Will large cities become obsolete?

[MadImmortalMan]

I think they might.

This started from my ponderings of my postman-induced petty annoyances. It's more or less axiomatic that the more people who live in close proximity to each other, the greater the probability for conflict exists. From a mathematical perspective, it makes sense that each individual added to the geographical group increases the possibility of conflict by an exponential factor. Though it's not exponential due to each individual in the area not actually coming in contact with every other individual every day, the total number of contacts in a period of time would increase on a curve that looks exponential as the population of the area increases. Or something like that. Basically, more people = more problems.

But it's also true that gathering people together in communities solves a lot of problems. We didn't invent cities just for the hell of it or because we like getting drunk and fighting each other. Clustering the population allows for the pooling of resources that is required to do certain things. A factory needs x number of people in order to operate and produce goods, and those people need a place to live, etc. From a logistical standpoint, it is easier to move goods to the end-users when the end-users are concentrated in one place. Economies of scale can be leveraged better, and greater specialization of labor is possible when the number of "customers" for a particular service is high in a single area. A man may be an expert cobbler in a large city and make a living solely at that type of work, whereas the same man in a rural area may need to also be a blacksmith, cooper, carpenter, millwright and teamster at the same time, becoming an expert at none. The community as a whole may more easily organize and pool its resources if living close to each other.

Cities also came about due to technological and logistical limitations. As soon as a farmer's farm yielded more food than his family needed, the obvious economic shift that would happen was going to be the impetus to stop farming. I wonder how that shift looked to the people at the time. Suddenly, there's all this food and nobody wants to buy yours. Well, food can only be shipped so far before it becomes unusable or requires special storage methods. So it made sense for all the people who stopped farming in favor of using their time other ways to live in close proximity to the special storage or the place where the farmers brought the food. Governance of a proximity-collected citizenry is more effective.

Cities create problems to solve. Due to the need to cluster together, other things become necessary. Sanitation, aqueducts, public safety, the need to maintain a steady food supply, housing, etc. All that stuff that formed the basis of the civil polity arose because people clustering together created problems that they had to solve together. As soon as there are more people on a piece of land too small to naturally sustain that number, those pressures exert themselves, and sometimes sooner. So the creation of problems helped humanity figure out how to organize itself and progress as a civil polity.


Some of the limitations that made cities necessary are now gone or insignificant. A man may only travel so far during the shelf life of the food he's carrying, whether walking or using some form of transportation. As the transportation and storage techniques got better, the distance increased. Now we have effectively no logistical limit on how far on the planet a fruit may go before it is consumed by a customer or spoilage. Political movements can be built on Twitter. The internet has become a tool of governance, and many people now do work which no longer requires the physical presence of their body at a certain location.
Many people who do that kind of work still go to concentrated locations to do it, but the share is decreasing, and will continue to do so because the economic factors will demand it. So will commercial real estate become like those farmers, all kinds of offices available that nobody wants? Maybe not, but there is a huge trend where I live of converting high-rise office buildings and casino properties into condos and penthouses if you want an anecdote. Transportation itself will obviously be a logistical issue for a while yet. We can't teleport from place to place. But some of the primary drivers of demand for transportation are diminishing. You can get an education from your house too.


The market is ultimately driven by the desires of the consumer, and humans want space. In the very basic question of where to live, the primary driver of choice has always been the limitations of proximity. You must live near the food supply, the bakery, the plant, the workshop. You must live near your place of employment. You must live in a place that falls within the limits of your wealth. You must live near the school that educates your children. All of those limitations required all of those places to be near where people live, which means they needed to be near each other. As we continue to check items off that list because they became location-independent, then what will be the natural tendency in the question of where to live? It will be more dependent on preference.
Why did every city in America develop sprawling tracts of suburbs as far as the eye can see? Because they could. The economics allowed it, the technology allowed it, the infrastructure allowed it and the logistics allowed it. That happened because people wanted it. When given the choice between the commute and more space and the convenience and less space, people chose space. It's also axiomatic that the more people who live in an area, the less space is available for each. That is reflected in the economics. You can rent a huge house in the countryside for the same price as a closet in Singapore. Thus, the choice of where to live became a balancing act. How far away from town can I go before the limitations of doing so become untenable? In that way people get the best quality of life they can manage without putting too great a strain on their logistical limitations.


