Emergent Urbanism

Rediscovering Urban Complexity

Phalanstere

Why build cities anyway?

Submitted by Mathieu Helie on Mon, 10/29/2007 - 00:55, last updated Sun, 11/06/2011 - 01:09

It's strange that in all the literature on the subject of urbanism and city living, very few people ever ask themselves why humans would build cities at all. It seems to me that in order to truly know what to do with the city, we must start out by knowing why it's there in the first place. Somehow cities are so deeply rooted in humanity's history that we never get around to asking why we live in them.

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