"Now James, if I'm reading you correctly, you see the sprawling burbs as an advance over the creaky antiquities of the city, a tommorowland where dreams come true."
No, Dwayne, you don't get it. It does not matter what you or I think is the best place for people to live. It matters what they think is the best place to live.
You have a quaintly old-fashioned distaste for getting into a car. That's ok - let someone else drive the goods to you, then. Nobody says that you have to get in a car. Just as its none of your business if others do.
In what sense are the suburbs and advance on the cities, then? In the sense that people are moving from the cities to the suburbs.
My point is that it is quixotic to disdain suburbia, when so many people plainly prefer it. All it means is that you find it difficult to relate to ordinary people's aspirations.
I do not mean that you have to live in suburbia. I don't. Nor do you. Lots of other people do.
The great cities of the nineteenth century were built up in an age when transport was expensive, and in the case of Europe, land was scarce (given over to extensive farming).
Karl Marx, like all the socialists of the nineteenth century looked forward to the abolition of the division between town and country. That remained a programmatic demand of the left right up to the bolshevik revolution.
Today, its happening. Land, retired from farm use is readily available. Transport is cheap. People commute greater distances. There is no need for them all to occupy the same overcrowded space.They can spread out. Why not, if that's what they want? Isn't socialism about giving people what they want?
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