Your comment made me go into a weird though experiment:
What if non-urban areas could somehow &quot;rebel&quot; and escape from the power control of the government controlling the cities?<p>Thus creating some sort of &quot;Urban city state islands&quot; rich in human&#x2F;tech resources surrounded by &quot;Urban land states&quot; rich in natural resources.<p>Obviously in such utopia these 2 entities could enter into much more balanced relationships of power and dependency from one another than what we have today.<p>I dare speculate that the reason that this currently cannot happen is that everything about natural resources is financialized and thus beholden to the power of the urban capital. The non-urban exploited by the urban is what we have... (also an imbalance in population from one to the other...) and many other reasons other will surely point out better than me!