Humanity is a sort of social, hive building mammal. Where an ant colony might accomplish this through pheromones and simple, instinctual responses; we make do by having an understanding of the world we live in, learning new behaviors, and - rather critically - communicating those understandings and behaviors to one another. And in the same way you can ignore the individual ants and treat the colony as a single emergent swarm organism, you can do the same to the cities people build.

It wasn’t a city, it was a process, a weight on the world that distorted the land for hundreds of miles around. People who’d never see it in their whole life nevertheless spent that life working for it. Thousands and thousands of green acres were part of it, forests were part of it. It drew in and consumed… …and gave back the dung from its pens, and the soot from its chimneys, and steel, and saucepans, and all the tools by which its food was made.

Different languages can carry different understandings and behaviors from generation to generation... but when you get down to it, one city's material interaction with the world, other cities, and the ecosystem are all broadly the same as any other city.

And now the cites are so industrialized, big, and bright that quite a lot of us have never seen the night sky.