Urbanization refers to the movement of people from rural to urban areas enabling cities and towns to grow. Urbanization leads to swift growth in towns and cities. The fast-paced growth is often accompanied by job opportunities, infrastructure development and better economic, political, and social mileages compared to rural areas.
While urbanization has got some of its own advantages, the disadvantages related to urbanization are something to worry about. Overpopulation, development of slums, housing problems, disposal of trash, sanitation issues, unemployment, growing landfills are some of the challenges that are faced in urban areas. Here are 51+ powerful quotes on urbanization and urban sprawl.
1. If the earth was an apartment, we wouldn’t be getting our security deposit back.
~ Jim Shubert
2. The right to the city is far more than the individual liberty to access urban resources: it is a right to change ourselves by changing the city.
~ David Harvey
3. Over a decade of citywide rezonings, land speculations, and corporate bidding wars for available commercial space has produced a Darwinian habitat where corporate retail proliferates, and where mom-and-pops have become an endangered species.
~ Alessandro Busà
4. The slurbs, urban sprawl, and the infinite number, of housing developments of the postwar boom have contributed to the architecture of entropy.
~ Robert Smithson
5. The disadvantages of a decentralized, spread-out urban area are tremendous, and the environmental damage of urban sprawl cannot be ignored. As a large city, Tokyo must be used more efficiently and the population density increased.
~ Minoru Mori
6. Urbanization is not about simply increasing the number of urban residents or expanding the area of cities. More importantly, it’s about a complete change from rural to urban style in terms of industry structure, employment, living environment and social security.
~ Li Keqiang
7. History shows that male homosexuality, which like prostitution flourishes with urbanization and soon becomes predictably ritualized, always tends toward decadence.
~ Camille Paglia
8. What’s bad about sprawl is not its uniformity but that it is uniformly bad.
~ James Kunstler
9. Defining sprawl is a little bit like defining pornography. You know it when you see it.
~ Ellen Dunham-Jones
10. The disadvantages of a decentralized, spread-out urban area are tremendous, and the environmental damage of urban sprawl cannot be ignored. As a large city, Tokyo must be used more efficiently and the population density increased.
~ Minoru Mori
11. There’s something about urban life – you walk out your door, and you’re in a steady of stream of life happening around you, and it’s very easy to get caught up in that stream and simply kind of keep on moving.
~ Dani Shapiro
12. Neither cities nor places in them are unordered, unplanned; the question is only whose order, whose planning, for what purpose?
~ Peter Marcuse
13. Urbanization in India is a slow but sure death for her villages and villagers.
~ Mahatma Gandhi
14. Dull, inert cities, it is true, do contain the seeds of their own destruction and little else. But lively, diverse, intense cities contain the seeds of their own regeneration, with energy enough to carry over for problems and needs outside themselves.
~ Jane Jacobs
15. We need more insurgency in the city in order to break unsustainable and privatizing patterns of urban development.
~ Jeffrey Hou
16. The modern city is probably the most unlovely and artificial site this planet affords. The ultimate solution is to abandon it. We shall solve the City Problem by leaving the city.
~ Henry Ford
17. Urbanization has lured more people to bustling metropolises, but precious little thought has been given to what happens when these cities fail. Over time, the underlying systems and processes of civilization – from lead mining to offshore drilling to car commuting – slowly poison us. Power grids brown out, the climate heats up, and industrial accidents ravage ecosystems and cities alike. For all the famed cities with thousands of years of continuity – Paris, London, Cairo, Athens, Rome, Istanbul – most cities just stop.
~ Ben Paynter
18. There are more effective ways of tackling environmental problems – including global warming, proliferation of plastics, urban sprawl, and the loss of biodiversity – than by treaties, top-down regulations, and other approaches offered by big governments and their dependents.
~ Preston Manning
19. Urbanization is putting a lot of stress on already depleting city’s resources and might prove inadequate for the people migrating from rural to urban areas.
~ Rinkesh Kukeja
20. What I like about cities is that everything is king-size, the beauty and the ugliness.
~ Joseph Brodsky
21. There was no doubt about it: the City was the culmination of man’s mastery over the environment. Not space travel, not the fifty colonized worlds that were now so haughtily independent, but the City.
~ Isaac Asimov, The Caves of Steel
22. Hillary Brown understands that for our grandchildren’s sake we must rebuild America and, in doing so, re-imagine our interconnected infrastructure systems to make them more efficient, environmentally safe, and resilient in this age of global urbanization. This fascinating and important book should be required reading for our elected officials and policy-makers.
~ Felix Rohatyn
23. Human civilization has been changing the Earth’s environment for millennia, often to our detriment. Dams, deforestation and urbanization can alter water cycles and wind patterns, occasionally triggering droughts or even creating deserts.
