“The common theory of the root of metropolises provinces that they resulted from the innovation of agriculture: Surplus food released people to get specializers. You can’t have full-time cobblers, blacksmiths, and administrative officials, the theory locomotes, without farms to feed them. Jane Jacobs upended that hypothesis in The Economy of Cities (1969). “Rural economies, including agricultural work,” she indited, “are direct made upon city economic systems and metropolis work.” It was so in the beginning, she argued, and continues to this twenty-four hours. Most farming innovations, for example, are city-based. When Rome foundered, European agriculture foundered. When crop rotary motion was reinvented in the twelfth century, it began around European cities and took deuce centuries to make distant farms. In the eighteenth century, the revolutionary use of fodder harvests like alfalfa to fix nitrogen in the grunge was developed first in city gardens. American factory farm soared up in the twentieses when hybrid corn was contrived, not on a farm but in a New Haven, Connecticut, research laboratory.” - Stewart Brand , Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto
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