Urbanisation Quotes

Since the 1970S, financial innova­tions such as the securitisation of mortgage debt and the spreading of investment risks through the creation of derivative markets, all tacitly (and now, as we see, actually) backed by state power, have permitted a huge flow of excess liquidity into all facets of urbanisa­tion and built environment construction worldwide.

In this age of urbanisation and virtual connections, it is possible to have hundreds of friends on social media but not a single heartfelt relationship in reality.

You came to tell us that the great cities are in favour of the gold standard; we reply that the great cities rest upon our broad and fertile plains. Burn down your cities and leave our farms, and your cities will spring up again as if by magic. But destroy out farms and the grass will grow in the city...You shall not press down upon the brow of labour this crown of thorns. You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.

There would remain no sign of you ever having played in this house. Your childhood is going to be swept under a camel-skin rug and elevators are going to be built over the lake we once swam in. This address, as we know it, would be lost forever and we’ll wake up in a box-sized room: cramped, trampled and sensationally unhappy.' ('Left from Dhakeshwari')

In postcolonial Africa, single dwelling housing is the biggest perpetrator of urban segregation.

... always the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty in the world." --- quoted by Evan Osnos to describe the rapidly urbanising China

Transferring in haste, I felt a curious breathlessness as the cars rumbled on through the early afternoon sunlight into territories I had always read of but had never before visited. I knew I was entering an altogether older-fashioned and more primitive New England than the mechanised, urbanised coastal and southern areas where all my life had been spent; an unspoiled, ancestral New England without the foreigners and factory-smoke, billboards and concrete roads, of the sections which modernity has touched. There would be odd survivals of that continuous native life whose deep roots make it the one authentic outgrowth of the landscape—-the continuous native life which keeps alive strange ancient memories, and fertilises the soil for shadowy, marvellous, and seldom-mentioned beliefs.

On the whole popular fiction in Victorian Scotland is not overwhelmingly backward-looking; it is not obsessed by rural themes; it does not shrink from urbanisation or its problems; it is not idyllic in its approach; it does not treat the common people as comic or quaint. The second half of the nineteenth century is not a period of creative trauma or linguistic decline; it is one of the richest and most vital episodes in the history of Scottish popular culture.

When we take a closer look at the real costs of urbanisation in the global economy, we can see how far this is from the truth. Precisely because there are so many people, a globalised economic model which can only feed, house and clothe a small minority has to be abandoned. ... The devastating consequences of urbanisation are not only environmental; they are also social. ... In providing alternatives to urbanisation and to a globalised economy, (the eco-village movement) presents models for living close to the land and in community with one another.

We are still learning the lessons of urbanisation, and how it affects every aspect of our lives. And yet urban design is something owned and practised by architects and city planners rather than by neuroscientists or psychologists. This is a great pity, something to be lamented, because the science and sensibility that psychology and neuroscience can bring to urban design – to improve the liveability and walkability of a city – is significant, as we will see. Urban design that fully and properly takes account of the needs of walkers will make cities much more attractive places to live and work.

The ideology of liberal humanism found expression in the earliest reviews of Hardy’s writing and remained a dominant force until the explosion of literary theory in the 1980s. It is a broad and still influential category. It endorses the moral value of the individual, and the strength of the human spirit. It prefers the integrity of an organic rural society to the anonymity and materialism of an urbanised and technological world. Applied to fiction, this ideology involves the naturalisation of the novel’s world and its values, and the recognition of fictional character as presenting a unified subject.

That Mrs. Munt should be the first to discover the misfortune was not remarkable, for she was so interested in the flats, that she watched their every mutation with unwearying care. In theory she despised them — they took away that old-world look — they cut off the sun — flats house a flashy type of person.

