Parasitic urbanism describes cities that only consume not create

Evidence

The city is like a pyre which gives light because it is burning what was created far away from it and many times against it. All cities are sterile. Proportionately few children are born there, and genius almost never. In the city there is enjoyment, but no creation; there is love but no generation, consumption but no production. … Apart from the “absolute” idiocies here, one should point out that Papini has in mind the “relative” model of the city non-city, the Koblenz of the consumers of landed income and tolerated houses. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1071

Categorization

Category: Definitional Content

• DEFINE: Contrast between productive and parasitic urban centers, part of Gramsci’s Italianist polemic deployed against modernist ‘Americanism’.