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Quote by Mary Ellen Chase

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Mary Ellen Chase
Mary Ellen Chase

Mary Ellen Chase was an American author renowned for her children's literature. Her works are celebrated for their rich imagination and profound depiction of the natural environment, making them highly popular with readers. more

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“Artmaking has been, at least since bohemia and modernism appeared in 19th century Paris, largely an urban enterprise: the closer to museums, publishers, audiences, patrons, politicians, other enemies, and each other, the better for artists and for art. For if cities have been essential to artists, artists have been essential to cities...Being an artist was one way of being a participant in the debate about meaning and value, and the closer to the center of things is the more one can participate. This is part of what makes urbanity worth celebrating, this braiding together of disparate lives, but the new gentrification threatens to yank out some strands together, diminishing urbanism itself. Perhaps the new urbanism will result in old cities that function like suburbs as those who were suburbia's blandly privileged take them over.”

UrbanismGentrification
Book:Hollow City: The Siege of San Francisco and the Crisis of American Urbanism
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“In articulating their theory of growth machines, Logan and Molotch contrast the exchange value of land (its economic worth) with its use value (value as living space) to illustrate the conflicting interests of developer-led growth coalitions focused on exchange value and the interests of city residents on use value. In North America, according to the two authors, exchange regularly trumps use. This fact underlies the development of a growth machine. Growth machines develop in the following manner: place entrepreneurs see the potential for profit from the development and intensification of their property holdings, namely, through the increase in rent. These "rentiers" develop a close relationship with other local business interests. In particular, businesses that rely on the growth of a city to increase their profitability, such as newspapers, are likely to support the interests of developers. Developers and their allies, through constant interaction with government, through ample campaign contributions, and through their ability to organize and mobilize, can co-opt local politicians, effectively coercing their involvement in the growth coalition. They supply politicians with the funds necessary to run effective election campaigns. Politicians, in turn, along with local media and other members of the growth coalition, help to perpetuate a link between civic pride and a city's economic and physical growth. This link undermines interest in the use value of land (specifically the use and maintenance of existing areas) as the city focuses increasingly on growth. Molotch argues in a later article that this coalition of growth interests reflected the most common political coalition in American cities, while acknowledging its limited applicability elsewhere. He argues that Americans' acceptance of developers' actions " as the baseline of urban process, rather than as disruptions," is evidence that Americans take developers' "presence for granted"....Numerous authors, in adopting growth machine theory, also added anti-growth citizen coalitions to the mix. Current analyses adopting the theory now invariably include the neighborhood-association-led anti-growth coalition as the foil of the developer-led growth coalition.”

Urban PlanningGentrificationAnti Gentrification
Book:Planning Politics in Toronto: The Ontario Municipal Board and Urban Development
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“By itself, gentrification can't explain the new geography of race that has emerged since the turn of the millennium... Gentrification is key to understanding what happened to our cities at the turn of the millennium. But it is only half of the story. It is only the visible side of the larger problem: resegregation.”

RaceRace RelationsRace And Racism In AmericaGentrification
Book:We Gon' Be Alright: Notes on Race and Resegregation
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“I had been sleepin there for a long time hwen the Fort Worth police put up no-loiterin signs all over the place and made me have to move my sleepin spot. I found out later some rich white folks was "revitalizin" downtown. Raggedy black fellas sleepin ont he sidwalks wadn't part of the plan.”

GentrificationSocial Inequality
Book:Same Kind of Different As Me: A Modern-Day Slave, an International Art Dealer, and the Unlikely Woman Who Bound Them Together
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“No one had second-guessed whether we belonged or were a good investment. The realtors had talked about how we were a part of a wave of new people coming in to enrich the neighborhood, make it better and more valuable, without knowing a damn thing about us. No, that's not true. The realtors had known one thing, that I was starting to see was more important than I'd realized. Us. Them.”

Gentrification
Book:When No One Is Watching
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