Eventually, it lost its human scale, residential population, vitality, sense of safety, and most of its sunshine. An equal amount of effort, she says, will be required to turn it back into neighbourhoods once again.

Some of these seem like weird issues to take. Our civilisation is an intrinsically larger than human scale undertaking; if you want to avoid that, you pretty much have to go back into the wild. Similarly, every tall downtown is shaded, because of the square cube law of basic geometry. Honestly it’s impressive how much light we do manage to let in.