Are you happy with the location of the capital of your state, province or nation?
 

Now of course nobody is going to take the capital out of Washington and plant it in SL or Denver. It would be extremely costly and Washington has history. But in a new area of settlement, the capital should be placed in or near the geographic center, and what is close to what is expected to be the future population center. Juneau is absurd as the Alaskan capital, and was even when it was selected. It should be Anchorage or perhaps Willow. Even Fairbanks would be better than Juneau. Sacramento, when chosen, wasn't bad for California when it was selected, but now is way too distant from the more populous south. Maybe Winnipeg would be a more central Canadian capital, although Quebec would probably resist the westward move. Perhaps a midlands location would be better for Britain than London, but London has the history and infrastructure. Paris will always be the capital of France I suppose.

Perhaps, over time, the bureaucracy could be spread around. Denver would make an ideal location for the Interior Dept. for example. NYC is the natural choice for the Treasury Dept., Federal Reserve and SEC. Omaha or Des Moines could get Agriculture etc., Chicago could get Commerce, Detroit or Pittsburgh Labor, Houston Energy. The President and Executive branch, Congress and Supreme Court, and probably Justice and Defense would remain in DC. But most of the bureaucracy could be spread around the country. The ease of internet communication makes this decentralization feasible.

The more high tech we get as a society, the less physical locations of capital cities matter. Everything can either be done online or state (and federal) services are duplicated in medium and major cities.

Houston is not a great choice for the DOE, since the DOE doesn't really have much to do with oil. I think Chicago (Argonne + Fermilab + most nuke plants in vicinity) or Bay Area (SLAC + LLNL + LBNL) or Albuquerque (Sandia + Los Alamos) make the most sense for the DOE.

Transportation could go to Boston since there's already a big DOT facility there, though FRA should probably be in Chicago and the FAA in Atlanta or Dallas or something.

Spreading the bureaucracy around spreads the tax revenue around, and jobs. Washington area is now one of the highest income cities because of this. Spread this around.

Would putting Transportation in Boston give Boston an unfair advantage in getting new projects?

After the Big Dig I can't imagine anyone would give Boston any money for anything.

Better than spreading Bureaucratic HQs around the country would be to decentralize much of the work and open significant satellite campuses in cities where they are appropriate, but leave the upper level staff in DC where they can report directly to the President.

Oh wait… that’s what we already do.

As someone from the southest of SoCal, I'm pretty fine with Sacramento being our capital. The Bay Area and LA are inevitably going to disagree about nearly everything, and they are near equal in prominence so it wouldn't be good to favor one over the other. It's best to have a neutral party to resolve disputes. A location in the Central Valley is far enough removed from both to prevent the local politics from effecting state decision making.

Theoretically we could've located the capital further south in the Central Valley, so as to be equidistant to both SF and LA. Fresno is the closest major city to the geographic center of California, making it probably the best candidate. But the tallest portion of the Sierra Nevada lies just west of Fresno, cutting it off from the rest of the country. Perhaps this doesn't particularly matter if one is only looking for a plot of land to build a government office building on, but the lack of connections to the east means Fresno will always have less economic activity than a city with rail and road connections to the greater USA. It would be better to locate the capital in an area with a good deal of commerce, all other things being equal, to take advantage of the skilled labor attracted to such places.

There are only two good passes then over the Sierra Nevada, Donner and Tehachapi. Sacramento lies near the entrance to Donner pass, and Bakersfield to the Tehachapi. Each is around 100 miles from SF and LA, respectively, so both are equally as removed from the politics of the coast. IMO the deciding factor for me is that Sacramento has water access to the Pacific ocean via the Sacramento river and the deep water canal. That's a pretty major advantage for goods shipment, making Sacramento the most accessible city in the Central Valley for industry. That leads to the Sacramento metro area being the most populated and richest area in the Central Valley, with the largest pool of skilled labor. So if we had to do it all over again, I'd still recommend Sacramento for the CA state capital.

I have always ended up far, far too close to the North Pole and far to distant to the Mediterranean.

About São Paulo state, only from neighbourhood, coming back to Downtown.

From here: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Pa...!4d-46.7119263 to here: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Co...!4d-46.6451314 or to any other place Downtown.

Today it's one of the worst located and ugliest seat of government.

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Regarding Brazil, I really detest Brasília, but going back to Rio would be impractical today. Several agencies, state-owned companies should definitely leave Brasília though. It's way to centralized.

Ottawa was and is a good location for Canada's capital, being on the border of the two most populous provinces, being adjacent to the two biggest cities, and straddling the French-English divide.

Harrisburg's location and physical build serves Pennsylvania fine. It's a mixture of the different parts of PA. I always thought the capitol complex had a very stately appearance.

https://i.imgur.com/rhfzXwlh.jpg

https://i.imgur.com/UENb7bmh.jpg

https://i.imgur.com/YIDeiwW.jpeg

^nice geographical setting.

Harrisburg sits right at the foot of the Appalachian Mountains and is only ~20 miles from the Appalachian Trail. It can make for an interesting trip especially if you wrap a visit to Hershey Park and Amish Country into it.

The joke is that Queen Victoria chose the Canadian capital in the 1800s by covering her eyes and randomly placing her finger on a map.

More likely it was a compromise after decades of the capital flip-flopping between various cities either too French, too English (Montreal, Quebec City, Toronto) or even too close to the hostile American border (Kingston, Ont.).

While Canada has expanded and grown demographically westward since then and some people have (only semi-seriously) advocated for a move to a more central location like Winnipeg, even today the two provinces of Ontario and Quebec combined have over 60% of Canada's population, and Ottawa lies in between the country's two largest cities.

When Ottawa was chosen, it was serving only the united provinces of Canada East (Quebec) and Canada West (Ontario). When the decision was made, it was very central on the boundary line between the two. Winnipeg was not even a thought in the 1850s, being not much more than the wilderness village of Fort Garry and not being part of Canada at the time. This was still controlled by the British Hudson's Bay Company, a completely separate entity until after Confederation when Britain finally decided to divest that huge territory to Canada.

Yes, I know. ;)

Capitals don't need to be at the geographic center of a governed territory (see Canadian provinces). For states it makes way more sense to have capitals in large cities than the middle of nowhere, since it is generally easier to travel to large cities.

For states, there were two reasons for choosing a centrally located capital: the early capital site was vulnerable to attack and had to be moved, or the territory had a fairly distributed population.

A capital should be in a transportation nexus, with trains, a major airport, good local transit, etc. Access shouldn't be mostly just cars.

I'd put it in the biggest city.

Olympia isn't a great location by that standard, but it's not terrible. You can get there by Amtrak and local bus, or by taking a train/bus to Tacoma then transferring to local bus. But it's time-consuming. And it's worse if you're not in the I-5 corridor.

I don't know if I agree with this. I just think of NYC and Albany. Upstate NY might be worse off if the state's political power revolved around NYC even more.