Methinks urban areas are tolerable & functional only because of the high degree of cooperation and order. Small actions by individuals can rapidly disrupt many lives; with such high concentration of people, the odds of disruptive activity happening frequently are high. To maintain a tolerable environment, small disruptions must be squelched rapidly and severely lest they soon become extensive and costly to others. This soon leads to creation of government to decide and implement acceptable cooperation and order, and police to enforce it, to a very nit-picking and pervasive degree. Without enforced cooperation and order, most individuals would waste a tremendous amount of time & resources counteracting such chaos.
Contrast rural areas: one can exercise a great deal of non-cooperation and disorder, and few will care.
Put grossly, it's the difference between difficulty to avoid human contact vs. difficulty to invoke human contact. The more people you encounter (directly or indirectly) in a short time, the exponentially greater the need for defining and enforcing order - right down to normalizing the lowest and highest in society (disparity is disruptive).