Stolen Words: Take That Textbook Urbanity
For former zinester wunderkind and budding urban theorist historicaltheft:"According to the time-honoured process of ‘development’, cities and states attain maturity only when they have standardised the population into one language and cosmology, contained poverty, made clear divisions between different kinds of land use - humans and animals, factories and residences - and imposed a unified code of law. Clearly, these things have not happened in Mumbai or Shanghai, and even so those places are producing things that anyone can look up to.
"Western tourists have been commenting for decades on the ingenuity they find on third-world streets - “I never knew there were so many ways of making money” - but now they see the improvisational ethos of these bricolage cities elevated into a form of global ambition, and realise that the unlikely potential of the third-world city was never unlikely at all.
"It is conceivable, in fact, that the cities from which the grand thoughts of the future will flow may look entirely unfamiliar, and rather intimidating, to Americans and Europeans."
--- The Sudden Stardom of Third-World Cities, by Rana Dasgupta
"Western tourists have been commenting for decades on the ingenuity they find on third-world streets - “I never knew there were so many ways of making money” - but now they see the improvisational ethos of these bricolage cities elevated into a form of global ambition, and realise that the unlikely potential of the third-world city was never unlikely at all.
"It is conceivable, in fact, that the cities from which the grand thoughts of the future will flow may look entirely unfamiliar, and rather intimidating, to Americans and Europeans."
--- The Sudden Stardom of Third-World Cities, by Rana Dasgupta