In a Sci Fi story, the author describes a future where humans live in huge buildings like gigantic bee hives. A person who has only been living outside asks about life inside:

She wants him to describe the residential apartments, the transport system, liftshafts and dropshafts, the schools, the recreational facilities. Who prepares the food? Who decides what professions the children will follow? Can you move from one city to another? Where do you keep all the new people? How do you manage not to hate each other, when you must live so close together? Don't you feel like prisoners? Thousands of you milling about like bees in a hive — how do you stand it? And the stale air, the pale artificial light, the separation from the natural world. Incomprehensible to her: such a narrow, compressed life. 

The subtle balance of need and want in it, the elaborate social system designed for minimal friction and frustration, the sense of community within one's own city and village, the glorification of parenthood, the colossal mechanical minds in the service core that keep the delicate interplay of urban rhythms coordinated — he makes the building seem a poem of human relationships, a miracle of civilized harmonies. 

There was no other way for humanity to develop. The necessity of the vertical city. The beauty of it. Its wondrous complexity, its intricate texture. Of course, there is beauty outside it, he admits that, he has in gone in search of it, but it is folly to think that it is something loathsome, something to be deplored. In its own way magnificent. The unique solution to the population crisis. 

From: The World Inside, by Robert Silverberg (1971)

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