"Cities all over the world are getting bigger as more and more people move from rural to urban sites, but that has created enormous problems with respect to environmental pollution and the general quality of life"
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Urbanization is usually sold as progress with better jobs, better schools, better culture. Dundes punctures that tidy story by treating city growth as a trade-off with a price tag most boosters prefer to hide. The sentence begins with a neutral, almost demographic inevitability - cities are "getting bigger" as people move - then pivots hard on "but", the hinge that turns optimism into indictment. Growth isn’t framed as a triumph of modernity; it’s framed as a machine that generates "enormous problems."
The phrasing matters. Dundes doesn’t just cite pollution; he pairs it with "the general quality of life", a deliberately broad category that smuggles in everything urban policy debates tend to silo: overcrowding, noise, housing stress, loss of community space, inequity in who breathes the worst air. "Environmental pollution" names a measurable crisis; "quality of life" names the lived experience of that crisis, the way it accumulates in lungs, commutes, mental health, and street-level friction.
As an educator and folklorist, Dundes was attuned to how societies narrate themselves. Read that way, his intent isn’t simply to warn about smog; it’s to question the cultural script that equates urban concentration with a better life by default. The subtext: when people move to cities, they’re often chasing opportunity created elsewhere - by economic restructuring, by rural disinvestment - and the city becomes the pressure valve. His sentence leaves the implied challenge hanging in the air: if urban growth is inevitable, so is the responsibility to design cities that don’t quietly degrade the people they claim to uplift.
The phrasing matters. Dundes doesn’t just cite pollution; he pairs it with "the general quality of life", a deliberately broad category that smuggles in everything urban policy debates tend to silo: overcrowding, noise, housing stress, loss of community space, inequity in who breathes the worst air. "Environmental pollution" names a measurable crisis; "quality of life" names the lived experience of that crisis, the way it accumulates in lungs, commutes, mental health, and street-level friction.
As an educator and folklorist, Dundes was attuned to how societies narrate themselves. Read that way, his intent isn’t simply to warn about smog; it’s to question the cultural script that equates urban concentration with a better life by default. The subtext: when people move to cities, they’re often chasing opportunity created elsewhere - by economic restructuring, by rural disinvestment - and the city becomes the pressure valve. His sentence leaves the implied challenge hanging in the air: if urban growth is inevitable, so is the responsibility to design cities that don’t quietly degrade the people they claim to uplift.
Quote Details
| Topic | Life |
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