For literally millions of years humans would have known well only a handful of other people, and likely met less than ~100-200 other humans at all throughout an entire lifetime. Crowds are a new thing under the sun.

Anyway, I like Christopher Alexander's "Interlocking Fingers" pattern: It seems someone has posted it here: http://iwritewordsgood.com/apl/patterns/apl003.htm

> People feel comfortable when they have access to the countryside, experience of open fields, and agriculture; access to wild plants and birds and animals. For this access, cities must have boundaries with the countryside near every point. At the same time, a city becomes good for life only when it contains a great density of interactions among people and work, and different ways of life. For the sake of this interaction, the city must be continuous - not broken up. In this pattern we shall try to bring these two facts to balance.

> ...

> Therefore: Keep interlocking fingers of farmland and urban land, even at the center of the metropolis. The urban fingers should never be more than 1 mile wide, while the farmland fingers should never be less than 1 mile wide.

It’s not like urban areas are not associated with mental health issues: https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2014/feb/25/city-stress-m...

I'm one of those people.. and I hate it in the city. But I like making six figures and that's not currently possible where I'm from originally.

>mental health issues related to loneliness

Citation? It's a fact that urban living is associated with higher levels of mental illness, not just conjecture.

I don't have a citation for loneliness per se, but suicide rates for young people are much higher in rural areas, "even after controlling for a broad array of county-level sociodemographic, economic, and health care system characteristics."

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/fullarticle/...

Of course, there's always the issue about whether suburbs and exurbs count as rural or urban, which leads to people talking past each other.

I can't see where they controlled for distance needed to travel to reach emergency departments after a suicide attempt. I'm sure they did, because it's a pretty big factor for how many people die from some methods, but it would have been nice to see this more clearly described.

Well, even if that accounts for part of the effect, it's still a benefit from urban living!

Urban living might be associated with mental illness, but so is poverty. Not because poverty causes mental illness, but because mental illness causes poverty. Mental illness also causes people to live in cities, because their needs are better met in cities.