetence… A History of the Western Alliance,
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Alex Albrinck (Activate (The Ravagers, #1))
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town where I knew almost everybody to a major metropolitan city with around five hundred thousand residents. My cousin
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Tasha Cobbs Leonard (Do It Anyway: Don't Give Up Before It Gets Good)
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London in those years was a thieves’ paradise. There was no citywide police force: The London Metropolitan Police Department would be established only in 1829. The patchwork of local watchmen, marshals and constables that patrolled the city in Wild’s day proved eminently bribable: Thieves often sold their plunder directly to them, at an attractive discount, which kept them safe from the hangman’s noose. Capitalizing on prevailing conditions, Wild began to gather London’s foremost thieves around him. He set up shop in the parlor of a London tavern, where he presided over the boldly named “Office for the Recovery of Lost and Stolen Property.” Suppose an English gentleman awoke one morning to find his gold watch and silver snuff box missing. Calling on Wild in his “office,” he would be informed that Wild “had an idea where the goods might be found, or at least who it was that had possession of them,” and that they could soon be returned to their rightful owner—for a fee. “If the person questioned Wild’s integrity, or asked how he should know so much about the theft, Wild answered ‘that it was meerly Providential; being, by meer Accident, at a Tavern, or at a Friend’s House in the Neighbourhood, [he] heard that such a Gentleman had his House broken open, and such and such Goods Stolen, and the like.’ ” Needless to say, Wild knew exactly where the goods were, because they’d been stolen by one of his own employees. What he’d done, in short, was to perfect a kind of property-kidnapping for ransom. The system proved so effective that he did not hesitate to target some of the country’s wealthiest men and women.
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Margalit Fox (The Talented Mrs. Mandelbaum: The Rise and Fall of an American Organized-Crime Boss)
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Suraj solar and allied industries,
Wework galaxy, 43,
Residency Road,
Bangalore-560025.
Mobile number : +91 808 850 7979
Understanding the idea of sun oriented streetlamps
Sun powered streetlamps have arisen as a feasible and effective lighting arrangement, particularly in metropolitan regions like Bangalore. By bridling the force of the sun, these lighting apparatuses offer various benefits over customary matrix based frameworks. In this article, we dive into the universe of sun powered streetlamps, investigating their advantages, evaluating factors, provider determination best practices, and future innovation patterns. Whether you are a mortgage holder, entrepreneur, or city organizer in Bangalore, understanding the complexities of sunlight based streetlamps can assist you with pursuing informed choices towards a greener and more savvy lighting arrangement.
### 1. Prologue to Sun based Streetlamps
#### Understanding the idea of sunlight based streetlamps
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Exploring trustworthy sun oriented streetlamp producers
With regards to picking a sun oriented streetlamp provider, getting your work done is significant. Search for makers with a strong standing for quality items and dependable help. You need a provider that has insight in the business and a history of following through on their commitments.
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Client input can give important experiences into the exhibition of a sun based streetlamp provider. Look at surveys and tributes from past clients to measure fulfillment levels. Positive criticism is a decent pointer that the provider is reliable and follows through on their responsibilities.
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suneasesolarblr
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It is my suspicion that people who are glamoured by big cities and think of themselves as urbane and thoroughly metropolitan are at heart country mice—simple, fearful, overdomesticated provincials, dazzled by city lights.
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Paul Theroux (Riding the Rails with Paul Theroux: The Great Railway Bazaar, The Old Patagonian Express, and Ghost Train to the Eastern Star)
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When memory is a veil of exposure through which the fullness of tides is visible, I can still sometimes smell the radiance of flowers. I argued with friends that Mumbai does have seasons—if one bothers to watch closely. Now I trace the months on a calendar like a distant call, the sound of a train whistle or fog that engulfs before the onset of rain to participate in a collective mourning.
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Sneha Subramanian Kanta
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When memory is a veil of exposure through which the fullness of tides is visible, I can still sometimes smell the radiance of flowers. I have argued with friends that Mumbai does have seasons—if one bothers to watch closely. Now I trace the months on a calendar like a distant call, the sound of a train whistle or fog that engulfs before the onset of rain to participate in a collective mourning.
