I found the book Metropolis to be a good history of that in the form of "what did cities look like over the years" - cities were dirty, crowded, less healthy, etc, than a lot of alternative lifestyles but they also supplied the material essentials in predictable and more reliable ways.

If physical survival was easy to do leisurely then there wouldn't have been the motivation for more complex forms of society (many of which had very-unfun roles for many participants long before capitalism).