ABSTRACT
For the first time in human history more people live in cities than in the countryside. The urban experience is now the dominant human condition, so it is perhaps time that we treat cities seriously as the environment of the majority of humans. For too long urbanization has been portrayed as a fall from grace, a move from the natural to the unnatural, from arcadia to dystopia. As someone who lived in a small village and worked for some time on farms, I have no such illusions about the pastoral life. Over two hundred years ago the poet Robert Burns described the rural laborer's work life as “the cheerless gloom of a hermit with the unceasing toil of a galley-slave.”
