2026-10-22: I found these old writings when I was cleaning up some stuff and added them here.
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Issue
To understand the most important characteristics of a society, one must study its major cities.
Essay
What is a society constituted of? We can confidently state that it is the people who form the societies. And to understand any of these societies we need to understand the lives of it's people. What provides us with high density of population in large numbers? Those places are major cities of that particular society. So studying the major cities of a society is a highly efficient and effective way to understand the most important characteristics of a society. Since we are only focusing on most important characteristics and not digressing into minutiae, we can safely concentrate our efforts on studying only major cities without much adverse effects on our conclusions.
The administration and ruling of a society highly affects the lives of people and consequently the whole society. Without understanding the formation and enforcement of law, we cannot say that we understand a society. Rulers and governments have, since millennia, focused their presence in the capital city of their country and operate the whole society from there. Therefore we ought to study the capital and other major cities of a society have a grasp on administration of that society.
Architecture and construction of cities also generally represent the advancements in technology that the society has been able to accomplish; this combined with concentration of educational institutes in cities provide useful insight into the intellectual output of a society. Usually the brightest minds of a society are responsible for most of it's progress therefore studying the intellect level of a society becomes key in understanding as to what position it held in the overall world at that time.
There had been and continue to be many societies which were agro-centric. Here the population is usually spread among different villages, and not within few key cities. This asks for a shift in our perspective in a way that the people may no longer be approaching all the way to their King in the city for justice, but rather a local authority. Similar things happen in all aspects of people's lives. Thus we need to consider these cases of agro-centric societies alike.
Though in case of agro-centric societies and other few such outlier cases, we need to use a different approach still we can safely say that in majority of societies their reflection can be seen in their cities and thus by making a diligent study of these cities we stand to amass quite a huge knowledge-base about these societies as a whole.