The nadir of urbanism

But towns and cities were also exploding in size. Industry was booming. New populations poored in. Towns and cities became places of sooty, shoddy tenements, diverse peoples wary of each other, streets fouled with horse excrement, then polluting cars and buses. Thoreau wrote, "Hope and the future for me are ... not in towns and cities, but in the impervious and quaking swamps." Rather than seeing cities as places where life comes together, they were seen as unnatural and unhealthy. Urbanism was toxic and to be regulated away. Zoning ordinances required new development to be low-slung, buildings to be detached and setback far from the street, and intimate neighborhoods replaced with big blocks, big buildings, and single-use zoning. Under the new rules, towns and cities went from cramped and intense to dispersed and lifeless. The human purposes of urbanism were forgotten.