" Even without the incessant outbreak of war, there was an undercurrent of terrorism and sadistic punishment in such a regime, similar to that which has been resurrected in the totalitarian states of our own day, which bear so many resemblances to these archaic absolutisms. Under such conditions, the necessary co-operations of urban living require the constant application of the police power, and the city becomes a kind of prison whose inhabitants are under constant surveillance: a state not merely symbolized but effectively perpetuated by the town wall and its barred gates. "

― Lewis Mumford , The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects