[barry-cotter]

> Thus you lose the benefit of being in the city (close to work, close to friends, close to cultural offerings, close to shops, close to ...)

This is the “Brooklyn is boring” problem. It’s temporary. The old city centre (Manhattan) is unlikely to decline rapidly in relative importance but cultural and economic life will happily extend itself from central areas to less central ones given the population and the money to make it worthwhile. Good transport links help enormously too.

[ghaff]

Tokyo doesn't really radiate from a single center anyway. It's really an agglomeration of centers of activity. This is also true of NYC to some degree (but in a different way). "Downtown," i.e. Wall Street, isn't the cultural and social center.