Sublime

Orderly travel now means going at the maximum speed for safety from point to point, but most reachable points are increasingly cluttered with people and parked cars, and so less worth going to see, and for similar reasons it is ever more inconvenient to do business in the centers of our great cities. Real travel requires a maximum of unscheduled

as cities grow and their networks evolve, the area or volume of the networks needed to keep them functionally connected tends to become smaller on a per capita basis. For example, in larger cities more people can share the same bus or segment of road or sewer pipe.

we cannot assume that everything interesting is at the same scale as ourselves.

On the larger stage of Eurasian or global economic competition, the maritime sector of the European economy, for all its success in developing the commodity trades across the Atlantic, and in finding customers among the expatriate Europeans in the Americas, was simply too small, too restricted in economic and demographic capacity, to aspire to

The future of humanity and the long-term sustainability of the planet are inextricably linked to the fate of our cities. Cities are the crucible of civilization, the hubs of innovation, the engines of wealth creation and centers of power, the magnets that attract creative individuals, and the stimulant for ideas, growth, and innovation. But they

The geography of most modern urbanization can ultimately be traced back to navigable waterways and deep harbors, followed by hundreds or even thousands of years of network effects pertaining to industry (i.e., progressive integration of labor and capital) and the iteratively compounding Pareto distributions that naturally follow.

Cities are synonymous with modernity not just because they usually contain the latest technologies or play host to the latest trends, but because they socialize us into modern people who seek status, validation, and uniqueness.