 | Cities -- which may go back several ice ages -- began as trading communities of hunters and antedate agriculture. In fact, cities invented farming. Just as modern farms depend on refrigeration, tractors, and electricity, so, too, did the first farms exist only because of the cities that caused and supported them.
"... cities are settlements where much new work is added to older work and this new work multiplies and diversifies a city's division of labor; that cities develop because of this process, not because of events outside of themselves; that cities invent and reinvent rural agricultural life; that developing new work is different from merely repeating and expanding efficiently the production of already existing goods and services, and thus requires different, conflicting conditions from those required for efficient production; that growing cities generation acute practical problems which are solved only by new goods and services that increase economic abundance..." (page 122)
"Jacobs came down firmly on the side of spontaneous inventiveness of individuals, as against abstract plans imposed by governments and corporations," wrote Canadian critic Robert Fulford. "She was an unlikely intellectual warrior, a theorist who opposed most theories, a teacher with no teaching job and no university degree, a writer who wrote well but infrequently." --
Wikipedia, Jane Jacobs.
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The Economy of Cities by Jane Jacobs
