Especially in the New World this is an especially important point. It’s not that long ago, historically speaking, that the USA’s important cities were not the same ones they are today. Before the Civil War, Charleston, SC was one of the biggest and most important cities in America; today it’s not anywhere near the top hundred. Cincinnati basically sprang up from nothing at the same time, going from a backwater hamlet to being one of the most important cities in the country in twenty years or so. Albany was once one of the biggest cities in America, one of the reasons it’s the state capital; today it isn’t one of the five biggest cities in the state and is quite a bit smaller than it once was. New Orleans was (by a very wide margin) the largest city in the South until into the twentieth century, and now it is nowhere near that; in 1901, Las Vegas wasn’t a city at all. None of this stuff could have been accurately predicted beforehand.