Reason Two
Modernization — if we look at this in another way we see that it is the pursuit of Convenience, Extravagance, and Ease; it signifies the ceaseless advance toward infinite prosperity.
And the pursuit of convenience, extravagance, and ease is none other than an expression of instinctual human greed — we want to have it easier and eat more delectable cuisine, we want to do more stimulating things, we want objects that are rarer and more beautiful. Thus the secondary and tertiary industries, in manufacturing and supplying us with festivals and entertainment and trinkets and gewgaws, are able to scale the heights of prosperity, and the cities thereby continue their boundless expansion.
Reason Three
There is one other abettor of urbanization that we must not overlook: the bewitching power of the money economy. In order to make more money, the city manufactures more merchandise than necessary, and forces services down our throats. Charged with the economic mission known as the Pursuit of Profit, the secondary and tertiary industries work hard at money making, and this too leads to the expansion of the cities.
The above three elements — (1) a national policy of modernization, i.e., urbanization; (2) the instinctive desire of human beings for prosperity, i.e., urbanization; (3) the Pursuit of Profit, which propels the secondary and tertiary industries to make more and more money, i.e., urbanization — combine to cause the increasing spread of the cities. This is symbolized in, for example, the construction industry.
Urbanization is, in more concrete terms, the covering of everything with concrete. Whether buildings or roads or riverbanks or seashores, the rule of thumb in modern times is to make it out of concrete. There are, to be sure, occasional pea gravel gardens or dirt playing fields in the cities, but these are few and far between. Cities are made by smothering the ground with concrete. Indeed, the city can be understood as construction itself.
Never-Ending Construction
The world is full of construction officials, who, if they cannot plan some kind of project, are capable of nothing but yawning; the proprietors of construction companies, who, in order to make money, cannot rest from their labors for a minute; the pitiful part-time farmers who pay back their loans by engaging in construction work; the proprietors of cement and gravel companies who will be in a pickle if they cannot get someone to use the tons of building materials they have made; the truckers and the dealers in construction machinery and fuel for them; the big shot politicians like Tanaka Kakuei whose life work is pork barrel; the idiotic voters who weep for joy over the services brought in by construction (that is, urbanization)… With an arrangement like this, it is almost assured that, even if the vast oceans dry up, there will always be construction going on in the world. At this rate, it will not be that far in the future before they are carrying out construction work among the peaks of the Himalayas.
There are some who will say, "Come now, they wouldn't go so far as to do such unnecessary work in the Himalayas," but if this is so, then when all the construction work in the world has been completed and there is no more to be done, is it possible to think that the Ministry of Construction will disband itself, that the construction companies will go belly up, that the cement companies will close down, or that the part-time farmers will hang themselves? There is no doubt that when such a time comes they will carry out needless construction work like covering over the peaks of the Himalayas with concrete. There will be no end to construction work, and consequently the urbanization of the Earth's surface will continue until the ground disappears entirely. [2]