[Qubert]

Originally Posted by llamaorama

Cities can't subsist on snowless winters, golf courses, and beaches either. Someone needs to tell the 3 or 4 million or so folks in Tampa-St Pete's that. By this logic it shouldn't exist as a major city since it's only real economic function is phosphate mining and a rail served port complex

Yes, it's true that Florida isn't an economic powerhouse nor is Phoenix. I'd argue however that this somewhat is in line with what I'm talking about:

Let's begin with the inherent fact that 330 million Americans have to live somewhere, and clearly there will be population agglomerations that spring up as a result. With this being said, one, we do have to account for the fact that these are ultimately retirement centers. You can make the argument that just like humans concentrated in places like Europe, The Fertile Crescent, The North China Plain, North India, etc for their fertile lands tens of thousands of years ago, people will go to naturally scenic and climatically desirable places if no other concerns are present. I tend to think of climate as something similar to oil: It's a natural resource you either have or you don't. Tough luck.

If a city has something attractive to people, then people will want to live there even if they could live somewhere else.

To an extent...attractiveness is a balancing act of multiple variables for every individual. A lot of the things people look for in cities could be cultivated even in small towns (see: college towns)

IMO American cities since the postwar era have existed in a consumption oriented service economy context. Companies that employ white-collar workers locate offices where their workers are as much as workers locate where their office is. It's not like Wall Street has to literally trade in slips of paper or retailers need to be close to Amazon's mail room....

Let's keep in mind that prior to the 1990s the post war era had been brutal for cities. The inherent mobility of white collar work *did* at one time fortell the doom of large urban areas with the rise of the suburban office park. The line about "Companies moving to their workers" can come back to haunt urban areas as much as it's helped them. One can argue that Dallas and Atlanta are modern examples of business following population.

It also needs to be noted that again, a lot of people don't work in jobs that are remote. A lot of people work in the service industry or in blue collar occupations. And people are often anchored to a place by family.

Both blue collar and service jobs exist anywhere there is people, and thus are highly mobile. And as far as family is concerned, the mass migrations (Africa -> Europe, Rural China -> Urban China, Latin America -> US, etc) of the 21st century have shown people do go where the money is, as cynical as that sounds.

There's probably an argument to be made that economic complexity concentrated geographically has economic benefits too? Organic farmers markets and coffee shops might all lease commercial restaurant equipment, so you get a dealer who specializes in that. Maybe the regional warranty service center for these machines locates nearby. Then you get a car dealer who specializes in Ford Transit and Dodge Sprinter vans to sell to these repairmen, and then someone who has a side gig doing spray on bedliners. Oh and light industrial space, real estate, a trade school. It just snowballs from there, right?

This is true, but we're also forgetting economies of scale. Places like Paris, NYC, and Tokyo did not come into being due to restaurants (Osaka and Lyon are said to have better restaurants respectively, FWIW)

In a rural area where everyone lives miles apart all these services are less viable since it would take a whole day for the repair man to go fix the one broken Hobart machine in Middlebury Vermont, he'd have to charge a lot more for labor to make up for it being his only gig of the day and charge a lot in mileage. The cost of building a commercial kitchen increases as equipment costs more and the guys who build it want more, and so there are fewer organic farmers markets and coffee shops in this little town and they charge more for an apple pie or a latte. Slowly but surely I think the economy would yield more jobs and wealth per dollar that "trickles down" in the form of consumption spending by some work-from-home tech or finance worker in the city where things are clustered and more efficient than in the little town, and as a result the city would sustain itself.

While again accurate, this doesn't really refute either me or the OP (which, in true SSP fashion, we are light years off-topic from). People aren't all going to rush out and buy farms. The more realistic scenario is the age of the mega-city may be in danger and instead it will be the age of the small to medium regional center like Des Moines, IA or Orleans, France. Even worse is a super-charging of the suburbs since if you're going to be in your house almost 24/7 you'd at least like some space, right?

The OP asked whose going to fight for big cities and it seems the political zeigist at least here in NYC is to tell the economic powers that be to shove it, and hope that off-off-broadway theaters and fair-trade organic juice bars are enough to sustain a 9 million person metropolis.


My verdict: Urbanism will survive, but the mega city will get dialed back. If things continue this way, what you'll see is a boom of 100k to 1m sized regional cities and a drain away from expensive mega regions including even Dallas, Houston, Atlanta et al