>>723804216
>They were also impossible in the period before the industrial revolution because the majority of the populace had to be producing food.
You are destroying your own argument. Yes. Most of the populace had to produce food. You need space to produce food. You do not have an internal combustion engine or other fast methods of transportation so you cannot be too far from the big city itself. So you lived in suburban environs adjacent to the city itself. Civilization IS suburban. The idea of “rural” doesn’t really exist until mass transportation.