asphalt jungle

From W. R. Burnett's novel The Asphalt Jungle (1949).

asphalt jungle (plural asphalt jungles)

(idiomatic) A city or urban area, where the landscape is covered by pavement and the environment is alienating and unsafe.
- 1962 July 27, “Manhattan's Lower Depths”, in Time‎ (film review of Strangers in the City), archived from the original on 7 March 2012:
  The sound track tingles with cool jazz, the dry atonal music of the asphalt jungle.
- 1976, A. Robert Lee, “Violence Real and Imagined: The World of Chester Himes' Novels”, in Negro American Literature Forum, volume 10, number 1, page 13:
  Harlem comes through as an urban hothouse mean with exotic hustle and violence, a tangible asphalt jungle with its own abrasive laws of motion.

type of urban area

English