Modern cities and buildings are all about quick bucks and ROI.
Even our costly monumental works (museums and such) are built by inflated-ego architects for the bucks, and with no sense of public beauty -- just their modernist or post-modernist personal ideology.
That's one thing that gets me about people suggesting to others to "just move" to find a job, and that they don't have to have any ties to any place (e.g. their home state).
In the end, this means treating every place as a temporary residency, sort of like a hotel, and having no civic concern and pride in it. In other words, it ends with ugly cities and dystopias.
The inverse would be the pride with which people like old New Yorkers loved their city (and of course old Europeans cities like Vienna, Paris, and so on).