I found the following in a brief Q&A with William Gibson (Scientific American):

“The Internet, which I think of as a sort of meta-city, has made it possible for people who don’t live in cities to master areas of expertise that previously required residence in a city, but I think it’s still a faith in concentrated choice that drives migration to cities.”

I paid $6 for the PDF of Gibson’s article (September issue). A few nuggets:

“Cities afforded more choices than small towns, and constantly, by increasing the number and randomization of potential human and cultural contacts. Cities were vast, multilayered engines of choice, peopled primarily with strangers.”

“Cities, to survive, must be capable of extended fugues of retrofitting.”

“Relative ruin, relative desertion, is a common stage of complex and necessary urban growth. Successful (which is to say, ongoing) cities are built up in a lacquering of countless layers: of lives, of choices encountered and made.”

If I wore a younger man’s clothes, I think a city would be the place for me.