From the space station’s distance mankind is a creature that comes out only at night

From the space station’s distance mankind is a creature that comes out only at night. Mankind is the light of cities and the illuminated filament of roads. By day, it’s gone. It hides in plain sight.

S. Harvey, Orbital (2024), loc. 302

We’ve got very used to this division very quickly, when it’s completely unnatural for humans

The same new survey we conducted in 2022 also tested whether we’d noticed this separation – and we have: two-thirds of us correctly say young people are more likely to live in cities and older people outside them. But over half of us say that’s always been the case, when this is actually a new trend that we’ve only seen in the last twenty or thirty years in the UK. We’ve got very used to this division very quickly, when it’s completely unnatural for humans.

B. Duffy, The Generation Divide (2023), loc. 175

The addition of a family of four to the typical urban area necessitates an additional ten thousand square feet of parking space

Since each major urban center served but a single function, parking lots began to multiple rapidly. Culture center parking serves only its patrons and is not used most of the time. Mall lots are all but vacant after nine in the evening. Arena lots, school lots, medical center lots, etc., enjoy no shared use but must be there. We have arrived at that point where the addition of a family of four to the typical urban area necessitates an additional ten thousand square feet of parking space to accommodate members’ vehicles at home and in the variety of separated centers at which they will have to park them. And now, we must use up a lot of land to secure houses and lots away from the congestion of auto traffic. Nothing was harder hit by unifunctional planning

R. Oldenburg, The great good place (1987), 216

This was very good advice but she still thought that living in a major city was key

If you want to move to the city, you can, Miss Grehan said. And studying poetry at university is a wonderful thing to do. But more important is to read poetry, and write poetry, every day. It doesn’t have to be for long. If just once a day people read a poem instead of picking up their phone, I guarantee you the world would be a better place. When she had gone Elaine said that this was very good advice but she still thought that living in a major city was key.

P. Murray, The bee sting (2023), Loc. 800

All other German towns [controlled] only 100 square kilometres or less

Italy, where around 25 cities each controlled at least 1,000 square kilometres, with Florence possessing 12,000 square kilometres by 1400, while Venice amassed nearly three times that across 1339-1428. By contrast, only Nuremberg came close, with 1,650 square kilometres, while Ulm had 930 square kilometres and all other German towns only 100 square kilometres or less.

P.H. Wilson, The Holy Roman Empire (2016),  518

Measured in these terms it is clear that during the Wars of the Roses English townsmen were more relaxed than they had been in earlier centuries

From the thirteenth century onwards most towns financed their building operations by being granted the right to levy a toll on goods coming into the town for sale. This toll was known as murage. In the fifteenth century several new sources of financial aid were found, the most popular being the receipt of a grant from customs duties to meet the cost of a sea-port’s fortification. As a crude barometer of the effect of the Wars of the Roses on the outlook of municipal authorities we can make a count at ten-year intervals of the number of towns receiving grants of murage or other forms of financial aid for the same purpose. In 1460 there were nine; 1470, again nine; in 1480 only six, and by 1490 it was down to four. One hundred years earlier the same count shows seven in 1360, seventeen in 1370, fifteen in 1380 and fifteen in 1390. Two hundred years earlier it had been fourteen in 1260, seventeen in 1270, and ten in 1280 and 1290. The totals for these decades, though somewhat artificial, are very revealing: fifty-one in the thirteenth century, fifty-four in the fourteenth and only twenty-eight in the fifteenth. Measured in these terms it is clear that during the Wars of the Roses English townsmen were more relaxed than they had been in earlier centuries, though possibly fractionally more worried than they had been in the previous four decades (1420-50) when the total is twenty-six.

J. Gillingham, The wars of the Roses (1981), 12

City centres across the UK were ripped out and destroyed to make way for the car far more comprehensively than the Luftwaffe

Imagine, by way of contrast, an Italian transport minister suggesting that the historic centres of Italy’s towns and cities be pulled down in order to make space for the growing number of Cinquecentos. They would be ridiculed and laughed out of office, and yet city centres across the UK were ripped out and destroyed to make way for the car far more comprehensively than the Luftwaffe (which had, in places such as Coventry, started the process) had ever achieved.

C. Wolmar, Are trams socialist? (2016), Kindle loc 382

The siding became a sea wall holding back the waves of housing

A few steps on and the ground gave way on either side, giving the impression of being on an elevated causeway. To my left, through the bare shrubbery, the siding became a sea wall holding back the waves of housing. Tidy terracotta boxes with grey roofs rolled with the landscape's contours like a swelling ocean, its peaks and troughs awash with the debris of suburbia: wires, cars, caravans and, cresting the waves, the square tower of a church, a tree or two and a dull defiance of offices.

R. Cowan, Common ground (2015), 19

Not until the beginning of the 20th century did Europe's urban populations finally become self-sustaining

Not until the beginning of the 20th century did Europe's urban populations finally become self-sustaining: before then, constant immigration of healthy peasants from the countryside was necessary to make up for the constant deaths of city dwellers from crowd diseases.

J. Diamond, Guns Germs and Steel (1997), 197