Crime seems to change character when it crosses a bridge or a tunnel. In the city, crime is taken as emblematic of class and race. In the suburbs, though, it's intimate and psychological -- resistant to generalization, a mystery of the individual soul.
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Places are produced in that wonderful interaction of people, place, narrative, and time. When the people desert these places, narratives are forgotten, ties break, and the place is unmade. What is un-remembered in abandonment cannot be re-remembered in transient automobile suburbs with too few places for shared experience and story making. The extreme is amnesia, and it means that those afflicted do not know who they are anymore. They are disoriented, isolated, and robbed of the ability to recognize emotional attachments to others. The sufferers do not have a coherent story anymore. Un-remembering is the enemy of good places and of public history.
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In an expanding universe, time is on the side of the outcast. Those who once inhabited the suburbs of human contempt find that without changing their address they eventually live in the metropolis.
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Dwell I but in the suburbs Of your good pleasure? If it be no more, Portia is Brutus' harlot, not his wife.
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Generally students are the best vehicles for passing on ideas, for their thoughts are plastic and can be molded and they can adjust the ideas of old men to the shape of reality as they find it in villages and hills of China or in ghettos and suburbs of America.
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Slums may well be breeding-grounds of crime, but middle-class suburbs are incubators of apathy and delirium.
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And the children of Israel gave by lot unto the Levites these cities with their suburbs, as the LORD commanded by the hand of Moses.
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I'd rather live nowhere than in the suburbs of nowhere.
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