Agrarianism vs. Urbanism (again)

The trade economy of the city, with its merchants and entrepreneurs, its delegations of labour and responsibility, has always been treated by those who dislike cities as an unnatural practice, a perversion of the "natural" life of an agricultural economy. An "ideal city" would live to the simple, seasonal rhythms of a rural village. But, as Jane Jacobs showed brilliantly in The Economy of Cities (1969), the myth of agricultural primacy has no foundation either in archaeology or economics. Cities do not necessarily grow out of the excess production of their pre-exisitng rural hinterlands...
— Jonathan Raban, Soft City