This is exactly backwards. Urbanization was driven by desire to escape oppressive togetherness of small town/village life. The primary draw of cities in history has been escaping your tribe. The idea that you might *find* your tribe is relatively new (1960s?) bonus possibility https://twitter.com/furman/status/1292284733578047488

For people citing “economics” as a/the reason, economics is never the answer to “why”, only “how.” It enables social escape, independence, individualism, means to live on own terms etc.

Social escape was main carrot. Early on industrialists had to coerce farmers away from land during droughts, and actively work to break family ties (like younger sons with weaker land claims). Once cities became established as individual escape zone, coercion became unnecessary.

It is especially weird to posit individual-agent reasons like economic opportunity when primary challenge was to individuate away in the first place from tight social settings where economic decisions were made by families and cash played a smaller role than mutuality.

If you read the early history of urbanization (pre-industrial) the economy was so subservient to culture (eg sumptuary laws, limits on innovation) that to go urban was literally an act of freedom-seeking. Many early cities bought their freedom from feudal lords.

I have a weird theory that oppressive rural conditions like serfdom and working peasants to death emerged *after* cities became established for escape via pre-industrial crafts. Industrialization accelerated an existing trend, it didn’t create it.

Cities created the rural labor shortage that drove a vicious cycle of increasing oppression by land owners that increased allure of escape.

Even in England where peasants were perhaps the most free. The coercion theory is overstated though it was certainly a factor early on.

The striking thing about cities is *how little* togetherness they need for basic functioning. Since Covid started I haven’t in-person interacted with anyone except my wife and complete strangers. No friends or extended family. This would not be possible in villages/small towns.

I do think Covid might reverse urbanization. But it won’t be a return to agrarian ways so much as a colonization of highly automated/mechanized countryside by urban Zoom expats who will bring urban ideas of freedom with them. They won’t meekly accept rural togetherness/community.

200 years (really 800 by my extended definition of urbanization) is a lot of momentum, but digital culture is a lot of centripetal force.