Urban Inequality Quotes

The price of property in city centres is making it impossible, particularly in the big cities, for any kind of social mix to take place. It's castrating the whole notion of city life

There is nothing of any consequence in education, in the economy, in city planning, in social policy that does not concern black people.

Chicago's one of the most segregated cities in America. Everybody lives in their own silos and vacuums.

The fact is inner-city black districts are not the same as suburban Republican districts. That's a fact. And people need to go and learn about the whole country.

Chicago is an incredibly great city, but it was clear to me that greatness wasn't being spread to all our neighborhoods.

Chicago has been characterized as the most segregated city in the United States, a city they said could never change.

'Park Avenue: Money, Power and the American Dream' is an intentionally angry film. How could it not be when the chance of an infant dying is five times greater on the Bronx Park Avenue than on Manhattan's Park Avenue just across the Harlem River?

Poor children in Baltimore face even worse odds than low-income kids elsewhere, mostly because they remain in impoverished neighborhoods.

Rio is an energetic, vibrant place, full of beauty and nature. But we face the kinds of problems any developing metropolis does - with pollution, traffic congestion, poverty. Distribution of green areas, for example, is not uniform. Madureira, the heart of the suburb in Rio, is a concrete jungle.

During the 1960s, one neighborhood in San Francisco had the lowest income, the highest unemployment rate, the highest proportion of families with incomes under four thousand dollars a year, the least educational attainment, the highest tuberculosis rate, and the highest proportion of substandard housing. […] That neighborhood was called Chinatown. Yet, in 1965, there were only five persons of Chinese ancestry committed to prison in the entire state of California.

London centre has a wealth of creative activity but there are parts of London where there isn't a cinema or where library provision is quite weak.

There is more sophistication and less sense in New York than anywhere else on the globe.

In Delhi the cars are getting bigger and sleeker, the hotels are getting posher, the gates are getting higher, and the guards are no longer the old chowkidars, the watchmen, but they are fellows with guns. And yet the poor are packed into every crevice like lice in the city. People don't see that anymore. It's as if you shine a light very brightly in one place, the darkness deepens around.

When I am in the city I have the impression that I am in a living room with crystal chandeliers, rugs of velvet, and satin cushions. And when I'm in the favela I have the impression that I'm a useless object, destined to be forever in a garbage dump.

In modern megalopolis the very men who make the city, who clean its streets and shovel its coal and run its subway trains, may be exiled from it when they quit work at night. To-day in New York the average worker simply cannot provide a decent home for himself on the average wage. We have been so victimized by the spirit of the real estate speculator that we have almost forgotten the logical ideal of a city as a pleasant place for common people to live together.

If you live in poor neighborhoods - I know from living in several poor neighborhoods - the worst supermarkets in the city are in the poorest neighborhoods, where people don't have cars.

It's easy. [Black man] is - he's separate already. The fact that you have Harlem, the fact that you have the Negro ghetto and the so-called Negro slum, he's already separate.

In Los Angeles, wealth and poverty are separated by the freeways. In New York, they're next to each other.

Central Park is the grandiose symbol of the front yard each child in New York hasn't got.

Till you lift womanhood itself, you will never arrest--nay, you will never importantly diminish the dreadful curse, the great sin of great cities.

We don't have a full black community in Boston. Our people are scattered. There's a middle class where I live in Highland Park but it's not like a piece of Washington or Chicago.

We can't have it so there are skyscrapers side by side with slums.

Cities tend to be representations of societies: diversity and inequality find their extremes in urban settings. Yet, when war is added onto pre-existing inequalities, high levels of poverty, or even disaster, urban fragility increases exponentially, making it harder to absorb the shocks of warfare.

Kansas City, well, part of the town's pretty cool, and part of the town is not. But it's gonna be that way no matter where you go.

Any city, however small, is in fact divided into two, one the city of the poor, the other of the rich; these are at war with one another.