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Thursday 9th of July 2026

American Dream Moving to the city © 2018 Kwiple.com
By the numbers Factor by which the poverty rate has grown faster in U.S. suburbs than in cities since 1990: 2 Harper's Index, September 2017 © 2017 Kwiple.com
By the numbers Percentage change since 2006 in the number of U.S. cities that have banned living in vehicles: +143 Harper's Index, March 2017 © 2017 Kwiple.com
Cities According to a 2018 United Nations report, the number of people living in the world's urban areas is forecast to grow by 2.5bn by 2050 — to two out of every three people on the planet. Financial Times, June 26, 2022 © 2022 Kwiple.com
Cities A bad neighbor is as great a plague as a good one is a great blessing. Hesiod, Works and Days © 2021 Kwiple.com
Cities Because cities are so exciting, their inhabitants do not have to be. Their ease of access to culture saps any will on their part to make it themselves. But more than that, even if they do create, they are too close to the action to seriously question it. … It is by viewing the culture from its margins that one spots how it might take a new course. In other words, boredom and isolation have their uses. Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, July 12, 2019, on the large number of creative talents who come from outside large cities © 2019 Kwiple.com
Cities The chief function of the city is to convert power into form, energy into culture, dead matter into the living symbols of art, biological reproduction into social creativity. Lewis Mumford, The City in History © 2021 Kwiple.com
Cities For all the emphasis we place on our multicutural cities, they epitomise our oligarchic reality. In the U.S., the more liberal a city's politics, the higher the rate of inequality. Edward Luce, The Retreat of Western Liberalism  © 2017 Kwiple.com
Cities If a city is not borderline unlivable, I question its greatness. Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, October 7, 2022 © 2022 Kwiple.com
Cities In no civilization is city life evolved independently of commerce and industry. Neither antiquity nor modern times show any exception to this rule. Henri Pirenne, Medieval Cities © 2023 Kwiple.com
Cities Modern “megacities” (defined as places with at least 10 million inhabitants) are the biggest human settlements in history, and growing every day. The world had ten megacities in 1990, 33 in 2018 and will have 43 by 2030, says the United Nations. Over a third of their population growth will be in India, China and Nigeria. Simon Kuper, Financial Times, June 2, 2022 © 2022 Kwiple.com
Cities Our great, global cities are turning into vast gated citadels where the elite reproduces itself. Simon Kuper, Financial Times, June 14, 2103 © 2018 Kwiple.com
Cities Urban renewal means Negro removal. James Baldwin © 2019 Kwiple.com
Cities We shall solve the problem of the city by leaving the city. Henry Ford © 2019 Kwiple.com
Cities People do not move to big cities to meet different kinds of people. They move there to meet like-minded people: the ones they could not find in their ambitionless suburb or waning town. Even in London, the centre of every profession in British life, people slide into work-defined tribes unless they actively fight against it. The one place where you can meet almost anyone becomes the one place where you probably won't. Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, November 2/3, 2019 © 2019 Kwiple.com
Cities To the West's economic losers, cities like London and Chicago are not so much magnets but death stars. Edward Luce, The Retreat of Western Liberalism  © 2017 Kwiple.com
Fright wingers say We have cities that are far more dangerous than Afghanistan. Donald Trump © 2016 Kwiple.com
Home rule The 20th-century movement toward home rule, or letting localities handle most of their own affairs, was once supported by both Republicans and Democrats. What's now become clear is that Republicans dislike local control if they are not in charge of it. The home rule movement has steadily faded in the last few decades as state lawmakers on the right have become more aggressive in invalidating the priorities of elected officials in cities, which have moved leftward in their voting patterns in recent years. New York Times, June 3, 2023 © 2023 Kwiple.com
Housing Housing units earmarked for low-income residents have virtually no impact on surrounding property values in major U.S. metro areas, according to an analysis of home-price data that that runs counter to the conventional view that such projects cause nearby property values to decline. Wall Street Journal, November 29, 2016 © 2016 Kwiple.com
Kwiplers say  Ban robots from sidewalks NOW, before they multiply like rabbits © 2017 Kwiple.com
Kwiplers say Cities should pass laws mandating voting in municipal elections, which should be held on the same day as federal elections © 2016 Kwiple.com
Nukes Once you've dropped a couple of nuclear bombs on a city, if you drop a couple more, all you do is make the rubble shake. Air Force Maj. Gen. (Ret.) Robert Latiff, who commanded a nuclear weapons unit in West Germany early in his career © 2021 Kwiple.com
Polarization Today, the rural-urban divide is really a divide between citizens whose orientation is national and citizens whose orientation is global. Barbara F. Walter, How Civil Wars Start  © 2022 Kwiple.com
Political inequality As of the census of 2010, the five most rural states wielded about 50% more electoral votes, and three times as many senators, per resident as the five most urban ones did. Economist, July 12, 2018 © 2018 Kwiple.com
Poitical inequality Today … Republicans are predominantly the party of sparsely populated regions,  while Democrats are the party of the cities. As a result, the Constitution's small-state bias, which became a rural  bias in the twentieth century, has become a partisan bias in the twentieth-first century. We are experiencing our own form of “creeping counter-majoritarianism.” Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, Tyranny of the Minority  © 2023 Kwiple.com
Republicans say Distrust city dwellers © 2016 Kwiple.com
Republicans say Replace elected mayors with emergency managers appointed by, and accountable to, the state legislature © 2016 Kwiple.com
Rural America Rural America Is the New ‘Inner City’ — — — — — A Wall Street Journal analysis shows that since the 1990s, sparsely populated counties have replaced large cities as America's most troubled areas by key measures of socioeconomic well-being – a decline that's accelerating citation front-age headline, Wall Street Journal, May 26, 2017 © 2017 Kwiple.com
Segregation Segregation did this to Gary. When the jobs left, the whites could move, and they did. But we blacks didn't have a choice. They wouldn't let us into their new neighborhoods with the good jobs, or if they let us, we sure as hell couldn't afford it. Then to make it worse, when we looked at the nice houses they left behind, we couldn't buy them because the banks wouldn't lend us money. 78-year-old black Gary, Indiana, resident quoted in The Guardian, March 28, 2017  © 2017 Kwiple.com
Selfie I don't like America enough to want to live anywhere else except Manhattan. And what I like about Manhattan is that it's full of foreigners. The America I live in  is the America of the cities. The rest is just drive-through. Susan Sontag © 2017 Kwiple.com
Waste management The 23 million hogs in Iowa (about a third of the hogs in the US) along with Iowa's other livestock produce as much excrement every year as 168 million humans, or the “fecal equivalent” of the world's eleven biggest cities. Ian Frazier, New York Review of Books, February 9, 2023 © 2023 Kwiple.com
 
Wealth inequality It is romantic to build utopias; it is moral to fix what is broken. We don't need billionaires. We need their billions back. For the cities that already exist. For the people in them. For goodness' sake. Jenny Lee, Financial Times, February 27, 2018 on billionaire's penchant for funding such projects as building new cities from scratch, funding the development of floating cities outside tax zones in international waters © 2018 Kwiple.com