> Maybe there is some type of awful natural law to be found even?
Maybe. You've got two examples so far. Can you go even further back? Which cities were industrial hubs prior to Silicon Valley and Detroit, and what became of them?
Mill towns from the industrial revolution come to mind. Factories and boarding houses created such thriving industry that towns literally spawned around them, but within decades they transformed into abandoned buildings in towns devoid of any economic opportunity.
> Eventually Silicon Valley will end up like Detroit, with abandoned 4-over-1 condo complexes and empty office parks where the software industry once stood.
What if the secular demand for living in Silicon Valley is higher than Detroit? What if Detroit was desirable due to the economics and infrastructure constraints of that time, but what if people like the other aspects, such as location and weather,of living somewhere?
Not that it’s not possible for that to change either, but my point is different pieces of land may be more or less desirable than others outside of economic conditions.
> Towns are an interesting case where the free market system breaks.
What you're observing isn't the output of a free market; for that, see towns built primarily up until about the 1930s; these are traditional, walkable towns, with a coherent downtowns and organic patterns of settlement.
Since then, zoning laws and land-use planning have drastically altered the common patterns of development and led to the rise of master-planned subdivisions that are all too common today.
If not for the artificial segregation of residential and commercial uses and for equally artificial restrictions on density of development, modern suburbs would likely be smaller satellite towns, each with its own coherent walkable core, instead of megatowns with purely residential sprawl extending great distances away from the only urban core permitted to be developed.
> If you want to build a city from scratch, why would you build this thing instead of just starting it in e.g. the plains of Nebraska or something?
Because major cities are located near natural supplies of fresh water, navigable waterways, etc., for a reason. The good places for cities tend to have cities in them.
> I think that captures some of the contradiction in your claims. Yes, cities could be terrible places to live and work. Yet people have moved to them throughout recent history because the alternative is worse.
I think this is a misreading. People who had options didn't urbanize until they had to. When a family had too many sons to split and or when Roman aristocrats or English magnates pushed people off their land or when a bad climate situation made farming impractical, people moved--but it's a very, very recent historical development to urbanize (en masse) when other choices exist.
Yes, the alternatives have been worse and so industrial urbanization became more appealing than starving. Who the hell made them worse and whose progenitors now control the capital needed to destroy ever more labor?
(Don't take not addressing the rest as dismissal--your other points are all within a coherent universe, they're just techno-optimism that I have no reason to share so I have nothing to say to them.)
> I am no Luddite, but I think that perhaps taking a step backwards in time could be an interesting experiment - create more towns that are self-sufficient, grow their own crops, build their own houses, etc. It seems like much of the wealth is getting boiled down into the hands of fewer and fewer big companies.
Maybe it would be different now, what with communications technology like the internet making proximity to major city centers less important. But to me, this doesn't sound like a practical solution
> Historically, efforts to create cities by decree have not worked well.
Aren’t there a number of big cities that have been built by decree and work well? I’m thinking of capital cities like Canberra (AUS), Brasilia (BRA) and Washington DC (USA). Granted, these are not quite so ambitious as The Line, but they turned mostly uninhabited swampland and farmland into major cities.
> City expands and resident need cheap housing. The cheap housing is built near the industrial zone as that is how economic forces work.
In cities like Mobile, Alabama, the opposite is usually true[1]: people already lived in those areas, but companies (and local governments) don't consider their health sufficiently important. I'll leave it up to you to infer why that is.
Where would you put one, and what would be the point of going there?
There are already settlements in every place it makes sense to live. Any new city would have to be developed on the strength of some newly-discovered resource; what would that be, and why would you not simply expand whichever town already happens to exist nearby, instead of going to all the expense of starting from scratch?
> An interesting question to ask is why do we always seem to grow by increasing density rather than establishing new small towns?
That would be increasing the density of the rural area the new small town springs up in. New towns do spring up in places where they can, but it's usually either some company drops a facility there and then housing pops up to support the facility as people decide they'd like a shorter commute, etc; or it's in the outskirts of built up areas, but then people complain about sprawl.
> Regarding the original point, I think it's important to highlight that without the industrial revolution humans wouldn't be able to live closely together in cities.
Note that settlements have naturally occurred around rivers because of agriculture (e.g. Mesopotamia), so "cities", in some sense of the word, have existed long before the industrial evolution.
I am aware that civilization brings good stuff with it - it's hard to not be aware of it - but I don't think the tradeoff is worth it. I think it can be, and ought to be, much better than this. It is my opinion that each and every human deserves to (be able to) live in an environment that is pleasant to them. I see it as a fundamental human right.
> How did we slip away so far from this being fairly obvious? Cities have worked well this way for hundreds of years.
Capitalism. Economies of scale. Taxpayer subsidies for car infrastructure. Nowadays Amazon, Uber Eats, etc.
Try actually running a local dairy or restaurant or electronics store and see how long it takes for you to be crushed out of existence by people driving to the supermarket 5 km away, or just ordering from VC funded loss-making delivery companies, or the like.
> Cities are very dense and, in the scheme of human existence, unnatural places.
I think that this kind of statement must be qualified very carefully. I believe (though I don't know) that cities are unnatural in the sense that they don't arise in nature among other animals than humans; but I'd be reluctant to call them unnatural for humans, in the sense that it seems to me that a large part of what makes us human is the ability to live together and function (well or poorly!) in large groups.
> Factories usually push down the value of land. Who wants to be next to a smokestack?
Factory workers. Then service workers who sell their food and cut their hair. Then doctors and nurses and police and firefighters and so on who are needed wherever people are concentrated. How do you think places go from being an empty field to a town?
> Which is all very well, except there basically isn't anybody who doesn't care about location and attracts investment. Location is important for everybody.
Then why do Boeing and Ford and GE build their factories in rural areas instead of in Manhattan?
> Suburbia done well can be great. Not everyone wants to be crowded into cities with noise and crime and no access to nature.
Which you can answer that cities done well can also be great.
Noise, crime and no access to nature is not a common denominator of cities. While my city is noisy, mostly due to the overuse of vehicles, I am 15 minutes by foot / 5 minutes by bicycle from the nature[1] and crime is not a something of concern here.
If you want an example of a city that does well in all 3 areas I think Utrecht is a good example.
> Suburbia can still have mixed use areas. We had a shopping center in our development for all the basic needs. We had parks and nature preserves and even areas with condos for cheaper housing.
Also, isn't that getting close to the definition of a small town...which is itself kind of a small city?
Maybe. You've got two examples so far. Can you go even further back? Which cities were industrial hubs prior to Silicon Valley and Detroit, and what became of them?
Mill towns from the industrial revolution come to mind. Factories and boarding houses created such thriving industry that towns literally spawned around them, but within decades they transformed into abandoned buildings in towns devoid of any economic opportunity.
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