I was thinking more along the lines of the Ogier using the Ways in this way. There were more than one thousand years between the end of the Breaking and the Ways becoming corrupted in which the Ways would be the best way to move between Steddings. Rather than forming a city or going to a city, I was wondering about all Ogier with access to a Waygate becoming like a single community who regularly traveled between the Steddings by using them due to the ease and safety of doing so. Even if an individual Stedding was nowhere near the size of a city, they would be so closely connected that their society would resemble that of a city.

The Ways provided safe and rapid travel and communication between Stedding until they began to change and Machin Shin, the Black Wind, made them too dangerous to consider using under any circumstance short of an emergency. However, before this change I would think they would be utilized heavily by anyone who could read the Ogier script covering the Guidings. There would be a much greater incentive for one to learn to read Ogier script and therefore many more would do so, leading to even greater use. In my mind, Ogier society (and to a lesser extent any other society with easy access to Waygates) would become much closer to a single, massive community which happens to span a much larger physical area than a collection of small, secluded communities. This ease of sharing resources and ideas would lead to accelerated cultural and technological development near the scale that we see in the cities of our modern world.

This is intriguing to me as there doesn't seem to be any evidence of such a society ever existing in the books. Is there something I'm missing? What are some reasons you think this wouldn't happen? What do you think it would be like if it did?