"Urbanization is one of the most obvious symptoms of what is called modernization. Before the harnessing of electrical power and the recent developments in electronics, division and mechanization of labor required the concentration of workers in factories, and of factories in cities where goods could easily be moved from one stage of production to the next. Urbanization breaks up traditional family-based communities and introduces people to a world where there is a multiplicity of human networks, each controlled by different purposes. In traditional rural societies, each person is securely fixed in a single human milieu that embraces work, leisure, family relationships, and religion.These all form part of a given world that is accepted as real and within which the individual person has a secure and well-defined identity. In a city the individual is in the presence of multiple possibilities... And to that extent his identity is a matter for his own choice, and so for anxiety and doubt. In the milling crowds of the city, composed of individuals each pursuing goals of his or her own choice, the individual's sense of being in a world without landmarks is heightened- sometimes to the point of despair."
-Lesslie Newbigin, Foolishness to the Greeks p. 32 (1986)
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