Transit Oriented Developments Quotes

The vertical dimension reflects the transition from agrarian societies to industrial societies, which brings secularization, bureaucratization, urbanization, and rationalization. These changes are linked with a polarization between traditional and secular-rational values. Societies whose people have traditional religious values fall toward the bottom of Figure 2.1; those with secular-rational values fall near the top. The people of traditional societies emphasize religion; they consider large families desirable and are in favor of showing more respect for authority; they rank relatively low on achievement motivation and oppose divorce, abortion, and homosexuality. The people of other societies consistently fall toward the opposite end of the spectrum on all of these orientations. The people of societies located near the top of this dimension have a secular outlook and show relatively high levels of political interest: state authority is more important for them than traditional religious authority. Traditional values are negatively linked with a society’s level of economic development but positively linked with

Societies with traditional values tend to emphasize maintaining the family and having many children. This is not just a matter of lip service; a society’s values and its actual fertility rate are strongly correlated. This sets up a self-reinforcing process: traditional values not only inhibit norms that promote economic development; they also encourage high population growth rates that tend to offset the effects of any economic growth that does occur, making it still more difficult to raise per capita income. Conversely, both industrialization and the rise of knowledge societies are linked with declining birth rates, so the pie gets divided up among fewer people, with cultural and economic factors constituting a mutually reinforcing syndrome. The transition from industrial society to knowledge society gives rise to another major dimension of cross-cultural variation on which a wide range of orientations are structured. The horizontal dimension of Figure 2.1 reflects the degree to which a society emphasizes survival values (toward the left of the figure) or self-expression values (toward the right). Postmaterialist values are a core component of self-expression values. Societies that emphasize self-expression values have

hypothesis that psychically sensitive individuals may somehow, through some as-yet-undiscovered “psychic retina,” be detecting large, rapid changes in entropy as bright beacons on the landscape ahead in time.24 May’s argument makes a certain amount of sense given the classical equivalence of time’s arrow with entropy. Things that are very rapidly dissipating heat, such as stars and nuclear reactors and houses on fire, or even just a living body making the ultimate transition to the state of disorder called death, could perhaps be seen as concentrated time. But steep entropy gradients also represent a category of information that is intrinsically interesting and meaningful to humans and toward which we are particularly vigilant, whatever the sensory channel through which we receive it. An attentional bias to entropy gradients has been shown for the conventional senses of sight and hearing, not just psi phenomena. Stimuli involving sudden, rapid motion, and especially fire and heat, as well as others’ deaths and illness, are signals that carry important information related to our survival, so we tend to notice and remember them.25 Thus, an alternative explanation for the link between psi accuracy and entropy is the perverse pleasure—that is, jouissance—aroused in people by signs of destruction. Some vigilant part of us needs be constantly scanning the environment for indications of threats to our life and health, which means we need on some level to find that search rewarding. If we were not rewarded, we would not keep our guard up. Entropic signals like smoke from an advancing fire, or screams or cries from a nearby victim of violence or illness, or the grief of a neighbor for their family member are all signifiers, part of what could be called the “natural language of peril.” We find it “enjoyable,” albeit in an ambivalent or repellent way, to engage with such signifiers because, again, their meaning, their signified, is our own survival. The heightened accuracy toward entropic targets that May observed could reflect a heightened fascination with fire, heat, and chaotic situations more generally, an attentional bias to survival-relevant stimuli. Our particular psychic fascination with fire may also reflect its central role as perhaps the most decisive technology in our evolutionary development as well as the most dangerous, always able to turn on its user in an unlucky instant.26 The same primitive threat-vigilance orientation accounts for the unique allure of artworks depicting destruction or the evidence of past destruction. In the 18th century, the sublime entered the vocabulary of art critics and philosophers like Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant to describe the aesthetic appeal of ruins, impenetrable wilderness, thunderstorms and storms at sea, and other visual signals of potential or past peril, including the slow entropy of erosion and decay. Another definition of the sublime would be the semiotic of entropy.

Worse yet, zoning often thwarts transit where it already exists, squandering taxpayer investments in transit—by blocking potential riders—and forcing more Americans into auto-oriented developments. And it seems to do so against the wishes of many residents and employers. As urban planner Jonathan Levine observes, demand to locate in and adjacent to transit is quite high among many

Over the years there also has been a transitional shift of labour legislations being exclusively employee oriented to advanced socio-economic lex of harmonious construction, emphasizing on the overall development of the economy builders (work-force) of the nation.