~ Jamais Cascio
24. The freedom to make and remake our cities and ourselves is, I want to argue, one of the most precious yet most neglected of our human rights.
~ David Harvey
25. In urbanization, you think big because you are thinking decades ahead.
~ Kushal Pal Singh
26. Urbanism is the most advanced, concrete fulfillment of a nightmare. Littre defines a nightmare as ‘a state that ends when one awakens with a start after extreme anxiety. But a start against whom? Who has stuffed us to the point of somnolence?
~ Tom McDonough
27. For those who are lost, there will always be cities that feel like home.
~ Simon Van Booy
28. All cities are mad but the madness is gallant. All cities are beautiful but the beauty is grim.
~ Christopher Morley
29. Urbanism works when it creates a journey as desirable as the destination.
~ Paul Goldberger
30. Anyone who believes in indefinite growth on a finite planet is either mad, or an economist.
~ David Attenborough
31. Cities, like cats, will reveal themselves at night.
~ Rupert Brooke
32. The developments in the North were those loosely embraced in the term modernization and included urbanization, industrialization,and mechanization. While those changes went forward apace, the antebellum South changed comparatively little, clinging to its rural, agricultural, labor-intensive economy and its traditional folk culture.
~ C. Vann Woodward
33. Unlike the urban development that I see taking over and swallowing up our precious soil, when we interact with our environment in a way that allows for regeneration and natural spaces, the outcome can be beautiful.
~ Cory Trepanier
34. You can’t understand a city without using its public transportation system.
~ Erol Ozan
35. The keywords of violent economics are urbanization, industrialization, centralization, efficiency, quantity, speed. . . . The problem of evolving a nonviolent way of economic life [in the West] and that of developing the underdeveloped countries may well turn out to be largely identical.
~ E. F. Schumacher
36. In an urban area, you’re not going to be an hour away from another post office.
~ Blake Farenthold
37. Living in a city shouldn’t make you cynical and living in a village shouldn’t make you vulnerable.
~ Amit Kalantri, Wealth of Words
38. The right to the city is far more than the individual liberty to access urban resources: it is a right to change ourselves by changing the city. It is, moreover, a common rather than an individual right since this transformation inevitably depends upon the exercise of a collective power to reshape the processes of urbanization. The freedom to make and remake our cities and ourselves is, I want to argue, one of the most precious yet most neglected of our human rights.
~ David Harvey
39. If it was not for Rajiv Gandhi, urbanization in India would have been history.
~ Kushal Pal Singh
40. We don’t want a plan based on land uses. We want a plan based on experiences. Who visits downtown to see land uses?
~ Mitchell Silver
41. You might declare that global warming and energy insecurity, not to mention urban sprawl and pollution, have intensified the sin of indulging one’s motoring desires. And I would not argue with that point. You’re right. I am a bad man. But over the long term, if you want to develop a new transportation and energy policy, you’d probably want to err on the side of assuming that people won’t change much. And it is human nature to like to be empowered.
~ Joel Achenbach
42. Will urban sprawl spread so far that most people lose all touch with nature? Will the day come when the only bird a typical American child ever sees is a canary in a pet shop window? When the only wild animal he knows is a rat-glimpsed on a night drive through some city slum? When the only tree he touches is the cleverly fabricated plastic evergreen that shades his gifts on Christmas morning?
~ Frank N. Ikard
43. Defining sprawl is a little bit like defining pornography. You know it when you see it.
~ Ellen Dunham-Jones
44. Growth is inevitable and desirable, but destruction of community character is not. The question is not whether your part of the world is going to change. The question is how.
~ Edward T. McMahon
45. Ultimately we need to recognize that while humans continue to build urban landscapes, we share these spaces with others species.
~ David Suzuki
46. All urbanization, pushed beyond a certain point, automatically becomes suburbanization…. Every great city is just a collection of suburbs. Its inhabitants do not live in their city; they merely inhabit it.
~ Aldous Huxley
47. Urbanization, one of humankind’s most successful and ambitious programs, is the triumph of the unnatural over the natural, the grid over the organic… Underway on a scale never before witnessed, one side effect of urbanization is the liberation of vast depopulated territories for the efficient production of ‘nature’.
~ Bruce Mau
48. Bringing nature back into the city is a way to deal with urban sprawl. If cities feel a little more natural, people like to live there rather than moving out and dividing up another piece of land that shouldn’t be touched.
~ Stone Gossard
49. The one thing that all great cities have in common is that they are all different.
~ Cate Blanchett
50. Urban residents, most of them middle class, have a much better sense of their environmental rights, and they’re willing to take to the streets.
~ Ma Jun
51. A city has no sense, no sentiment, no soul.
~ Amit Kalantri, Wealth of Words
52. I’m a kid from New York, so urban life reflected in art and music was around me and accessible and tangible.
~ Zoe Saldana
