Isn’t living in cities itself driven at least in part by memetics (e.g., glamour/appeal of city living shown on TV/movies)? Certainly memes can cause people to not live in cities, e.g., the Amish or the meme of moving out to the suburbs to raise kids.
I think the main reason people move to cities isn’t because cities are charming. It’s because cities are objectively better places economically, you could say it’s a kind of Keynesian beauty contest. If you’re a business, you want to be located somewhere with many job seekers and potential clients nearby. So people who want jobs and services will also want to live nearby, and so on.
If teleportation was invented tomorrow and people could blink around at low cost, I expect that people would instantly spread out to live on their own patches of land, and cities would become mostly just places to visit and maybe work. The city charm wouldn’t keep anyone living in a cramped apartment with neighbors above and below, if the economic reason for that disappeared. When I first imagined this scenario, I thought to myself that maybe we’re lucky teleportation hasn’t been invented yet :-)
Living in cities is primarily driven by economics: lots of people close together makes shipping/logistics/transportation/infrastructure cheaper. City centers are cheap from a logistical point of view but usually suffer from high real estate costs (except where these are depressed by crime or neglect), suburbs are often a good compromise between logistical costs and real estate costs, and rural living tends to involve the nearest store being 10 miles away, pricey, yet still having a poor assortment, plus difficulty with access to utilities and public transport. (FWIW, I used to live on a dirt road in a forest in the mountains above Silicon Valley, so I’m rather familiar with the upsides and downsides of both.)
Isn’t living in cities itself driven at least in part by memetics (e.g., glamour/appeal of city living shown on TV/movies)? Certainly memes can cause people to not live in cities, e.g., the Amish or the meme of moving out to the suburbs to raise kids.
I think the main reason people move to cities isn’t because cities are charming. It’s because cities are objectively better places economically, you could say it’s a kind of Keynesian beauty contest. If you’re a business, you want to be located somewhere with many job seekers and potential clients nearby. So people who want jobs and services will also want to live nearby, and so on.
If teleportation was invented tomorrow and people could blink around at low cost, I expect that people would instantly spread out to live on their own patches of land, and cities would become mostly just places to visit and maybe work. The city charm wouldn’t keep anyone living in a cramped apartment with neighbors above and below, if the economic reason for that disappeared. When I first imagined this scenario, I thought to myself that maybe we’re lucky teleportation hasn’t been invented yet :-)
Living in cities is primarily driven by economics: lots of people close together makes shipping/logistics/transportation/infrastructure cheaper. City centers are cheap from a logistical point of view but usually suffer from high real estate costs (except where these are depressed by crime or neglect), suburbs are often a good compromise between logistical costs and real estate costs, and rural living tends to involve the nearest store being 10 miles away, pricey, yet still having a poor assortment, plus difficulty with access to utilities and public transport. (FWIW, I used to live on a dirt road in a forest in the mountains above Silicon Valley, so I’m rather familiar with the upsides and downsides of both.)