You can build lots of housing in remote locations, sure, but people have to want to live there. Even existing cities can have massive surplus of housing if people don't want to live there anymore (see Detroit for an example). Most people want to live in existing cities, and particularly the biggest cities (hence them being the biggest). Tokyo is huge because people want to be there; there are cheap houses available outside of Tokyo but people don't want to be there as much. Most of the time, each state or country has a single large city that grows much faster than all the other cities, because people want to be there and not somewhere else.

The main "successful" new cities these days are when governments create one for their headquarters (or move their headquarters to an existing smaller city), like Sejong in South Korea. This is because it induces demand quite successfully for government employees to move there. You need a strong inducing of demand to create a new city; existing cities already have strong demand via jobs, other people, and services, so new cities need to outcompete them.