Has anyone ever considered moving to some wilderness and just developing an urban center there, a la Sim City? If there's such a shortage of cities, perhaps building one from scratch is a viable option.
While cities frequently arise organically, they do exist for reasons. People move to cities for opportunity. Opportunity to find work is the most common one, but other ones crop up. Opportunity to meet people; opportunity to produce or consume the finer arts. Educational opportunities, for themselves or their children. Opportunities for freedom of some kind, religious, sexual, literal.
So if you want to build a new city, you have to ask yourself, what opportunities can we create for people, to inspire them to move here? You don't have to provide all the opportunities - once you have a critical mass of people they'll create new opportunities themselves to pull in more people - but to get the ball rolling you need to create some core opportunity that is great enough to pull in that initial critical mass of people.
Historically this has happened most often through industry. You go to a small nothing of a town, open a new factory that employs thousands of people, and it turns into a city.
Though it's happened. Brasilia, Phoenix, Las Vegas, Salt Lake City, Dubai, all come to mind. Each has major issues and limitations.
Historically, cities have been established near productive capacity, transport (nearly always water), and with local sources of essentials, especially food and water. It's possible to violate these norms, but incredibly expensive, long term, to do so.
I seem to remember some old computer game, I think it was Amazon Trail 3[0], in which there was a side quest where you had to trade rubber for other items while near Fordlandia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Songdo_International_Business_...
Brasilia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bras%C3%ADlia
England's garden cities: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden_city_movement
And later the New Towns: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_towns_movement
I'm would guess there are examples from the former communist bloc, but i'm not familiar with them. Would Magnitogorsk count?