If you want a taste of the nightmare that your city could become, look to China. Foreign Policy has an excellent article that ties together a lot of threads I have picked up over the last few months. To sum up, "For all their economic success, China's cities, with their lack of civil society, apocalyptic air pollution, snarling traffic, and suffocating state bureaucracy, are still terrible places to live."
China is what happens when industry is allowed to run the show. China's cities are a model of the perfect Libertarian society: freed from the constraints of a restrictive government, China's industries pollute the air, water, and land to a shocking extent. Without government intervention, everything becomes a commodity, including the people. The author describes "smog the color of gargled milk" in one city, and describes another as "a gray Manchurian industrial powerhouse."
This is what happens when a government gives free rein to business, without a thought for protecting its people. As a rule, you can either defend business or people, and if you throw all your weight behind business, you end up with cities where the average lifespan is 30, and food adulteration scandals (melamine in baby formula; "soy sauce" made from discarded human hair) are a daily occurrence.
