[LeifCarrotson]

Subsequent to the agricultural revolution, big cities have been more economically efficient than suburban and rural areas. The productivity of cities massively subsidizes small towns and cul-de-sac neighborhoods.

Hedonistically, everyone wants to live on a big lot on a low-traffic road... with friends, family, and work/shopping/services a short distance away. If everyone does have that kind of housing, then - quickly - no one will have it, because evetything will be too spread out; you need to drive a big, polluting car fast through someone else's low-traffic neighborhood to get to yours.

The costs of concentrated habitation are less than the benefits - there's enough tax base and density to support roads and (emergency or mundane) services and businesses. The costs of distributed habitation are higher, and don't work if the entire nation switches to that kind of housing.

[coldtea]

>big cities have been more economically efficient than suburban and rural areas. The productivity of cities massively subsidizes small towns and cul-de-sac neighborhoods.

Environmentally and sustainably speaking, the "productivity" of big cities is zero.

Cut from the outside, a city like New York would die in a few months when food dissapears, with people eating one another. Cut from urban centers, rural towns and villages will continue to be able to drink and feed themselves just fine.

They only exist because the people living there are subsidized, for water, food, and other such essentials, from outside. Even factory production lives outside those cities.

That's how they started actually, when the rural production because so larger, as to be able to sustain not just itself, but also a parasitic, mediating and administrating, urbal class.

>If everyone does have that kind of housing, then - quickly - no one will have it, because evetything will be too spread out; you need to drive a big, polluting car fast through someone else's low-traffic neighborhood to get to yours.

There's nothing inevitable about this, it's just how US suburbs were designed, to be car-centered.

In decentralized suburbs with local walkable distance shops (walkable as a stronger condition as opposed to merely "a short distance away"), and with local jobs and more extended work from home, it doesn't matter if they "spread out", because you don't have to drive a "a big, polluting car fast through", as the need to go elsewhere is less frequent: work, socializing, shopping is nearby.

Add a good public transportation service, and you don't even need a car.

[esafak]

It's not parasitism, it's mutualism. If the country nurtures, the city pays the bills. I would not want to live in a country without both. Heck a country without cities probably would not last long except as a vassal.