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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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200 years (really 800 by my extended definition of urbanization) is a lot of momentum, but digital culture is a lot of centripetal force.
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Replying to @vgr
I think the people leaving cities are the ones who were never really tied to them in the first place. How many of those "urban Zoom expats" were actually born and raised in the city vs moved in after college (I actually have no idea, I don't live in a big city)
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Replying to @vsbobclear
Most are moving due to either privilege+health security or high rents and precarity. The countryside has now been so empty for so long in the developed world, very few people are “from” there. Most are from suburbs of other cities. Depends where you draw the boundary of course
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But a move of Pittsburgh area native-borns to SF for example (a common pattern) is hardly rural to urban. True rural to urban kinda wrapped in the late 50s in the US. Since then it’s been urban to urban.
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