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Sneha Subramanian Kanta
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In order to understand how everything went to hell on January 6th, you have to understand that the District of Columbia has its own rules. The city was established as a federal district in 1790. In the years since then, Washington has gained a greater degree of autonomy and home rule, but it doesn’t operate like a normal state or city. A congressional committee reviews laws passed in the city and retains authority over its budget, and of course there’s still the thorny issue of taxation without representation in Congress. Local DC Metropolitan police officers often have to take a backseat to specialized federal police forces in the city’s many national parks and federal buildings, including the Capitol. There, the primary law enforcement agency is the US Capitol Police. According to a Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) directive issued in 2003, the department’s policy is to “extend assistance” to the Capitol police if it is required.
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Denver Riggleman (The Breach: The Untold Story of the Investigation into January 6th)
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Nonetheless, Kiev was still an alluring prize. Whoever acquired it not only enjoyed the prestige of ruling "the mother of Rus' cities," but could also lay claim to being the senior member of the Riurikid dynasty. Because
it was the home of the metropolitan and the site of the major churches and monasteries, the city remained the undisputed cultural and religious, if not political, center of all Rus'. Even with the decline in its population and territory, Kiev and its lands were still among the most developed and populous in all of Ukraine.
Kiev's assets were also its liabilities, however. Princely competition for the city continued unabated. The Ukrainian historian Stefan Tomashivsky calculated that between 1146 and 1246, twenty-four princes ruled in Kiev on forty-seven separate occasions. Of these, one ruled seven separate times, five ruled three times each, and eight occupied the throne twice each. Significantly, thirty-five princely tenures lasted for less than a year each.? One prince took a rather drastic approach in dealing with the problem of Kiev. In 1169, unsure of his ability to retain control of the city once he had won it and unwilling to have it overshadow his growing domains in the northeast, Andrei Bogoliubsky, the prince of Vladimir-Suzdal and a forerunner of the princes of Moscow, attacked Kiev and savagely sacked it. It never completely recovered from this destructive raid.
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Orest Subtelny (Ukraine: A History)
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The actual antecedents of contemporary populist politicians like Trump are to be found not in interwar Central European totalitarian states but in state and local politics, particularly urban politics. In Europe, pro-Brexit Boris Johnson was the mayor of London before becoming prime minister, and Italy’s Matteo Salvini was on the city council of Milan from 1993 to 2012.
In the United States, the shift from post-1945 democratic pluralism to technocratic neoliberalism was fostered from the 1960s onward by an alliance of the white overclass with African Americans and other racial minority groups. The result was a backlash by white working-class voters, not only against nonwhites who were seen as competitors for jobs and housing, but also against the alien cultural liberalism of white “gentry liberals.” The backlash in the North was particularly intense among “white ethnics”—first-, second-, and third-generation white immigrants like Irish, German, Italian, and Polish Americans, many of them Catholic. The disproportionately working-class white ethnics now found themselves defined as bigots by the same white Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) elites who until recently had imposed quotas on Jews and Catholics in their Ivy League universities, but who were now posing as the virtuous, enlightened champions of civil rights.
This toxic mix of black aspiration, white ethnic backlash, and WASP condescension provided a ripe habitat for demagogues, many of them old-school Democrats like Frank Rizzo, mayor of Philadelphia, Sam Yorty, mayor of Los Angeles, and Mario Angelo Procaccino, failed mayoral candidate in New York. These populist big-city mayors or candidates in the second half of the twentieth century combined appeals to working-class grievances and resentments with folksy language and feuds with the metropolitan press, a pattern practiced, in different ways, by later New York City mayors Ed Koch, a Democrat, and Rudy Giuliani, a Republican.
In its “Against Trump” issue of January 22, 2016, the editors of National Review mocked the “funky outer-borough accents” shared by Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders. Indeed, Trump, a “white ethnic” from Queens with German and Scots ancestors, with his support in the US industrial states where working-class non-British European-Americans are concentrated, is ethnically different from most of his predecessors in the White House, whose ancestors were proportionately far more British American. Traits which seem outlandish in a US president would not have seemed so if Trump had been elected mayor of New York. Donald Trump was not Der Führer. He was Da Mayor of America.
