the.com/city
Humanity's way of putting strangers close enough to borrow sugar, far enough to ignore them.
means A large, permanent settlement where lots of people live and work close together, usually with its own government and infrastructure.
from From Old French 'cite', from Latin 'civitas' — which didn't originally mean a place at all, but a body of citizens, a community bound by shared rights and belonging. Civitas itself grew from 'civis', meaning citizen. So the word started as a question of who you belong with, and only later hardened into a question of where you live — the buildings came after the belonging.
- legal threshold
- Often just population size, not culture or vibe
- oldest contender
- Jericho, inhabited since roughly 9000 BCE
- loneliness paradox
- Densest places often report the most isolation
- economic engine
- Cities produce over 80 percent of global GDP