Modern Cities

So recently I was talking with a friend about cars vs. horses and how horses would probably be better for our society but how cars are a necessity with our world the way it is. I mean, we have cities that are so big you can't even drive across them in a single day, let alone around them! That's just crazy, and unheard of in the history of man except for our day and age. That's not a city--that's just a massive conglomeration of humanity sprawled across the land. Think about it: the reason mankind began living in cities was for mutual protection from enemies and for the betterment of the lives of the inhabitants through cooperation. In a modern city, covering thousands of square miles, there can be no unified, coordinated defense against an invader--it's just a giant target with so many helpless people running around as individuals or small groups. Or think about this: depending on where you live, it could take a couple hours to a whole day or more to walk to the capitol of the city, if you even know where it is! In any other day and age, such a city could not have sustained itself--and even today, they don't always sustain themselves that well! The size of cities today makes for a logistical nightmare, traffic nightmares, law enforcement nightmares, you name it. In everyday life, it's just too big, too massive, for a normal amount of civilized control and cooperation among the inhabitants. As a citizen of a modern city, all I know is that there are hundreds of thousands of people living for miles all around me, of whom I know less than 0.01%. And somehow, we're supposed to function as a unified whole? No wonder people nowadays are so disconnected!



Tokyo, Japan, the world's largest city in the history of mankind.
Metropolitan population: 35.7 million people (almost as many as the entire State of California)
Metropolitan area: 5,000+ square miles
Source: worldsbiggest.net

Satellite view of Tokyo, Japan
Source: wikipedia.com