What was true about the character of people was true thousands of years ago is still true today - the same goes for the cities they live in. We have more technology, vast accumulations of knowledge and other staples of modern times but in reality we still live at the crossroads with merchants, nobles, and the like. Our social classes have evolved, changed names, and (some of us) have stopped bowing to the wills of conspicuous lords but the same systems of power realistically exist today.
Having grown up in the cities of Moscow, Kiev, and New York, I can say that in my experience, there are still centers to modern cities, both in the sense of political powerhouses and general public centers for socializing and entertainment. In Moscow and Kiev likely due to the shadow of the Soviet regime, there was sometimes the sense of living in an ancient city much like those described by the authors - there were poor farmers from outside the city who would come within its walls to peddle their wares only to return back to their less than glamorous lives in the poorer suburbs at the end of the day. The same cobblestone roads from years gone by carry modern traffic into and out of the city, to both updated and outdated versions of cathedrals, factories and merchant quarters.
Many people spend their lives attempting to acquire whatever wealth they can so that they are able to move into the city, where to outsiders and the non-city poor opportunities seem to be endless and a certain sense of hope and possibility exists. At the same time, people within the cities who are also struggling often seek to escape the drudgery of a modern industrial city where it is easy to feel like a piece of a machine, only to feel just as unable to leave as the outsiders who want in. Just like the landowners of centuries past who could barely make enough money to get by and hoped to save enough to buy their way into accepted society within a city, the average person today has infinitely more wealth yet the same level of social immobility and are equally unable to move themselves OUT into a house with a white picket fence, or IN to an apartment with a view of the skyline.
Also, cities are built around whatever they are built around. You can justify the existence of NYC any way you want - you can claim it came about for religious reasons by stretching towards the pilgrim bit, claim its built around merchants, perhaps the fact that it was at a literal crossroad between the south and northeast, but the fact remains that cities can kind of just spring up because people tend to swarm like ants on a sugar cube whether the sugar is real or imagined, and then stay wherever they gathered for generations because we are stubborn and don't know when to move on.