Cities Are An Immense Laboratory

In Trading With Each Other Cities Can't Be In Too Different Stages Of Development, And They Can't Copy One Another. Backward Cities, Or Younger Cities, Or Newly Forming Cities In Supply Regions, Have To Develop To A Great Extent On One Another's Shoulders. This Is One Of The Terrible Things About Empires. Empires Want Them Only To Trade With The Empire, Which Doesn't Help Them At All. It's Just A Way Of Exploiting Them.

There Are Dangers In Sentimentalizing Nature. Most Sentimental Ideas Imply, At Bottom, A Deep If Unacknowledged Disrespect. It Is No Accident That We Americans, Probably The World's Champion Sentimentalizers About Nature, Are At One And The Same Time Probably The World's Most Voracious And Disrespectful Destroyers Of Wild And Rural Countryside.

Redundancy Is Expensive But Indispensable.

Modernism Really Started With People Getting Infatuated With The Idea Of "it's The Twentieth Century, Is This Suitable For The Twentieth Century." This Happened Before The First World War And It Wasn't Just The Soldiers. You Can See It Happening If You Read The Bloomsbury Biographies. It Was A Reaction To A Great Extent Against Victorianism. There Was So Much That Was Repressive And Stuffy. Victorian Buildings Were Associated With It, And They Were Regarded As Very Ugly. Even When They Weren't Ugly, People Made Them Ugly. They Were Painted Hideously.

Cities Are An Immense Laboratory Of Trial And Error, Failure And Success, In City Building And City Design.