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Michael Lind (The New Class War: Saving Democracy from the Managerial Elite)
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There were two orchestras with two hundred musicians in all—one onstage and a larger one on the board track below conducted by Giorgio Polacca, who inherited the Metropolitan Opera’s baton from Arturo Toscanini. A battalion of 250 Boy Scout ushers arrived late to find a near riot in the grandstands, as patrons scrambled for oversold seats. The triumphal march scene at the end of the second act was the most spectacular ever staged—with five hundred soldiers from the New York State Militia, sixteen horses, four camels, a pair of oxen, and Hattie the elephant from
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Thomas Campanella (Brooklyn: The Once and Future City)
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The values of large cities, espoused by evangelist mayors like Rahm Emmanuel in Chicago or Sadiq Khan in London, are considered so self-evidently superior that only a bigot could reject them. Large cities are ethnically and socially diverse, are constantly changing, and tend to have low social cohesion and high inequality. Ethnic ties to neighbourhood are always provisional, until the next wave of immigrants moves in. In terms of tradition, 'all that is solid melts into air', to quote Marx. Thus the only approach to life, especially for whites or those of mixed background who lack an ethnic enclave, is modernist: namely, to be an individualist, seek immediate experience, suppress the desire for continuity with previous generations and eschew ethnic ties to the landscape. The goal of left-modernism is a kind of New York-writ large: to universalize the metropolitan condition. All else is darkness. The problem is that the metropolitan version of nationhood alienates conservatives who prefer stability and order-seekers who prefer higher cohesion, reducing their trust in society and politics.
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Eric Kaufmann (Whiteshift: Populism, Immigration and the Future of White Majorities)
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Where I grew up, there were not a lot of people. In fact, there are currently more people in my apartment complex than there were in my hometown. There were no black people, no Hispanic people, no Asian people, no openly gay people, and everyone thought the same way about everything (the major exception being that 'Ford vs. Chevy' thing). Now, this does not mean rural North Dakotans are not smart; in fact the opposite is true. I generally find that Midwesterners have far more practical sensibility than people from metropolitan areas; they seem to have a better sense of themselves, and the general education level is higher (this is mostly due to the fact that virtually no one ever drops out of school in a small town and cutting class is almost impossible, so even the least-educated people have spent 12 years at a desk).
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Chuck Klosterman (Fargo Rock City: A Heavy Metal Odyssey in Rural North Dakota)
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A study of emissions from US metropolitan areas between 1999 and 2008 found that, contrary to expectations, CO2 emissions scale proportionally with city size, and that larger cities are not metabolically more efficient than smaller ones.38 The scaling coefficient was only 7 percent lower than 1.0—that is, every 1 percent rise in population led to a 0.93 percent rise of emissions.
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Vaclav Smil (Size: How It Explains the World)
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Instead of funding the completion of the Second Avenue subway, billions of dollars may very well be used for other transportation megaprojects in the New York metropolitan area, such as constructing a sorely needed new Hudson River railroad tunnel for New Jersey Transit and Amtrak, replacing the world’s busiest bus terminal at 42nd Street, and improving rail connections to the region’s airports. The MTA still needs to finish the Long Island Rail Road connection to Grand Central Terminal, a project that started along with the Second Avenue subway in the 1960s. Nagaraja, who as president of MTA Capital Construction was once responsible for its construction, referred to this project as “one of the biggest disasters in transit history.
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Philip Mark Plotch (Last Subway: The Long Wait for the Next Train in New York City)
“
Over the next few years, the number of African Americans seeking jobs and homes in and near Palo Alto grew, but no developer who depended on federal government loan insurance would sell to them, and no California state-licensed real estate agent would show them houses. But then, in 1954, one resident of a whites-only area in East Palo Alto, across a highway from the Stanford campus, sold his house to a black family.
