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Sprawl Quotes

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Sprawl Quotes

“Hey! Pal! How do I get to town from here? And he ssid: Well, just take a right where they're gonna build that new shopping mall, go straight past where they're gonna put in the freeway, take a left at what's gonna be the new sports center, and keep going until you hit the place where they´re thiinking of building that drive-in bank. You can't miss it. And I said: This must be the place.”

“Hey! Pal! How do I get to town from here? And he said: Well, just take a right where they're gonna build that new shopping mall, go straight past where they're gonna put in the freeway, take a left at what's gonna be the new sports center, and keep going until you hit the place where they´re thinking of building that drive-in bank. You can't miss it. And I said: This must be the place.”

“Gomi. Thirty-five percent of the landmass of Tokyo was built on gomi, on level tracts reclaimed from the Bay through a century's systematic dumping. Gomi, there, was a resource to be managed, to be collected, carefully plowed under. London's relationship to gomi was more subtle, more oblique. To Kumiko's eyes, the bulk of the city consisted of gomi, of structures the Japanese economy would long ago have devoured in its relentless hunger for space in which to build. Yet these structures revealed, even to Kumiko, the fabric of time, each wall patched by generation of hands in an ongoing task of restoration. The English valued their gomi in its own right, in a way she had only begun to understand; they inhabited it. Gomi in the Sprawl was something else: a rich humus, a decay that sprouted prodigies in steel and polymer. The apparent lack of planning alone was enough to dizzy her, running so entirely opposite the value her own culture placed on efficient land use. Her tax ride from the airport had already shown her decay, whole blocks in ruins, unglazed windows gaping above sidewalks heaped with trash. And faces staring as the armoed hover made its way through the streets.”

“In 1995 Bank of America issued a famous report on sprawl in California. The bank pronounced: 'Urban job centers have decentralized to the suburbs. New housing tracts have moved even deeper into agriculturally and environmentally sensitive areas. Private auto use continues to rise. This acceleration of sprawl has surfaced enormous social, environmental, and economic costs, which until now have been hidden, ignored, or quietly borne by society.”

“Sociologists point out that the suburbs have done an efficient job of sorting people into communities where they will be surrounded by people of the same socioeconomic status. Meanwhile, the architectures of sprawl inhibit political activity that requires face-to-face interaction. It is not that sprawl makes political activity impossible, but by privatizing gathering space and dispersing human activity, sprawl makes political gatherings less likely.”