Urban ecology (Sociology) -- Japan; Urban renewal -- Japan
There is one other abettor of urbanization that we must not
overlook: the bewitching power of the money economy. In order to
make more money, the city manufactures more merchandise than
necessary, and forces services down our throats. Charged with the
economic mission known as the Pursuit of Profit, the secondary
and tertiary industries work hard at money making, and this too
leads to the expansion of the cities.
The above three elements -- (1) a national policy of
modernization, i.e., urbanization; (2) the instinctive desire of
human beings for prosperity, i.e., urbanization; (3) the Pursuit
of Profit, which propels the secondary and tertiary industries to
make more and more money, i.e., urbanization -- combine to cause
the increasing spread of the cities. This is symbolized in, for
example, the construction industry.
Urbanization is, in more concrete terms, the covering of
everything with concrete. Whether buildings or roads or
riverbanks or seashores, the rule of thumb in modern times is to
make it out of concrete. There are, to be sure, occasional pea
gravel gardens or dirt playing fields in the cities, but these
are few and far between. Cities are made by smothering the ground
with concrete. Indeed, the city can be understood as construction
itself.
Never-Ending Construction
The world is full of construction officials, who, if they cannot
plan some kind of project, are capable of nothing but yawning;
the proprietors of construction companies, who, in order to make
money, cannot rest from their labors for a minute; the pitiful
part-time farmers who pay back their loans by engaging in
construction work; the proprietors of cement and gravel companies
who will be in a pickle if they cannot get someone to use the
tons of building materials they have made; the truckers and the
dealers in construction machinery and fuel for them; the big shot
politicians like Tanaka Kakuei whose life work is pork barrel;
the idiotic voters who weep for joy over the services brought in
by construction (that is, urbanization)... With an arrangement
like this, it is almost assured that, even if the vast oceans dry
up, there will always be construction going on in the world. At
this rate, it will not be that far in the future before they are
carrying out construction work among the peaks of the Himalayas.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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