All of it is. The whole damn thing. There is no right way or wrong way there is just what was decided upon by whoever was calling the shots at the time, and then that guy or faction died, was overrun, was deposed, died out, was succeeded by _____ and then he/she built on what was already created or tore it all down or burned it or an earthquake took it or whatever and it was rebuilt and so on.
Three hundred years ago, give or take, there was nothing here in the ol' U.S.of A. 'cept bands of Native Americans but they weren't called 'Americans', they had other names they called themselves and they had their thing own going.
In Europe things were different. There were more permanent structures built by people who had lived and ruled there from before, but now were only ruins, as the shifting fortunes of various wannabe rulers had expanded and lost empires and such many times, so much so that the mapmakers of the time had been kept busy drawing the currently agreed-upon borders. This river, that range of mountains, that strategic valley or pass was 'ours', or maybe it was 'their's, but not for long- or for forever- by any means.
In Asia it was the same way pretty much 'cept for Japan, protected by the sea from invaders and marauders. India had been protected too, with the Himalayas along their Northern border.
Vast Africa had been hostile to invasion and empire building due to desert, disease, jungle, and no real network of transportation. It was hard to conquer, and even harder to rule, so why bother?
Few did.
Australia! So isolated that nobody went there for centuries, and when they got there, they had to build everything from scratch.
And who knows if any civilizations preceded the ones historians have evidence of, those lost civilizations buried under sand, ice, and sea.
As of this writing, the only thing agreed upon worldwide that I can readily think of is time. What time is it? Other than that, nothing else is as universally accepted or kept exactly, precisely, the same. Cars are cars but each country has different makes and models. Food is food but each country, and region therein, cooks it or throws it together differently. Electrical voltages, systems of measuring volume, temperature, and speed vary from place to place. What the exact same item is even named.
Nothing is static, all is evolving (or de-volving, sad to say, in some areas) and the show goes on 24/7, 365.
Nice to look at but no street parking
Aldric Rivat- Unsplash.com
It would be interesting to see the entirety of this in time lapse, which is what historians try and do for us, documentarians try and visually present to us, they try and distill this lengthy process into comprehensible bites that we can take in. They bring us the short version, the salient points, the synopsis of events. Not the 'How It's Made' but "How It Was Made' for enquiring minds want to know those kinds of things.
Take the gentrification of a city. If we know how that occurs, we can prevent it from happening, nip it in the bud, stop the process, reverse it, and keep the city vibrant and alive.
How did San Francisco, a favorite city of mine and a good example, become overrun with homeless? Why are rents spiraling out of control there?
City planners didn't have the analytical tools to alert them to such potentially undesirable outcomes in real time before but they have them now. They can collect data and track trends. They don't have to let systems devolve in order to understand them later, which was sort of the old, slow way of doing things.
Case studies of neighborhoods becoming overtaken by wealthier residents go back to Roman times. Crowded working class neighborhoods became neighborhoods containing only villas there, thus the term 'Gentry' as in 'having the dough to buy you bums out and renovate' which was turned into the term 'Landed Gentry' of Olde England and has become the 'tech giants/Airbnb passive investor phenomenon' going on in San Francisco today. 'Gentrification' is the catch-all term which covers this seemingly non-understandable, highly complex, and politically volatile issue, yet it, like everything else, is totally malleable. Causes and their resulting effects can be pinpointed more easily these days and solutions can be proposed, enacted, or at least tried out.
Delving into the fine details of the process of gentrification as it applies to each unique city ain't exacly my forte, I'm more of a theoretical kind of guy, but there are people of such bent who can show you on the internet the reasons they think San Francisco has devolved into the city it has become today. (New York too. And many others).
If there was ever a maxim that applies to how society functions, that simplifies the seemingly complicated, it is this:
"Remember- It’s All Made Up!”
(And in real estate's case, cause and effect is not shifting around like in three card monte, that game where you try and guess what's under one of the cups when the street hustler stops moving them around. Real estate is a stationary target)