Almost immediately Floyd Lowe, president of the California Real Estate Association, set up an office in East Palo Alto to panic white families into listing their homes for sale, a practice known as blockbusting. He and other agents warned that a 'Negro invasion' was imminent and that it would result in collapsing property values. Soon, growing numbers of white owners succumbed to the scaremongering and sold at discounted prices to the agents and their speculators. The agents, including Lowe himself, then designed display ads with banner headlines-"Colored Buyers!"-which they ran in San Francisco newspapers. African Americans desperate for housing, purchased the homes at inflated prices. Within a three-month period, one agent alone sold sixty previously white-owned properties to African Americans. The California real estate commissioner refused to take any action, asserting that while regulations prohibited licensed agents from engaging in 'unethical practices,' the exploitation of racial fear was not within the real estate commission's jurisdiction. Although the local real estate board would ordinarily 'blackball' any agent who sold to a nonwhite buyer in the city's white neighborhoods (thereby denying the agent access to the multiple listing service upon which his or her business depended), once wholesale blockbusting began, the board was unconcerned, even supportive.
At the time, the Federal Housing Administration and Veterans Administration not only refused to insure mortgages for African Americans in designated white neighborhoods like Ladera; they also would not insure mortgages for whites in a neighborhood where African Americans were present. So once East Palo Alto was integrated, whites wanting to move into the area could no longer obtain government-insured mortgages. State-regulated insurance companies, like the Equitable Life Insurance Company and the Prudential Life Insurance Company, also declared that their policy was not to issue mortgages to whites in integrated neighborhoods. State insurance regulators had no objection to this stance. The Bank of America and other leading California banks had similar policies, also with the consent of federal banking regulators.
Within six years the population of East Palo Alto was 82 percent black. Conditions deteriorated as African Americans who had been excluded from other neighborhoods doubled up in single-family homes. Their East Palo Alto houses had been priced so much higher than similar properties for whites that the owners had difficulty making payments without additional rental income. Federal and state hosing policy had created a slum in East Palo Alto.
With the increased density of the area, the school district could no longer accommodate all Palo Alto students, so in 1958 it proposed to create a second high school to accommodate teh expanding student population. The district decided to construct the new school in the heart of what had become the East Palo Alto ghetto, so black students in Palo Alto's existing integrated building would have to withdraw, creating a segregated African American school in the eastern section and a white one to the west. the board ignored pleas of African American and liberal white activists that it draw an east-west school boundary to establish two integrated secondary schools.
In ways like these, federal, state, and local governments purposely created segregation in every metropolitan area of the nation.
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Richard Rothstein (The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America)
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Government's commitment to separating residential areas by race began nationwide following the violent suppression of Reconstruction after 1877. Although the Supreme Court in 1917 forbade the first wave of policies—racial segregation by zoning ordinance—the federal government began to recommend ways that cities could evade that ruling, not only in the southern and border states but across the country. In the 1920s a Harding administration committee promoted zoning ordinances that distinguished single-family from multifamily districts. Although government publications did not say it in as many words, committee members made little effort to hide that an important purpose was to prevent racial integration. Simultaneously, and through the 1920s and the Hoover administration, the government conducted a propaganda campaign directed at white middle-class families to persuade them to move out of apartments and into single-family dwellings. During the 1930s the Roosevelt administration created maps of every metropolitan area, divided into zones of foreclosure risk based in part on the race of their occupants. The administration then insured white homeowners' mortgages if they lived in all-white neighborhoods into which there was little danger of African Americans moving. After World War II the federal government went further and spurred the suburbanization of every metropolitan area by guaranteeing bank loans to mass-production builders who would create the all-white subdivisions that came to ring American cities.
In 1973, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights concluded that the 'housing industry, aided and abetted by Government, must bear the primary responsibility for the legacy of segregated housing. . . . Government and private industry came together to create a system of residential segregation.
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Richard Rothstein (The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America)
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In 1884, for instance, they gave £750 for a piece at the eastern end of Allhallows’ Churchyard, London Wall. The remainder of that little ground is now a public garden, laid out in 1894 by the Metropolitan Public Gardens Association, and is a quiet resting-place in the busy thoroughfare, with a piece of the ancient City wall still existing in it.