The Industrial Revolution brought about dozens of major upheavals in human society. Adapting to industrial time is just one of them. Other notable examples include urbanisation, the disappearance of the peasantry, the rise of the industrial proletariat, the empowerment of the common person, democratisation, youth culture and the disintegration of patriarchy. Yet all of these upheavals are dwarfed by the most momentous social revolution that ever befell humankind: the collapse of the family and the local community and their replacement by the state and the market. As best we can tell, from the earliest times, more than a million years ago, humans lived in small, intimate communities, most of whose members were kin. The Cognitive Revolution and the Agricultural Revolution did not change that. They glued together families and communities to create tribes, cities, kingdoms and empires, but families and communities remained the basic building blocks of all human societies. The Industrial Revolution, on the other hand, managed within little more than two centuries to break these building blocks into atoms. Most of the traditional functions of families and communities were handed over to states and markets.

Do you know what caused the downfall of the ancient world? The ruling class had become rich and urbanised. From then on, it had been inspired by the wish to ensure for its heirs a life free from care. It's a state of mind that entails the following corollary : the more heirs there are, the less each one of them receives. Hence the limitation of births. The power of each family depended to some extent on the number of slaves it possessed. Thus there grew up the plebs which was driven to multiplication, faced by a patrician class which was shrinking. The day when Christianity abolished the frontier that had hitherto separated the two classes, the Roman patriciate found itself submerged in the resulting mass. It's the fall in the birthrate that's at the bottom of everything.

The Marxist prediction that capitalism would ultimately collapse and be replaced by socialism (Khrushchev’s tactless ‘We will bury you!’) had been a comfort to Soviet Communists as they struggled against Russia’s historical ‘backwardness’ to make a modern, industrialised, urbanised society. They made it, more or less, by the beginning of the 1980s. Soviet power and status was recognised throughout the world. ‘Soviet man’ became a recognisable animal, with close relatives in the Soviet bloc in Eastern Europe, more problematic relatives in China and North Korea, and admirers in the Third World. Then, in one of the most spectacular unpredicted ‘accidents’ of modern history, it was Soviet ‘socialism’ that collapsed, giving way to what the Russians called the ‘wild capitalism’ of the 1990s. An array of fifteen new successor states, including the Russian Federation, emerged blinking into the light of freedom – all, including the Russians, loudly complaining that in the old days of the Soviet Union they had been victims of exploitation.

Growth of industrial output I.2 Output in selected industries I.3 Urbanisation 2.1 Investment

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.

Such was life; everything passed away; the fields and woodlands of boyhood became built upon; streets and pavements and lamp posts arose where warblers and willow wrens had sung; nothing ever remained the same.

Not long ago, local farms and markets were the only source of food in one's life. We understood where our food came from, the ground in which it grew, and its link to our Creator. Today, however, with the globalisation of the food industry and the ever-increasing urbanisation of humanity, we've lost this link to the earth and forgotten our dependence on the Creator to provide food for us.

In urbanisation, the suburbs are just as monocultural (as agriculture), with a lifestyle that maximises the excessive consumption of material goods in an astonishingly wasteful manner and with isolating and individualising social effects. Capital dominates the practices whereby we collectively and even individually relate to nature. It disregards anything other than functionalist aesthetic values. In its ruinous approach to the sheer beauty and infinite diversity of a natural world (of which we are all a part) it exhibits its own utterly barren qualities. If nature is fecund, given over to the perpetual creation of novelty, then capital cuts that novelty into pieces and reassembles the bits into pure technology. Capital carries within itself a dessicating definition not only of the teeming diversity of the natural world but of the tremendous potentiality of human nature to evolve freely its own capacities and powers. Capital's relation to nature and human nature is alienating in the extreme.

We at Takapūwāhia – or ‘the Pā’ as we call it – have had a city build itself around us. We’ve been urbanised only reluctantly. In some respects, the process has been good, and in some not so good. It’s meant we have had to adapt and we continue to do so.

A civilization must be judged by its standards not by its expenditure.

It has been estimated that only one in four of the empire’s citizens lived above subsistence level,13 and a rural population had become increasingly urbanised.

