[asplake]

As I recall, Paul Krugman’s 2008 Nobel Prize lecture would be a good place to start to understand why, economically at least, cities are they way they are, have the size distribution they have, and so on. For a philosophical delve into how cities and other large scale products of society emerge, you could try DeLanda.

[jongjong]

IMO, it's because of money printing. It makes everything about capital and human bodies. It creates a ponzi scheme which drives increasing centralization. Let's face it, most people who live in cities produce little to no value for society. Mostly doing bullshit jobs. Yet thanks to government money printing, their useless labour can be monetized. Places with high concentrations of people can now command large investments, real estate prices start to inflate due to artificial scarcity of land in central areas, this increases the 'value' of real estate collateral which allows city dwellers to take out large loans against it to fund even more bs ventures and jobs to attract even more people... The government keeps printing money and handing out huge contacts to large bs companies to do useless 'intellectual' work. Using job creation as a cover for the ridiculous inefficiencies they create.

The economy is hollowed out and the competitive market dynamics are replaced with inefficient monopolies... People lose valuable skills and gain useless skills instead because bs jobs pay better than useful ones. Nobody wants to do useful jobs simply because they don't pay... At the same time the intelligent ones among them recognize the uselessness of their high paying BS jobs and this demoralizes them, makes them feel guilty about everything and makes them vulnerable to woke and other self-loathing ideologies (though of course they won't acknowledge this, even to themselves).