Comment by et-al | Hacker News Reader

Comment by et-al | Hacker News Reader

> The picture emerges. Companies are more like organisms. They grow and asymptote. Cities are open ended.

Geoffrey West's point about growth doesn't seem to mention the competition for resources. That's one of the reasons why corporations and organisms slow down. Companies evolve to gain market share, but so are their competitors. In addition, we have anti-trust laws that do limit these companies. And what is his definition of a corporation? Where do holding companies and conglomerates fit into this model?

With regards to cities, they also deal with constrained resources, both financial and natural. At some point, the megalopolis of LA won't be able get enough water or power to it. We haven't felt it yet due to engineering and the Water Wars, but I question whether sprawl of that scale is sustainable.

And its easy to make this assumption of cities with unlimited growth if you happen to live in a thriving one, but let's not forget White Flight and dystopias of the 80s. Cities grow because people need/want to live in them, so they can easily die when they become inhospitable. As San Francisco becomes more like Manhattan, would people want to stay?

> As San Francisco becomes more like Manhattan, would people want to stay?

i don't know if the existing residents will want to stay, but i think many more people overall would want to live in a manhattan of the west coast, as evidenced by the manhattan of the east coast which people keep moving to.

> I don't know if the existing residents will want to stay, but i think many more people overall would want to live in a manhattan of the west coast

So go build "Manhattan of the West Coast" somewhere else on the coast, and leave San Francisco alone.

No, build it right beside SF and leave the rest of the coast alone...

I'm laughing at your NIMBYism, but some big city along the northern California or southern Oregon coast would make the corridor from Vancouver to San Francisco more contiguous, which could help to justify a high-speed rail line.

> I'm laughing at your NIMBYism

San Francisco ain't my backyard, by a long shot.

> some big city along the northern California or southern Oregon coast would make the corridor from Vancouver to San Francisco more contiguous, which could help to justify a high-speed rail line.

AFAIK, the geography of the Northen California to Southern Oregon coast isn't real conducive either to a high-speed rail line or a big city.

(If you want a Manhattan of the West Coast, it probably would make more sense to try to build it in the LA area, where an extra couple million people packed in a tight area would still obviously require radical new local infrastructure where it came together, but wouldn't be as significant of a relative increase in demand on regional infrastructure.)

Just protective of San Francisco, then?

Given that the probability of a new big city on the West Coast is effectively zero, I felt comfortable ignoring real limitations of that plan. In reality, of course, water, seismicity, and erosion put a damper on any attractive hypothetical options.

> Just protective of San Francisco, then?

It just doesn't make sense to transform a city to something its residents don't want because someone else has an aesthetic preference for it to exist somewhere.

And I'm sure many complained when the buildings and prices of Manhattan kept climbing. The transplants to a city sooner or later become its natives, with their own desires and aesthetic preferences.

Yes it does. It's current residents transformed it into what it is now from what it was before they arrived...why wouldn't we expect that to continue happening? Just cause some of them don't want it to happen?

Good point. As much as we romanticise that we're no longer economic migrants, most people probably still are. In which case, as long as there is money to be made in city, people will go irregardless of its aesthetics. They may complain with tweets and Medium rants, but they'll still come and stay.

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