city/country nutritional flow

A city could be the home of technical nutrition, and the countryside the home of biological nutrition. And as the city brings in biological nutrition-its food, its natural resources-from the country, it utilizes them to good effect to support its people, and then it returns them to the countryside to rebuild the health of the soil. On the other hand, the city could be the place where we make things, where the industrial producers of cars, tractors, computers and communication devices send beneficial goods out into the world and accepts them back as resources for new products that only cities can make.

-- William McDonough, A New Design for Human Enterprise: Address to China-US Center Meeting, 2002; (emphasis mine)

Another interesting urban/rural I/O observation:

America is dominated by her cities as they draw into them the brawn and brain and wealth of the hinterland and give back not only a constant stream of necessities and gadgets, but also a pattern for living.

--St. Clair Drake & Horace R. Cayton, Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City

-- Dave (July 29, 2007 12:09 PM)