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>Cities grow around something. In the past, that "something" has generally been a point-specific natural resource that can be exploited. Natural harbors, confluences of rivers, mines, etc. Sometimes cities grow around point-specific artificial resources like crossroads.

They can also grow around political and religious motivations like the Massachusetts Bay Colony, Las Vegas, Salt Lake City, the utopian experiment of New Harmony, Indiana, etc.

Massachusetts Bay Colony formed around a natural harbor that was already in use by native americans. The others I'll grant you.

We should build a major new city at the confluence of the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers. It seems like an ideal location.

Starbase, TX, seems to have a good reason to grow.

my dad lives in a "master planned" community in the middle of nowhere in the desert centered around a man made lake that needs to get refilled periodically. the weird thing is that 20 years later its actually much more populated and thriving

Would you be willing to share what brings people there? Is it a retirement community?

just a development for families, with some amenities like community center, pools etc. you can get a very large house for not so much money. it honestly is fairly nice, visiting used to seem depressing when I was younger but now when I visit with my kids it seems like not a bad place for a family to grow up in.

> in the middle of nowhere in the desert centered around a man made lake that needs to get refilled periodically.

How is that refilling paid for? What source of water does it draw from?

no idea, there's also a fish truck that dumps fish in it every week or so

There’s generally home owner dues in those types of communities.

Are there jobs nearby? Do most people have far to commute?

I imagine that things may have changed a bit over the years, depending how big the development was perhaps it was the catalyst for more development?

> Cities grow around something.

Today that resource could just be "cheap land". We don't need coal or iron today, we need housing.

> very strong government incentives

Could "cheap housing" be such an incentive?

Last I checked, those resources are water and roads (or promises of roads). But people can't live without water and don't keep building where they can't get it.

You can have all the empty space you want to build on, but if it doesn't have water or electricity, it will continue to be empty. Modern societies rely on modern infrastructure.

Do you think someone building a new city will not connect it to the grid and think about the water?

They will certainly try, but if they pick the wrong spot it will be prohibitively expensive compared to other locations and so they will be more inclined to pick another location, and the market price of the land will price this all in

That's exactly the point. Where do you think water comes from? You can't just build a city in the middle of the desert. In order for it to be sustainable you need it located next to a lake or river or other large source of freshwater that's easily exploited. Water is a natural resource just like any other.

The reason that major cities are where they are is because either there's a ton of traffic that flows through the area OR because they were the highest, easiest point to build on near a major source of fresh water. So no, they're not going to just appear because you build a city there. That's not how cities or infrastructure work.

> We don't need coal or iron today

Yes, who uses steel anymore? /s

All of us, but the Swedish are doing it without using coal or other fossile fuels. [0] Iron's going to be a bit harder to remove from the process though ;)

[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidrvetter/2021/08/19/how-swe...