Goldsmith, Kenneth

"At one point, I envisioned making all the invisible language in the air around us material. At any given moment, there’s language flying all around us that we are not aware of: think of radio waves and cellular phone connections, TV signals, etc.."

"I began to obsess on the amount of language being produced by individuals. What would happen if all the language were somehow materialized?"

"I wanted to write a book that I would never be able to know. The approach I took was that of quantity. I’d collect so many words that each time I’d open my book, I’d be surprised by something that I had forgotten was there. What constitutes a big book? I looked on my bookshelf for clues. I found that any dictionary worth its salt was at least 600 pages so with that in mind, I decided that I would write a 600 page book. I did. And in the end, the project was a failure. I got to know every word so well over the four years that it took to write it that I am bored by the book. I can’t open a page and be surprised. Perhaps quantity was the wrong approach."

Kenneth Goldsmith:

I look to theory only when I realize that somebody has dedicated their entire life to a question I have only fleetingly considered (a work in progress)

Harvey, David. The Right to the city

"The suburbanization of the United States was not merely a matter of new infrastructures. As in Second Empire Paris, it entailed a radical transformation in lifestyles, bringing new products from housing to refrigerators and air conditioners, as well as two cars in the driveway and an enormous increase in the consumption of oil. It also altered the political landscape as subsidized home-ownership for the middle classes changed the focus of community action towards the defense of property values and individualized identities, turning the suburban vote towards conservative republicanism. Debt-encumbered homeowners, it was argued, were less likely to go on strike. This project successfully absorbed the surplus and assured social stability, albeit at the cost of hollowing out the inner cities and generating urban unrest amongst those, chiefly African-Americans, who were denied access to the new prosperity."

Harvey, David. The Right to the city

"From their inception, cities have arisen through geographical and social concentrations of a surplus product. Urbanization has always been therefore, a class phenomenon, since surpluses are extracted from somewhere and from somebody, while the control of their disbursement typically lies in a few hands."

Park, Robert, sociologist, quoted by David Harvey

The city is "man's most successful attempt to remake the world he lives in more after his heart's desire. But, if the city is the world which man created, it is the world in which he is henceforth condemned to live. Thus, indirectly, and without any clear sense of the nature of his task, in making the city man had remade himself"

Robert Park, On Social control and Collective Behaviour, Chicago 1967, p. 3.

Harvey, David. The Right to the city

"The question of what kind of city we want cannot be divorced from that of what kind of social ties, relationship to nature, lifestyles, technologies and aesthetic values we desire. The right to the city is far more than the individual liberty to access resources: it is a right to change ourselves by changing the city. It is, moreover, a common rather than an individual right since this transformation inevitably depends upon the exercise of a collective power to reshape the processes of urbanization. The freedom to make and remake our cities and ourselves is, I want to argue, one of the most precious yet most neglected of our human rights."