"But New York should be a city of workers and eccentrics as well as visionaries and billionaires; a place of schoolteachers and garbagemen and janitors, or peop

"But New York should be a city of workers and eccentrics as well as visionaries and billionaires; a place of schoolteachers and garbagemen and janitors, or people who wear buttons reading is it fascism yet? [..] A city of people who sell books on the street [..] street photographers [..] immigrant vendors [..] bus drivers [..] driven businessmen [..] hedge fund operators. All helped to get along a little better, out of gratitude for all that they do to keep everything running, and to keep New York remarkable." It occurs to me that this is pale nostalgic romanticism, and we don't really need cities at all except for commerce & trade. Most of our country's population was rural about a century ago. No reason we couldn't go back to that and still benefit from modern convenience. I think mega-cities should probably evolve into massive business parks with no residential housing, and that collective mega-business-park can then pay for the services their employees need to access it (transportation, sanitation, etc). It sure seems like a modern transportation system might make living in rural or suburban land more feasible for lower-income people.