A town or neighborhood generally functions as a large village.
But a city does not function like a large town or a large neighborhood. It functions like a collection of competing and cooperating towns and neighborhoods.
I think this is a big reason why capitalism and our car dependent zoning has broken the way cities function. Urban and civil planners and franchise planners, etc. plan out development to optimize cities, not to optimize towns/neighborhoods.
For example, when Walmart plans a new store, they plan to optimize their sales based on service to the larger city, not in service of the town/neighborhood they are opening up in. When city planners plan a new highway, they plan it to optimize transportation in the whole city, not to optimize transportation in the town/neighborhood. Everything is planned to optimize on the city level and the village/town/neighborhood level is sacrificed as a result.
That's why people have to drive 30 minutes to go to a grocery store and 40 minutes to go to church, etc. this is what has killed our communities.
To expand on this, this is also why our "global village" of the #internet fails as a village. Because companies that have taken over the internet didn't treat it like a village, they treat it like city planners treat a city. Optimize everything for the greatest number of users.
Which is part of the interesting thing about #Mastodon and ActivityPub. An individual Mastodon server really does function more like a village than it does a city. It's a small group of people collectively trying to make their little internet community better, and they are more able to police their own users as a result. #ActivityPub is able to function like a more healthy city that supports cooperating and competing towns and villages.
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