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Comment by jib | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sold on density. I think improving rural logistics is more key. Make more land attractive rather than making more use of current land.

That is logistics both for people, data, and goods.

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It does seem attractive, all the empty land out there.

But the point of cities is to be near lots of other people all the time. There's a tipping point of human flourishing from the intermingling.

Great cities outlasted empires. Interaction density is the important thing, and it grows combinatorially with human density. There's no way you're going to get rural logistics to that level.

Also there's a significant problem of infrastructural efficiency. There's research indicating that city infrastructure follows a 3/4ths-power distribution, where doubling the population only increases the need for infrastructure by 68% [1]. The more generalizable format of this is Kleiber's Law [2], which notes that animal metabolisms scale along that same distribution by body mass. The implication is that cities like Detroit that are rapidly contracting in population and per-capita income are getting a double-wammy of decreasing tax revenues and increasing per-capita infrastructure costs.

[1] http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/05/19/math-and-the...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kleiber%27s_law

Its possible the internet has solved some of that benefit of closeness, but that socially we haven't yet caught up, but will gradually.

eg. Having good broadband plus good VR goggles and cameras might make remote working much more immediate and a viable replacement for all those commuter cars on the road.. the technology to make that effortless might be here in 2 years and our social norms might catch up in 10 years after that..but maybe its much longer, and/or a carbon tax or higher fuel or road use tax is needed as an incentive.

Logistics will make a big difference. But distance will always matter for transportation. Also, walking on foot will always remain a core human experience of cities and buildings (I hope)-- and technology can't change walking speed much. Finally, an increasingly large part of the population want to live close to a vibrant neighborhood -- and you need density for that.

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