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Isabella M. Holmes (The London Burial Grounds Notes on Their History from the Earliest Times to the Present Day)
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Many East Siders pushed the MTA to add a station at 96th Street. Metropolitan Hospital, a city-owned facility located at 97th Street, sent about one hundred doctors, nurses, and other employees to the hearing. One of its directors charged the MTA with “brutal insensitivity toward the sick poor” and said it was not a coincidence that Rockefeller University and New York Hospital, where the governor was a major benefactor, would have much more convenient access. After the hearing, which lasted four hours and fifteen minutes, the MTA board subsequently voted to add a new station at 96th Street. The Bronx did not have as much political clout as the Upper East Side.
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Philip Mark Plotch (Last Subway: The Long Wait for the Next Train in New York City)
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During the Blitz of 1940–1941, for example, as German bombs rained down on London, isolated populations of Culex mosquitoes were confined to the air-raid tunnel shelters of the Underground Tube along with the city’s resilient citizens. These trapped mosquitoes quickly adapted to feed on mice, rats, and humans instead of birds and are now a species of mosquito distinct from their aboveground parental counterparts.* What should have taken thousands of years of evolution was accomplished by these mining sapper mosquitoes in less than one hundred years. “In another 100 years time,” jokes Richard Jones, former president of the British Entomological and Natural History Society, “there may be separate Circle Line, Metropolitan Line and Jubilee Line mosquito species in the tunnels below London.
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Timothy C. Winegard (The Mosquito: A Human History of Our Deadliest Predator)
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As you may have discovered, there is no doubt that remote work has benefits. Commute times disappear. Operational costs get slashed. Bloated travel budgets are no longer imperative. Hiring and retaining employees without asking them to relocate from their home countries or domestic cities becomes conceivable, resolving global travel barriers. Astronomical real estate costs that exist in some locations have the potential to get reduced significantly, a welcome solution in an economic downturn. Societal ills like poverty gaps between rural and metropolitan areas might have the opportunity to close while simultaneously creating an untapped labor pool for companies. Gender gaps may shrink as organizations rethink their remote capacities for maternity leave. Gas emissions can decline, having measurable impact on environmental sustainability.
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Tsedal Neeley (Remote Work Revolution: Succeeding from Anywhere)
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In New York City and San Francisco, for example, rents increased from about a quarter of median incomes in 2000 to almost half (42% and 46% respectively) by 2016.6 Meanwhile, 51% of renter households in the nation’s nine largest metropolitan areas pay more than 30% of their income – the standard maximum ratio for affordability – on housing.7 Saving for a deposit to buy a home becomes virtually impossible under such conditions.
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Josh Ryan-Collins (Why Can't You Afford a Home? (The Future of Capitalism))
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Page 207
In the inner cities of all the major metropolitan areas across the United States, ethnic Koreans represent an increasingly glaring market-dominant minority vis-à-vis the relatively economically depressed African-American majorities around them. In New York City, Koreans, less than .1 percent of the city’s population, own 85 percent of produce stands, 70 percent of grocery stores, 80 percent of nail salons, and 60 percent of dry cleaners. In portions of downtown Los Angeles, Koreans own 40 percent of the real estate but constitute only 10 percent of the residents. Korean-American businesses in Los Angeles County number roughly 25,000, with gross sales of $4.5 billion. Nationwide, Korean entrepreneurs have in the last decade come to control 80 percent of the $2.5 billion African-American beauty business, which—“like preaching and burying people”—historically was always a “black” business and a source of pride, income, and jobs for African-Americans. “They’ve come in and taken away a market that’s not rightfully theirs,” is the common, angry view among inner-city blacks.
Page 208
At a December 31, 1994, rally, Norman “Grand Dad” Reide, vice president of Al Sharpton’s National Action Network, accused Koreans of “reaping a financial harvest at the expense of black people” and recommended that “we boycott the bloodsucking Koreans.” More recently, in November 2000, African-Americans firebombed a Korean-owned grocery store in northeast Washington, D.C. The spray-painted message on the charred walls: “Burn them down, Shut them down, Black Power!
