26 Sep

What’s the difference between a big building and a small city?

Not much, it seems. After visiting Hadrian’s Villa, then walking through towns as small as Castelvecchio Calvisio and Ostia Antica, the similarities between one man’s massive residence and an entire population’s local amenities are easily comparable. A theater, a temple, a library, a bath house… Complexes often shared by a couple thousand in the same neighborhood were also shared by an emperor and a few of his guests. The ratio of people using facilities to number of facilities available shifts drastically from big building to small city, even though the square footage of land space seems relatively the same (from what I’ve gathered from walking tours of the aforementioned sites).

I learned in some sociology class that significantly less than 1% of the world population contains more than a third of the world’s wealth. What’s the difference between a big building and a small city? Nothing, really. What’s the difference between people that live in a big building and people that live in a small city? Numbers; it’s the difference between a hundred and a hundred thousand.