Ben Wilson > Quotes

“Dickens became one of the greatest interpreters of urban life because he was a prodigious walker; his visceral encounters with the physical and human cityscape run through all his work. Urban literature is bound up with walking, because walking takes you away from the familiar, down “long perplexing lanes untrod before,” as John Gay put it in his 1716 poem “Trivia; or, the Art of Walking the Streets of London.”
― Ben Wilson, Metropolis: A History of the City, Humankind's Greatest Invention

“All adolescents want to escape from home into the world, not vice versa as adults do. The suburbs naturally mark a front line of conflict between teenagers and parents, a clash of values and aspirations.”
― Ben Wilson, Metropolis: A History of the City, Humankind's Greatest Invention

“Deep underground, microbes turn half a century's worth of city waste into methane. The gases and leachate are extracted through an extensive network of subterranean pipes and then used to power 22,000 nearby homes. While 150 million tons of garbage gradually decomposes unseen below the surface, above ground, the former dump reverts to meadows, woodland and saltwater marshes, providing a haven for wildlife and a massive park for the people of New York.
This is Fresh Kills in the 2020s. In 2001, the infamous landfill received its last, and saddest, consignments - the charred debris of the World Trade Center. Since then, it has been transformed into a 2,315-acre public park. Three times bigger than Central Park, it is the largest new green public space created within New York City for over a century, a mixture of wildlife habitats, bike trails, sports fields, art exhibits and playgrounds. This is poisoned land: fifty years' worth of landfill has killed for ever one of the city's most productive wetland ecosystems. Restoration is impossible. Instead, a brand new ecosystem is emerging on top of the toxic garbage”
― Ben Wilson, Urban Jungle: The History and Future of Nature in the City

“by 2025, 440 cities with a collective population of 600 million (7% of all people) will account for half of worldwide gross domestic product.”
― Ben Wilson, Metropolis: A History of the City, Humankind's Greatest Invention

“Bombs carved out space for nature in cities that had rarely existed before and certainly not on that kind of scale.”
― Ben Wilson, Urban Jungle: The History and Future of Nature in the City

“By 1980 8.2% of American suburbanites (7.4 million people) lived below the poverty line; over the next two decades the figure doubled, meaning that impoverished suburbanites outnumbered poor people in the inner city. Murders fell in American cities by 16.7% but rose by 16.9% in the suburbs.”
― Ben Wilson, Metropolis: A History of the City, Humankind's Greatest Invention

“press-ganged’, ‘taking the wind out of your sails’, ‘shot across the bows’, ‘loose cannon’, ‘shipshape’, ‘batten down the hatches’ belong more obviously to the sea. Others such as ‘close quarters’, ‘cut and run’, ‘fathoming’ something, ‘broad in the beam’ and the ‘cut of your jib’ take a moment”
― Ben Wilson, Empire of the Deep: The Rise and Fall of the British Navy

“A city is one of the miracles of human existence. What prevents the human ant heap from degenerating into violence is civility, the spoken and unspoken codes that govern day-to-day interactions between people.”
― Ben Wilson, Metropolis: A History of the City, Humankind's Greatest Invention

“Most importantly, studies have shown that easy access to green space significantly improves mental and physical health. It reduces stress to boot and improves cognitive development in children.”
― Ben Wilson, Urban Jungle: The History and Future of Nature in the City

“What perhaps began as a consensual, communal undertaking evolved into a highly centralised, highly unequal society. There was probably no sudden change or power grab: each generation built on the work of the last, and strides in efficiency were paid for with small sacrifices of freedom and equality. Rewarding labour with grants of food from the benevolent temple became, in time, a way of compelling hard work through the control of rations.”
― Ben Wilson, Metropolis: A History of the City, Humankind's Greatest Invention

“The light in which the city is cast by writers, poets and artists helps determine the kind of cities we get.”
― Ben Wilson, Metropolis: A History of the City, Humankind's Greatest Invention

