I wish this was a problem. What is completely missing (at least in my life) is offline "downtime" and solitude. People in large openspace in the office, crowded tram, crowded shop, people everywhere in the park, people around my favourite walking trail, and of course, roommates, everywhere. There's no escape, no opt-out, no nothing. It actually drives me mad.
Go backpacking. I go crazy without it too. It slowly creeps up on me over months. If you haven't done it before, I wrote this to help: http://knol.google.com/k/how-to-backpack
I do that quite often, but never alone (I'd creep out while while staying in a tent at night alone with idea, that there might be bears nearby, even if it sounds funny). And it cannot be done frequently enough, over months... four or five days are already enough.
What I actually want is my own apartment in a decent building (like, hm, the one where the architect paid some attention even to "details" like accoustic isolation) somewhere in a decent part of some decent city, not some detached bunker in a wilderness, or (even worse) house in some infinitely stretched suburbia. Sometimes, I do want to meet people, and it's great if it can be done with ten minute walk or 15 minutes of subway ride or something. I even kind of enjoy crowds at city squares, busy walking street and so on. I don't want to live alone, without a human being within tens of kilometers. That's not even practical and makes little sense.
And I don't like the idea of this thread below this at all. I even think it's very much a part of the problem, not its solution. Of course, it's happening, all the time, people moving from "ugly" and crowded city, somewhere to a "countryside" (yet near the city). And that's why I can't go anywhere outside the city, because there ceased to be any outside, just ring after ring of satelite villages, and roads between them. It had also turned the city into just a little more than a large parking place...
I really think that more and more people will start leaving the cities as communication continues to improve. The reason people conglomerated was so they could be in constant contact and physical space is not limiting factor to that any more.
In 2008, the world reaches an invisible but momentous milestone: For the first time in history, more than half its human population, 3.3 billion people, will be living in urban areas. By 2030, this is expected to swell to almost 5 billion. Many of the new urbanites will be poor. Their future, the future of cities in developing countries, the future of humanity itself, all depend very much on decisions made now in preparation for this growth.
Most of the urban growth cited by the article is in developing countries. This is because they are beginning to industrialize and make things. America is not making as much any more and most people work white collar jobs. There is just not as much of a reason to conglomerate around a place of work like there is if the whole town works building cars, for example.
(To put up a disclaimer, I have just extrapolating this from what I think. I have not done a significant amount of research. There is a lot science fiction talking about this however, such as Daemon, Freedom TM, and even The Stars My Destination from way back. I also found this article that has some facts, despite being a little old. http://www.innserendipity.com/ruralren/rebound.html)
The more remote the area, the more expensive supplies will be. Land might be cheap, and communications networks may be available, but you'll have to pay the extra for shipping things like food in.
Renewable energy sources such as solar and wind work much better in a distributed system in which individual homes and business are responsible for their own energy production. Besides energy, I think the shift toward healthier and organic food will lead to many people with land to have their own gardens and grow their own food.
