I’ve been studying this subject for over two decades and used to work as an urban planner, so thank you for giving me an excuse to take a whack as this question. It requires a book to answer, but I’ll try to say something meaningful compressed into a few paragraphs.
Humanity has always expanded its base by establishing new settlements. There are the usual myriad of reasons for this, but they boil down into a few major categories. People are either fleeing from something: overpopulation, soil depletion, war, drought or other natural catastrophes, religious or political persecution; or trying to find something: mineral riches, commercial opportunity, better soil, freedom. Or both at once. The one thing that is close to a true universal for all these is the presence of a steady supply of fresh water. Nothing is as important. Available farmland is second, although it is not a necessity when a mineral strike creates a “gold rush” situation.
A settlement can be as small as a single family at first or it could be a village made up of a band traveling together. Favorable places might see a whole series of villages within a few miles of one another.
These places could stay villages forever, but cities are part of an organic process of evolution. One village is located in a more favorable spot, either naturally or because a railroad or canal, e.g., is built next to it. This village begins to grow at a an increasing rate and eventually may encompass all the other villages in the area. This is certainly the way most cities in the U.S. developed.
Nor do they have to be villages for this to happen. After the Erie Canal made New York City the best site to originate trade to the entire Midwest it zoomed past its rivals of Philadelphia and Boston in population. The coming of the telegraph made it possible for stock trading to be concentrated in one spot and that also favored NYC. Its success fed on itself. It later encompassed all of its surrounding villages. Brooklyn was a separate city until 1898, when Manhattan swallowed the other boroughs and became today’s NYC. Philadelphia was officially no more than Penn’s two square mile tract until the late 19th century when it snatched all the surrounding villages and expanded to 135 square miles.
But it works the other way as well. All the ghost towns in the west are examples of cities failing to compete. Cheyenne was supposed to become a great metropolis because it was the spot where the transcontinental railroad had its great roundhouses and machines shops. It became a city, but other places grew more.
There is one alternative, but it is very rare. Occasionally, throughout history, cities have been formed for political reasons. We know of this from almost the dawn of recorded history. Alexander, e.g., created cities bearing his name throughout his conquered provinces. Only a few of these political cities have ever been sited on places starting from bare soil. Cities need water and transportation links and, even in ancient times, most of the good places already had somebody living there. Washington, D.C. was created on a site that already had Alexandria and Georgetown among other villages. I don’t know the history of other politically-created capitals, like Canberra and Brasilia, but I bet that something more than, say, raw jungle existed there first.
So the answer to your question depends on just what you mean by it. If you’re asking whether small settlements or towns are turning into cities, the answer is yes, it happens all the time. Scottsdale and Glendale, AZ, Plano and Arlington, TX, and Virginia Beach, VA, each had populations of less than 10,000 in 1950. Garland, TX, Anchorage, AK, and Aurora, CO, all were under 12,000.
But if you are asking whether any cities are popping up out of bare nothingness, out of the influence of current cities, the question has to be: where would you put them? There are currently 261 Metropolitan Statistical Areas in the U.S. Any place outside of this is probably on an Indian reservation or protected federal land.
The same has to be true in other countries. You can start a settlement or village outback where nobody lives, but how and why would it grow into a city? Cities emerge for a reason. There might eventually be a reason for a city to grow in the middle of the Gobi or Sahara deserts but we don’t have one right now.
And most people simply don’t want to go off into the wilds and start a whole new city. They want the comforts of existing jobs, people, and infrastructure. That’s why people in California live two hours or more away from their jobs, but still add to existing urban conglomerations. In Upstate New York, where a twenty-minute commute is looked at as impossibly arduous, these people are thought nuts, but the attractions of California are obvious sufficient to make this worthwhile for them. We call these distant sites suburbs or exurbs, even though they may be 100 miles from the center city. We’ve essentially defined new city-making out of the vocabulary.
Whew. That was fun. Let me know if you want me to expound some more.
Wow. Wrote too long. A million answers come up on Preview. We seem to be giving much the same speech, though.
