Can you expand on this? Is there a general social benefit to people settling remote areas?
It sounds like you are ascribing some special virtue to rural living that I just don't see. When I think about work that adds social value, very little of it requires rural living (farming, mostly) and most of it can be done anywhere (computer programming, skilled trades, manufacturing, etc.). Why is a person's contribution bigger if they are rural? What special value is there in doing these things in a place no one lives? Why do we need to increase growth in some arbitrary rural location.
> There is a prevailing political worldview predicated on warehousing people in cities and making them dependent on public services
And ironically, you are arguing that we should be providing these people a public service, presumably because they are dependent on it. I fail to see where the cut off should be.
A marginal chicken in a mass feeding factory is less valuable than a marginal chicken in a backyard. It's a question of numbers and impact. The life of a marginal person in a city is not as valuable or meaningful to their neighbours as a marginal person in the country, as there are more strong ties in rural areas, and more weak ones in urban ones. In this sense of marginal numbers, cities cheapen lives.
Maybe that's the point, where humans should switch our r/K selection strategy from high investment in K-selected lives to low investment r-selected lives, and try to exist and spread more like bugs than mammals, but that's not something I'd advocate.
If you want the necessary growth and evolution of a civilization for long term survival, you need to diversify it over geography.
The cut off for public services is the persons relationship to them. When you pull hydro lines into rural areas, you facilitate growth from each marginal person out there. When you supply power to a new suburb, you are facilitating marginal growth there at a lower rate. The public service dependency occurs when growth is a zero-sum competition for the attention of a provider (see Ivan Illich's radical monopoly and related ideas), instead of exogenously sourced growth in a rural setting, merely facilitated by public services.
The crux of the policy disagreement is in different axioms about the value of individual life (v. collective "good"), which I don't think we reconcile here, but we can see how our assessments of a policy are certainly artifacts of them.
Some scattered towns aren't going to significantly impact claims by indigenous peoples, and anybody else claiming big chunks of the top half of Canada is going to get laughed out of the room.
The northwest passage is seeing Russian / US subs crossing without permission. Having a population creates a stronger claim for situations like this.
Okay but that's not about claiming the territory.
> Hans island is in dispute between Greenland and Canada and both countries visit every year to plant a flag. Having a settlement if possible year round would make the claim stronger.
Okay, that's a tiny island. Far over 99% of the land is not in dispute, and doesn't need towns to stop it from being in dispute. And even there, they don't bother to have anyone live on it! I feel like this island supports the idea that these populations are disconnected from land claims.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Nares_strait_border_(Kenn...
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Also wow it super does not matter who owns this island when the strait is already split right down the middle.
> The northwest passage is seeing Russian / US subs crossing without permission. Having a population creates a stronger claim for situations like this.
How so? I could see how an active port could physically get in the way of sneaking through, but I don't see at all how a town gives canada a better claim for keeping those subs away.
Why is this desirable? You basically just expand every single cost without much benefit and reducing the quality of facilities provided to everyone. The general trend of populations globally is centralization which provides massive benefits.
I'm not sure I agree with this, but I'm curious to hear your logic. My understanding is that more urbanization is required for both environmental and infrastructural reasons.
Satellite internet changes a lot, as if you can do off grid renewable power with satellite internet, economic viability and mobility of populations changes radically. We've seen it post-covid with rural real estate prices matching those of cities as the result of remote work (I think).
Hydro was used as a giant opaque debt slush fund by previous governments, where they levered up debt secured against revenues and then blew it on favoured groups to secure re-election. "Infrastructure," surely, but now you have a debt retirement fee on every hydro bill that is essentially a tax.