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 :-)
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 :-)