"…what is so wonderful about being big? It is often said that the world is suffering from the ills of bigness, and we now have some clinical examples in our large cities. Many cities are probably past the point of good government because too many things are wrong. Should we not rather ask whether we need cities? With modern systems of communication and transportation, businesses do not need to be within walking or taxicab distances of each other, and how many people must one be near in order to live a happy life? People who flock to cities looking for jobs and more interesting lives will flock back again if jobs and more interesting lives are to be found where they came from. It has been suggested that, with modern systems of communication, the America of the future may be simply a network of small towns."

—B.F. Skinner, Walden Two Revisited (1976)

starting Skinner’s Walden Two (1948). by this 1976 preface, he was already predicting comms would dismantle mega-cities into a network of small towns. (he sure did get remote-work logistics right decades early 😅)

since his work is known for out-engineering friction + trading human messiness for predictability, I'm curious to see if his behavioural utopia misunderstood why people still crave the chaos of the city, as I sometimes do/often don't 🤹‍♀️