“Songdo in South Korea was built from scratch along these specifications on land reclaimed from the Yellow Sea at a cost of $35 billion. Labelled the twenty-first century’s “high-tech utopia,” it is a living city, touted as”
― Ben Wilson, Metropolis: A History of the City, Humankind's Greatest Invention

“If you refuse to go to the market, how would you know of the existence of others? How would you know of your own existence?”
― Ben Wilson, Metropolis: A History of the City, Humankind's Greatest Invention

“It is a memorable and counterintuitive fact that the invention of the city came long before the invention of the wheel.”
― Ben Wilson, Metropolis: A History of the City, Humankind's Greatest Invention

“the average individual American’s yearly drive lengthened to 12,000 miles, and commuting times tripled between the 1960s and the end of the century. At the same time, the proportion of household income spent on cars doubled to 20%. During a period of turbocharged suburbanisation and rapid sprawl, it was found that between 1990 and 1995 alone, the time spent driving by mothers of young children rose by 11%; hours spent behind the wheel were greater than those devoted to dressing, bathing and feeding an infant combined.”
― Ben Wilson, Metropolis: A History of the City, Humankind's Greatest Invention

“Far from degenerating morals, the city was an engine of improvement. In the city “we polish one another and rub off our corners and rough sides by a sort of amicable collision,” wrote the Earl of Shaftesbury in 1711. Later in the century the Scottish philosopher David Hume held that men and women who “flock to the cities” experienced “an increase of humanity, from the habit of conversing together, and contributing to each other’s pleasure and entertainment.” 20 Conversation, pleasure and entertainment: leisure was chief among the things that helped to refine society in the modern metropolis.”
― Ben Wilson, Metropolis: A History of the City, Humankind's Greatest Invention

“In examining the history of cities, I looked for material in markets, souks and bazaars; in swimming pools, stadiums and parks; in street-food stalls, coffee houses and cafés; in shops, malls and department stores. I interrogated paintings, novels, films and songs as much as official records in search of the lived experience of cities and the intensity of their daily life.”
― Ben Wilson, Metropolis: A History of the City, Humankind's Greatest Invention

“Electricity gave rise to elevators, light bulbs, telegraphs and telephones, recent inventions that made working in a tower possible, along with heating and ventilation systems. The skyscraper was a machine as much as it was a building, the culmination of nineteenth-century technology.”
― Ben Wilson, Metropolis: A History of the City, Humankind's Greatest Invention

“The practice of deep-frying fish was brought to London and popularised by Sephardic Jewish refugees fleeing persecution in Spain and Portugal from the sixteenth century; its double act with chips dates to the 1860s, when Joseph Malin, a teenage Ashkenazi Jew from eastern Europe, abandoned his family rug-weaving business after a flash of inspiration inspired him to pair the two. He sold them on the street from a tray hung round his neck; success on the street led to a permanent shop in the East End.”
― Ben Wilson, Metropolis: A History of the City, Humankind's Greatest Invention

“what looks like chaos is often self-organised in an intricate and invisible way.”
― Ben Wilson, Metropolis: A History of the City, Humankind's Greatest Invention

“Tenements were a screenwriter’s dream—lively, interesting places that lent themselves to narrative.”
― Ben Wilson, Metropolis: A History of the City, Humankind's Greatest Invention

“Cities create entirely new taboos and restrictions even as they liberate.”
― Ben Wilson, Metropolis: A History of the City, Humankind's Greatest Invention

“The late twentieth century saw the creation of “boomburbs” in America—vast suburbs of over 100,000 people that had long-term population-growth figures in double digits. Their population increase and economic vitality outpaced cities. Mesa, a suburb of Phoenix, Arizona, for example, has a population of over half a million, making it bigger than the cities of Miami, St. Louis and Minneapolis.”
― Ben Wilson, Metropolis: A History of the City, Humankind's Greatest Invention

“According to the architect Jon Jerde, commissioned to rethink the mall in the 1980s: “Urban and suburban Americans seldom stroll aimlessly, as Europeans do, to parade and rub shoulders in a crowd. We need a destination, a sense of arrival at a definite location.”
― Ben Wilson, Metropolis: A History of the City, Humankind's Greatest Invention