It’s not the physical locations that are making a difference. It’s the people and policies working together that make social distancing and contract tracing etc effective or not.

The physical location matters a lot as well. Geographical barriers like oceans and mountains do a lot to reduce transmission across borders; getting domestic cases under control won’t help much if new ones keep getting imported.

This is particularly important for metro areas that span multiple local jurisdictions: a single authority can’t do significantly better (or worse) than its neighbors, so they have to act in concert with each other. Ruling by committee is inevitably slower than by fiat, which makes it harder to handle highly dynamic situations.

Local jurisdictions within a city should have little to no control over policies in a pandemic like this. Giving them that control rather than operating at a higher level is idiotic. China was relatively successful because they sacrificed the economy of Wuhan early, but acting even sooner could have completely contained the virus and prevented the pandemic.

But you have to use the power structures that were in place pre-epidemic, and lots of them stop at arbitrary boundaries where the modern cities don’t. In the US, health policy is generally handled at the state level, but you’ve got places like the DC metro area where the city effectively spans both Federal land and parts of two states.

I am saying polices are the reason why some areas failed. Saying this is how things are done is justification for failing policies, but it doesn’t mean they actually work.

The CDC was specifically created because diseases need a nationwide response, the US simply failed.