And in all developing countries people living on the land cannot wait to move into the city, even though there are no jobs for them there, and no housing. The only precedent for this demographic transformation is what happened some ten thousand years ago, when our remote ancestors first settled on the land and became pastoralists and farmers. But that transformation took several thousand years. Ours has happened in less than a century. And the key to the survival and health of this new urban human society is the development of communities in the city.
Community is a fact, whether family or religion, social class or caste.
There is very little mobility in rural society, and what there is is mostly downward. Rural society has been romanticized for millennia, especially in the West, where rural communities have usually been portrayed as idyllic. However, the community in the rural society is actually both compulsory and coercive. One recent example. My family and I lived in rural Vermont only 50 years ago, in the late 1940s.