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by gingabriska 2544 days ago
Is there a way to limit the size of these big cities?

What if they start requiring a domestic visa process to let in the people from other states?

Everyone wants a life of high standards of living which cities provide along with employment.

If we do not limit the number of people who can get in, it will naturally result in whole population of India moving into these cities.

This will result in people making wherever they live better instead of just moving to a better city.

5 comments

That is exactly what totalitarian regimes like North Korea do to maintain the high living standards in certain cities.

Mobility rights is seen as a fundamental human right and is protected by constitution in most countries.

What needs to happen is to provide economic incentives for people to spread out, not through laws that limit ones right to movement.

This is not a problem of city size but lack of planning for growth at the regional level. Look at New York City as an example, they started sourcing water from far distances early on and built an infrastructure to support a very large city. cities need to develop their surrounding areas to support themselves, sprawl isn't just because people don't want to live in a city sprawl is also required to support one

.

The way it's generally balanced out is exploding property prices and an unlivable mess of traffic and perhaps pollution.

However, people are willing to endure a lot if living standards are generally low.

Mumbai has high real estate price like but it doesn't stop people below the poverty line from coming to Mumbai and living in slums.
> If we do not limit the number of people who can get in, it will naturally result in whole population of India moving into these cities.

The population of France does not all live in Paris, nor that of the USA in New York. Even in as small a country as Luxembourg not everyone lives in Luxembourg City.

I must ask, does Paris or Luxembourg has slums like Mumbai has? Higher prices doesn't stop people below poverty line from coming to Mumbai and living below the standards here.
No, in part because they don’t have rent control that has frozen rents since 1947 or urban planning laws which make building densely illegal.

https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2017/04/tw...

https://mru.org/courses/principles-economics-microeconomics/...

> This will result in people making wherever they live better instead of just moving to a better city.

Maybe in the long term. In the immediate future, it would lead to massive economic recession due to labour shortages in high-employment areas and economic genocide in low-employment areas. The only way to redistribute employment might be gradual with economic incentives and disincentives. It also requires long-term thinking and implementation and it is difficult to imagine this in the Indian context.