I think it depends on how you rank growth. Sure, in terms of raw persons, the large cities are adding more people, but in terms of percentage growth, many of the fastest growing areas are actually small-mid sized towns/cities in the South [1].

Other measurements like job opportunities also tends to favor small/mid cities. "U.S. Census Bureau metropolitan area population estimates for 2017, which show a significant increase in domestic migration away from the 53 major metropolitan areas with populations over a million and toward the 54 middle-sized metro areas in the 500,000 to 1 million range." [2]

As to your point about subsidies...many of those subsidies are for the production of food that the cities obviously rely on. I think it would be interesting to see how livable large cities -- dozens or hundreds of miles away from food sources, waste disposal sites, and water sources -- would be if the true, un-subsidized costs were passed through.

[1] http://worldpopulationreview.com/us-cities/

[2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/joelkotkin/2018/05/15/growth-in...

I think 1 is a bit misleading because it shows city populations and not metro area population. You get cities like Miami and Atlanta in the top 10 by growth rate that look like mid size cities but are actually in the top ten largest metro areas in the US.

Maybe, but I think the concept of metro areas doesn't help much when trying to define people moving from small towns to cities.

For example, the Philadelphia metro area has over 6 million residents, while the city itself has only about 1.6. Problem is, the metro area includes extremely rural and small towns within about a 1-2 hour drive of the center of the city [1]. I'm not sure I'd consider someone living in exurban/rural Chester or Montgomery counties, 50 miles from the city, to be living in Philly.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delaware_Valley

Using the population within city limits to measure, rank, or even describe a city isn't very helpful because city limits are completely arbitrary. Metro areas, while still arbitrary are much less so. Take Atlanta--everyone who lives here considers Atlanta to be anything inside the perimeter (I-285), and the urban population is about 4.5 million, but the city limits only cover half of that area (~130 square miles) and include only about 400k people. Then you have Sitka, Alaska that covers almost 3k square miles, while the urban center is only 2 square miles.

>rural and small towns within about a 1-2 hour drive of the center of the city

According to this, the vast majority of the metro area is within 1 hour.

https://app.traveltimeplatform.com/#/search/0_lng=-75.16843&...

>I'm not sure I'd consider someone living in exurban/rural Chester or Montgomery counties, 50 miles from the city, to be living in Philly.

The number of people living in rural areas is small compared to the people living in closer more densely populated areas. Subtract 10-20% from the population numbers to account for them and you still have a number more useful and less arbitrary than population within city limits.

> More people have been moving into cities

Not so much in Canada. Small towns (1,000 to 29,999 people) are the fastest growing community type. Large cities (100,000+ people) have lost share of the population. The definition of urban is "a population of at least 1,000 and a density of 400 or more people per square kilometre", so you might hear that urbanization continues (which is true, the rural population shrunk by about the same rate as cities), but that doesn't mean the people are moving into cities.

Canada is very different from the US in this regard, so it's important to consider both distinctly. Canada never had the same mass-exodus of the middle class from their cities, so the economic demographics are all very different from those of American cities. Maybe these two sets of cities are growing to become more like each other?

Really? There are no suburbs in Canada? There were sure a lot of poor neighborhoods in Montréal near the downtown core in the 60's and a lot of residential development on the South Shore and the West Island.

There absolutely are suburbs. But relative to the US, Canada’s major cities have maintained bigger inner-urban middle classes.

>More people have been moving into cities since remote work has become possible than the opposite.

More people have been becoming surfers than leaving surfing for skateboarding since it was invented.