The Industrial Revolution brought about dozens of major upheavals in human society. Adapting to industrial time is just one of them. Other notable examples include urbanisation, the disappearance of the peasantry, the rise of the industrial proletariat, the empowerment of the common person, democratisation, youth culture and the disintegration of patriarchy. Yet all of these upheavals are dwarfed by the most momentous social revolution that ever befell humankind: the collapse of the family and the local community and their replacement by the state and the market.

In between the two extremes, there’s a sweet spot for commodities demand. After per capita income rises above $4,000, countries typically industrialise and urbanise, creating a strong, and sometimes disproportionate, relationship between further economic growth and extra commodity demand. China hit the commodity sweet spot around the time that Davis wrote his Xstrata memo: its GDP per capita reached $3,959 in 2001.6 Davis’s analysis wasn’t based on detailed economic modelling, but he knew from his travels there that something big was happening in China that could supercharge the commodity markets

Allied shipping repairs gave a great boost to South African steel manufacturing. By 1943, manufacturing had overtaken mining as the largest employer and producer of wealth in South Africa. With increasing land restrictions and poverty in the rural areas, black people were already pouring into the rising manufacturing centres of the Witwatersrand, Cape Town and Port Elizabeth. It was a major period of black urbanisation in South Africa, and a time of great opportunities for some. But it was also a time of growing black urban poverty and unemployment, as the numbers seeking work far outstripped the numbers of new jobs available. It was a situation already approaching crisis point when the 200,000 whites and 100,000 blacks serving in Allied armies overseas returned to South Africa after the war.

questions Those taking a new leadership role should ask: How is your industry changing and, in particular, how are your customers’ expectations evolving? What are the global developments (for example, increased migration, urbanisation or proliferation of mobile communications) that could benefit, threaten or generally alter the way that you do business? What are the political, economic, social, technological, legislative or environmental trends that could affect your business? What situation best describes the challenges and opportunities faced by the business? Is this clearly and widely recognised? What specific challenges are likely to be encountered? How can they be addressed? What are the major opportunities and what action is needed to realise them? Are there quick wins or low-hanging fruit that can be secured? What are the greatest risks, threats and potential pitfalls? How will these be avoided or overcome? What are the expectations of stakeholders? Are these expectations realistic – do they need adjusting? What should be the priorities?

Un panneau pédagogique donne les chiffres de la population juive de Jassy. J’ai pris quelques secondes, avant de sortir, pour les noter au passage, pour moi, pour vous : 1803 : 2420 chefs de famille. 1831:17570 personnes. 1899 : 39 400 personnes. 1921 : 43 500 personnes. 1941 : 35 400 personnes. 1947 : 30 000 personnes. 1980 : 1800. 1996 : 600 personnes. Forte expansion entre 1803 et 1831, et surtout à la fin du siècle vers 1870–1880 (c’est l’époque de l’urbanisation) ; forte émigration vers l’Occident en 1899, puis vers Israël dans les années 1960, aboutissant à la situation actuelle. (p. 73)

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

It was as if the city’s old, mossy walls, its ancient fountains covered in beautiful script, and its wooden homes, twisting and rotting to the point of leaning on one another for support, had all been burned down and wrecked into nothingness, and the new streets, concrete houses, neon-lit shops, and apartment blocks taking their place had been built to seem even older, more intimidating and incomprehensible, than any place before. The city was no longer an enormous, familiar home but a faithless space in which anyone who got the chance added more concrete, more streets, courtyards, walls, pavements, and shops.

Perhaps the most significant of these are two related aspects characteristic of Japanese urbanisation: the intense intermixture of differing land uses, and the extensive areas of unplanned, haphazard urban development. Mixed land use is so prevalent in Japanese cities that it may be hard to believe the government Figure 0.1 The “busy place” (sakariba) of Ueno is one Japan’s most enduring central city entertainment and shopping districts, and was already famous in the Tokugawa period for its theatres and nightlife.

While Australia is superficially referred to as a continental nation, upon closer scrutiny, it is in fact an archipelago.