EXPIRES: 1975

WRITTEN: 1961

There is a quality even meaner than outright ugliness or disorder, and this meaner quality is the dishonest mask of pretended order, achieved by ignoring or suppressing the real order that is struggling to exist and to be served... Low-income projects that become worse centers of delinquency, vandalism and general social hopelessness than the slums they were supposed to replace.

Jane Jacobs

The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Random House, 1961), Introduction, pp. 3–4

Written: 1961

Addressed to: by the 1970s

Source: The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Random House

Author: Jane Jacobs

Category: Culture & Society

Annotation

Jacobs predicted that the massive urban renewal projects then underway — Robert Moses's superblocks, Pruitt-Igoe, Cabrini-Green — would prove worse than the neighborhoods they demolished. She was writing against the overwhelming consensus of urban planning professionals, who considered slum clearance self-evidently progressive. Within a decade, her prediction was confirmed so thoroughly that the demolition of Pruitt-Igoe in 1972 became an icon of modernist failure.

What Actually Happened

Pruitt-Igoe was demolished 1972–1976. Cabrini-Green was demolished 1995–2011. 'Urban renewal' became so discredited that the phrase itself was largely abandoned by planners.

#urban-planning#cities#housing#modernism#slum-clearance

2000

In the three short decades between now and the twenty-first century, millions of ordinary, psychologically normal people will face an abrupt collision with the future. Citizens of the world's richest and most technically advanced nations will find it increasingly painful to keep up with the incessant demand for change.

Alvin Toffler

2014

Indeed, the most somber speculation I can make about A.D. 2014 is that in a society of enforced leisure, the most glorious single word in the vocabulary will have become work!

Isaac Asimov

1980

Why did I pick on the next nine years instead of the next 900 for finding a solution to the population crisis? One answer is that the world is rapidly running out of food. And famine, of course, could be one way to reach a death rate solution to the population problem. In fact, the battle to feed humanity is already lost, in the sense that we will not be able to prevent large famines in the next decade or so.

Dr Paul R. Ehrlich