Health: Correlation is not causation. Those people also have cash, access to the best care, preventative care, etc.
Environment: What services are you talking about? Remember that to squeeze people together in the first place you have to import and maintain costly networks for moving food, water and energy. So dealing with decentralization from an efficiency standpoint should take this tradeoff in to account. As for the emissions references, I suppose they don't take in to account the ridiculous amount of pollution that goes on overseas or in other areas for products shipped in to cities (or the overheads of shipping itself).
I agree that historically there's great social and intellectual wealth in cities, but I personally believe that's now being eclipsed by non-geographic movements, many of which are largely fostered through the internet.
You seem to assume that you don't need to create and maintain costly networks for moving food, water and energy for people to live in rural areas. Not many people in rural areas farm their own food and sort out their own local water and energy supply.
Cities benefit because you can bring in resources using more efficient means in larger quantities.
The availability of water varies regionally, but in many areas it is not a big deal to drill a well and have clean water (and septic is usually just a matter of meeting building codes).
Energy and food are still a big deal, but the mix today is that shipping fuel has less impact on food prices than real estate value (that is, the food at rural stores isn't particularly expensive and they usually aren't that far away). They may be less economical than city stores, but they seem tenable.
I sort of think the trick is to figure out a set of policies that lead to healthy medium-high density areas, as it is most 'great cities' seem to be at least partly accidental.
> but in many areas it is not a big deal to drill a well and have clean water
Yet that is not how more than a miniscule fraction of houses in less densely built areas gets their water.
> Energy and food are still a big deal, but the mix today is that shipping fuel has less impact on food prices than real estate value (that is, the food at rural stores isn't particularly expensive and they usually aren't that far away). They may be less economical than city stores, but they seem tenable.
The real estate cost is irrelevant to the discussion of the efficiency of urban vs. rural energy and food delivery.
I was responding to you calling the distribution networks costly. If rural distribution ends up costing less, the efficiency isn't something you are going to get people to give much consideration.
This is why I then start talking about making more good cities, because that should presumably remove some of the costs that are more or less associated with lack of supply.
In theory, cities are better. It's cheaper to build a road network for 10 million people than 1000 road networks for 10,000 people. You can ship stuff in with container ships, rather than trucks.
But this might cause people to be more wasteful. Everything is cheap and accessible, so they consume more stuff.
Environment: What services are you talking about? Remember that to squeeze people together in the first place you have to import and maintain costly networks for moving food, water and energy. So dealing with decentralization from an efficiency standpoint should take this tradeoff in to account. As for the emissions references, I suppose they don't take in to account the ridiculous amount of pollution that goes on overseas or in other areas for products shipped in to cities (or the overheads of shipping itself).
I agree that historically there's great social and intellectual wealth in cities, but I personally believe that's now being eclipsed by non-geographic movements, many of which are largely fostered through the internet.