worship the glitch

The common theory of the origin of cities states that they resulted from the invention of agriculture: Surplus food freed people to become specialists. You can’t have full-time cobblers, blacksmiths, and bureaucrats, the theory goes, without farms to feed them. Jane Jacobs upended that supposition in The Economy of Cities (1969). “Rural economies, including agricultural work,” she wrote, “are directly built upon city economies and city work.” It was so in the beginning, she argued, and continues to this day. Most farming innovations, for example, are city-based. When Rome collapsed, European agriculture collapsed. When crop rotation was reinvented in the twelfth century, it began around European cities and took two centuries to reach remote farms. In the eighteenth century, the revolutionary use of fodder crops like alfalfa to fix nitrogen in the soil was developed first in city gardens. American agriculture soared in the 1920s when hybrid corn was invented, not on a farm but in a New Haven, Connecticut, laboratory.