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Amy Chua (World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability)
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Typically such reports focus on urban water supplies. The emphasis is understandable: most people live in metropolitan areas and water from their taps is what will make them sick if contaminated. But most freshwater is actually used by agriculture—almost 70 percent, according to the U.N. Food and Agricultural Organization. Just 12 percent goes to direct human consumption: drinking, cooking, washing, and so on. (Industry takes the rest.) For most of human history, agriculture’s overwhelming thirst didn’t matter; water was plentiful enough for all. But now populations have risen enough that the requirements of families and the requirements of agriculture are colliding. The water problems of cities and agriculture
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Charles C. Mann (The Wizard and the Prophet: Two Remarkable Scientists and Their Dueling Visions to Shape Tomorrow's World)
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In 1965, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then an official in the U.S. Department of Labor, called the inner cities after the arrival of the southern migrants “a tangle of pathology.” He argued that what had attracted southerners like Ida Mae, George, and Robert was welfare: “the differential in payments between jurisdictions has to encourage some migration toward urban centers in the North,” he wrote, adding his own italics. Their reputation had preceded them. It had not been good. Neither was it accurate. The general laws of migration hold that the greater the obstacles and the farther the distance traveled, the more ambitious the migrants. “It is the higher status segments of a population which are most residentially mobile,” the sociologists Karl and Alma Taeuber wrote in a 1965 analysis of census data on the migrants, published the same year as the Moynihan Report. “As the distance of migration increases,” wrote the migration scholar Everett Lee, “the migrants become an increasingly superior group.” Any migration takes some measure of energy, planning, and forethought. It requires not only the desire for something better but the willingness to act on that desire to achieve it. Thus the people who undertake such a journey are more likely to be either among the better educated of their homes of origin or those most motivated to make it in the New World, researchers have found. “Migrants who overcome a considerable set of intervening obstacles do so for compelling reasons, and such migrations are not taken lightly,” Lee wrote. “Intervening obstacles serve to weed out some of the weak or the incapable.” The South had erected some of the highest barriers to migration of any people seeking to leave one place for another in this country. By the time the migrants made it out, they were likely willing to do whatever it took to make it, so as not to have to return south and admit defeat. It would be decades before census data could be further analyzed and bear out these observations. One myth they had to overcome was that they were bedraggled hayseeds just off the plantation. Census figures paint a different picture. By the 1930s, nearly two out of every three colored migrants to the big cities of the North and West were coming from towns or cities in the South, as did George Starling and Robert Foster, rather than straight from the field. “The move to northern cities was dominated by urban southerners,” wrote the scholar J. Trent Alexander. Thus the latter wave of migrants brought a higher level of sophistication than was assumed at the time. “Most Negro migrants to northern metropolitan areas have had considerable previous experience with urban living,” the Taeuber study observed. Overall, southern migrants represented the most educated segment of the southern black population they left, the sociologist Stewart Tolnay wrote in 1998. In 1940 and 1950, colored people who left the South “averaged nearly two more years of completed schooling than those who remained in the South.” That middle wave of migrants found themselves, on average, more than two years behind the blacks they encountered
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Isabel Wilkerson (The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration)
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Well before the London Metropolitan Police were formed, Southern cities like New Orleans, Savannah, and Charleston had paid full-time police who wore uniforms, were accountable to local civilian officials, and were connected to a broader criminal justice system. These early police forces were derived not from the informal watch system as happened in the Northeast, but instead from slave patrols, and developed to prevent revolts.
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Alex S. Vitale (The End of Policing)
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The city’s garment industry thrived on cheap immigrant labor and inexpensive transit services. But the combination of rapidly increasing ridership and insufficient funding for the subways created a problem that raised the ire of numerous civic groups in the mid-1920s. A leader of the Metropolitan Housewives’ League pointed out “the inhuman, indecent, and dangerous crowding and jamming of passengers, the unclean trains and platforms, and especially the conditions of the public waiting and toilet rooms which are filthy, unsanitary and disease breeding.” Likewise, the City Club of New York told city officials, “We do not get a civilized ride for a nickel today. We get instead a chance to hang on, like a chimpanzee, to a flying ring suspended from the roof of the car while we are crushed to the point of indecency by our fellow sufferers.
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Philip Mark Plotch (Last Subway: The Long Wait for the Next Train in New York City)