the.com/concrete jungle
Nature lost the lease, but pigeons renegotiated the terms.
means A densely built, high-rise city environment seen as harsh, impersonal, and almost a wild ecosystem of its own where survival rules still apply.
from A 20th-century metaphorical coinage pairing 'concrete,' the literal building material of modern cities, with 'jungle,' long used figuratively in English for any dense, lawless, survival-of-the-fittest environment (as in 'law of the jungle'). The phrase caught on through mid-1900s writing about urban poverty and alienation, and was cemented in popular culture by songs and films using it to cast the city as a wilderness with concrete trees and asphalt undergrowth — nature's rules, just rebuilt in steel and cement.
- origin
- Coined to describe dense, dehumanizing cityscapes
- temperature
- Cities run hotter than surrounding land by design flaw
- irony
- More biodiversity thrives there than most suburbs
- pop culture
- Immortalized by Bob Marley, not city planners