But people also don't want isolation. Social animals, and all that. Some clustering is necessary, I think, just on a psychological level. Some people simply want to be where the action is, surrounded by many others and are comforted by that. Strangely, that desire is not universal though. The rest are unnerved by the very same circumstance. Maybe it's 50-50 or something, I don't know. But I do know that there are levels at which most people are comfortable somewhere in the middle. Maybe cities will be like that. Maybe they will find a middle ground--as the limitations on where people can choose to live drop away, maybe the small cities will grow and the large ones will shrink until they get closer to some optimal population density for the human animal. I don't know, but I'm not investing in commercial office space.

What of social movements? Now that one is a wild card. People want organic, locally-grown, earth-friendly, lead-free, biodegradable, non-corporate, crowdsourced, all-natural and...affordable. The farmers' markets are becoming incredibly popular--(also a great place to find women I noticed, for you single guys). Most of that stuff looks like it would play to the rural aspect, but the impact of those things on actual decision-making tends to be muted, I think. People will buy organic and locally-grown, but only if you truck it to the grocery store downstairs from their apartment, if you know what I mean.




TL:DR - Skim the bold bits.

[Admiral Yi]

The opposite.  Large numbers of people have bid up the most desirable real estate in the world: compact, walkable urban centers.

[garbon]

The opposite.  Large numbers of people have bid up the most desirable real estate in the world: compact, walkable urban centers.

[MadImmortalMan]

The opposite.  Large numbers of people have bid up the most desirable real estate in the world: compact, walkable urban centers.

And the reasons they did so are going away. Which is kinda why I thought of the question. 

[Neil]

When modern, technical society comes to an end.  Barring that, large-scale free or nearly-free teleportation might put a damper on city size.

[Admiral Yi]

And the reasons they did so are going away. Which is kinda why I thought of the question. 

People don't want to live in The Village because it's close to the grain silos.

[mongers]

No.

[MadImmortalMan]

And the reasons they did so are going away. Which is kinda why I thought of the question. 

People don't want to live in The Village because it's close to the grain silos.

No, that limitation is gone. As are others I mentioned. And then people started leaving.

[Admiral Yi]

No, that limitation is gone. As are others I mentioned. And then people started leaving.

Where's your evidence?  Most cities in the world have kept on growing.

[Ideologue]

In the future, we will all live underground.  That's what Arthur C. Clarke told me, anyway.

[Ed Anger]

Josq should be condemned to an American suburb, condemned to driving everywhere and falling afoul of the drunk in public laws.

[DGuller]

It seems like the trend of going in the other direction.  Urbanization is accelerating again, or so is my impression.  I do agree that the basic determinant of the importance of cities is transportation.  If you can be teleported anywhere in the country at any time at no cost of any kind, then I imagine that the population would be almost evenly spread out along all habitable land.

I would also disagree about the social aspects of living in a city.  IMO, big cities are a perfect example of a crowd being the loneliest place.  I imagine that in fact small towns are the more sociable places, precisely because everyone knows everyone, and thus you have to support the human connections with strangers you run into every day.

[MadImmortalMan]

Another thing I didn't mention is that the larger a city is, the more fragile a system it is. It takes more resources to sustain, it's more susceptible to supply shocks in commodities and it's a more likely to suffer more from localized adversity. I don't think that's a reason people choose to live there or not, however.

[mongers]

Isn't the growth in city size and urban occupancy one of the more consistent trends in history ?

Also are we on course to see majority of humanity living in cities during this centre, perhaps within the lifetime of some of us ?

Which maybe the first time this has occurred in human history ?

[Grey Fox]

Maybe but they will become larger, much larger first.