Most cities around the world (except some cities in the US) are "strategically" located near a river or on shore. Because of that, pretty much the whole world live near a river or sea. The most strategically located cities "become" a trading hub and these days have become large cities.
It's well worth mentioning, however, that if the people in the city (who where strategically located for trading) didn't adapt to the changes in the world conditions, then these cities simply disappear or become much less relevant. Many cities of the world would have lost this privilege due to digitalization and the sea becoming safer.
It's impossible to separate the people from the social institutions which do create the opportunity in the services sector which dominates modern advanced economies.
In the Bay Area/SF the digital economy is defined by the ecosystem of big tech, VCs, thousands of software engineers and maybe tens of thousands of support services like accountants.
not sure this is a good example - while it's true for actual gold mining, in the case of software developers, having other software devs around (plus also good computers, which you could argue is like gold) can be an opportunity in itself - look at all the devtools startups that happen in the Bay Area.
A large group of people is an opportunity in itself.
I'm not sure if there's been some slight shift of topic here. By "planned", I think we originally meant "deliberately built in relatively undeveloped land". But then you mention as an example of a failure of deliberately building a city in relatively undeveloped land, an example of a failure of micromanagement (also a kind of planning, but one that is completely orthogonal to the circumstances of the city's founding).
So does Brasilia's original strictly separated zoning show the problems of strictly separated zoning, or does it show the problems of deliberately building a city where none was before? It's possible we just had the wrong idea of what you need to have a great city during the 20th century isn't it? Washington DC, for instance, is an artificial city with top-down planning, but it was built at a time when people had different ideas about what made a great city, and it doesn't really seem to be a failure. It doesn't even appear on your list, despite being the case that served as a template for your other examples.
(I don't know. I don't know anything about Brasilia other than that it is the capital of Brazil.)
As I recall, DC was designed by George Washington himself (probably with help from his friends), back in the late 1700s, but the city as a whole was not: what they designed was the Federal district only. The Capitol, the White House, the National Mall between them, etc. Over time, this grew with the additions of the Smithsonian buildings and many other things.
The thing is, no one lives there. That district is entirely devoid of residential areas in fact, and with very little commercial stuff if any. All that stuff is mostly to the north, and I don't see any evidence of it being planned top-down at all, except maybe the original street layout which is largely a simple grid, with lettered streets running east-west, and a few interesting things like Dupont Circle (which probably came later).
DC is definitely not a place I'd call a "master planned city" or "artificial city"; it's evolved far too much in the last 300+ years.
I am from DC and it's pretty well known that it is a planned city. Look up the L'Enfant Plan.
I'm not really sure what you are talking about.
The military dictatorship decide to introduce strict zoning (probably lifting ideas that were happening in the USA during the 60s), completely destroying the urbanistic approach of the original design.
It's a failure of micromanagement from authoritarianism, inspired by the misguided (and nowadays considered idiotic) approach to urban design of the USA in the 50s onward.
Brasilia is also what I would call "not a city", it has a pretty large population which doesn't live in it like in a city. There's very few vibrant public places there, from an urbanist perspective it's a complete disaster.
I initially read this as meaning "if the money was ever moved out", and then laughed ... yes, if they ever stopped being the capital ...
Don't languages in general have single words with multiple meanings? Is this a special feature of English?
That's not what I'm referring to; it's the confusion over "capital" vs "capitol" (in addition to the double meaning of capital city vs capital-money).
Density is an effective way of substituting for transport speed, which is the binding constraint on many opportunities.
The number of coffee shops I can choose to visit on my 15 minute break after stand up is limited by the density of the urban environment, for a given mode of transport.
Many public, private and social enterprises have this dynamic. A police station needs to be within a certain travel distance of the outskirts of their community to be useful, likewise a supermarket or nightclub.
There is an argument that, at a certain extreme point, density might have such a negative impact on transport speed that it might increase transit time. I'm personally split on this issue. Density definitely hurts motor vehicle speed but has little effect on walking speed and might even improve rail speed.
What is the dynamic in "this dynamic" ? Do you have an examples with social enterprises?
I intended the phrase "this dynamic" to capture the relationship between transport time and viability of the enterprise.
> Do you have an examples with social enterprises?
Sure thing. Food banks, soup kitchens and homeless shelters all need to be within a viable transport time of the people they intend to help.
Initially, geographic advantage (such as being near harbour, river, or some other geographic feature) gives a settlement that's not yet a city a big advantage in attracting more people there. This in turn, forces the city to grow as more people cram in.
To artificially build denser by policy doesn't produce opportunities - those opportunities would have to be there first! And it's this "expensiveness" of creating more accomodation in the city that causes the city to expand.