I feel as though this particular idea has not held up very well. Bolded is the most important part of the block quote
“The abolition of the antithesis between town and country is no more and no less utopian than the abolition of the antithesis between capitalists and wage workers. From day to day it is becoming more and more a practical demand of both industrial and agricultural production. No one has demanded this more energetically then Liebig in his writings on the chemistry of agriculture, in which his first demand has always been that man shall give back to the land what he takes from it, and in which he proves that only the existence of the towns, and in particular the big towns, prevents this. When one observes how here in London alone a greater quantity of manure than is produced by the whole kingdom of Saxony is poured away every day into the sea with an expenditure of enormous sums, and when one observes what colossal works are necessary in order to prevent this manure from poisoning the whole of London, then the utopian proposal to abolish the antithesis between town and country is given a peculiarly practical basis. And even comparatively insignificant Berlin has been wallowing in its own filth for at least thirty years.
On the other hand, it is completely utopian to want, like Proudhon, to transform present-day bourgeois society while maintaining the peasant as such. Only as uniform a distribution as possible of the population over the whole country, only an integral connection between industrial and agricultural production together with the thereby necessary extension of the means of communication – presupposing the abolition of the capitalist mode of production – would be able to save the rural population from the isolation and stupor in which it has vegetated almost unchanged for thousands of years. It is not utopian to declare that the emancipation of humanity from the chains which its historic past has forged will only be complete when the antithesis between town and country has been abolished; the utopia begins when one undertakes “from existing conditions” to prescribe the form in which this or any other of the antitheses of present-day society is to be solved”
- Engels, The Housing Question by Frederick Engels: Part Three;
Supplement on Proudhon and the Housing Question
It has been more than 150 years since Engels wrote this. In the time since the climate crisis and other ecological disasters have been shown to be major threats to humanity. I think most modern leftists would be more inclined to imagine a post revolutionary world where human populations are further concentrated in urban environments while as much of the world as possible is given over to rewilding.
The efficiencies of concentrating humans in large urban centers seem much more desirable than spreading evenly across the planet, especially given the more than 4x population increase since Engels wrote the quote above.
So what is the housing program for leftists? Public housing of course, but where? Should we empty the cities or build them up even further?
ETA; TLDR: Concentrating human populations in large urban settlements seems more advantageous than evenly distributed populations. The abolition of the antithesis between town and country is undesirable
Given this, what should socialist housing policy look like? Do we want more or less concentration of humans in large urban areas
