A city is created based on its ability to grow. Once a sufficient size is acheived and its taxes can sustain the local govt without burden or detrimental effects to the nearby city helping it grow then it can be an independent city.
Thats the reason why cities grow from other cities. It usually grows from a neighboring city that helps it with its police force, fire department, electricity and so on. Startup towns are hard to capitalize unles you have a surefire money making endeavor. Las vegas did that because gambling sustained it easily.
So to answer the Hijack Question: Beside water, you’ll need
**a scalable access to power (electricty)
**some core business to attract and sustain a growing population
**Easy transportaion access for goods, services and people that you need to make your city grow. Such as near a main highway, train routes, an airport, or waterway or port.
**good infrastructure to house, feed, transport and support the population
**attract supporting businesses to help maintain the core business which can become core businesses as well.
**last but not least, lots and lots of capital.
I’m not trying to start a p!ssing contest with you, Zagadka, I just wanted somebody searching for that town to be able to find it readily. Try searching for “Havasu, AZ” at maps.yahoo.com and tell me what you find.
Correct, there was no real town there, it was quite literally farmland. It was really a number of quite large, self-contained farms that were naturally a bit more concentrated around the Molongolo River
There were a few houses that were submerged when the Molongolo River was dammed and Lake Burley Griffin created (among them my great-uncle’s farm house).
The people displaced were moved to a town further north (I think it was Collector, but don’t quote me on that)
Thanks all for the great answers, especially Exapno Mapcase, whose post was fascinating and as far as I’m concerned, you can expound as much as you want, because whatever you type on the matter, I’ll read it.
I am really impressed with Vegas as well - there must have been no one in Nevada until that developed… my map shows Vegas, Reno and not a lot else.
I meant “we” as all of humanity, but I used American examples and asked about America specifically because I’m interested in the US and most people know about the US. It’s easier for people to talk about Chicago than Hobart. But other countries are good too… what happened in Shenzhen to promote such a growth spurt?
I guess since my original question was kind of hard to answer, (although many have done it very well), so - are settlements of any size (well larger than a few farms) still being created independent to existing cities? I would guess not in the case of the western world (no room) but how about anywhere else?
And re: Canberra, I believe the govt was looking for a place no more than x km from Sydney and no more than x km from Melbourne, with a suitable location to become a “garden city” and near a supply of fresh water (Molonglo River).
Thanks Gex Gex and Muffin. City-building is an absolutely fascinating subject. Cities themselves are an almost fractal environment - the way they grow is almost the same no matter at what stage of their growth you look at. The way large center cities evolve smaller communities around them, as the result of sprawl and population growth - which may be separate political entities but are all part of one economic “city-state” - but become one continuous city mass is very similar in today’s Los Angeles but also in yesterday’s London. Jane Jacob’s The Economy of Cities is the classic text here.
And economics is the answer to where people choose to live. As world population keeps growing by the hundreds of millions each year, people need to make the economic choice - do I stay in a crowded center city or do I strike off on my own for a less crowded site? It was once expected that many “third-world” capitals would grow to reach 30 million people by now. It didn’t happen, partly because birth rates go down as median income rises and because without a superb infrastructure, cities can get too large to work even minimally. That seems to be why greater Tokyo, as advanced an infrastructure in a compact area as there is in the world, is the only 30 million cityscape.
If new cities do rise - and the Chinese seem to be making a concerted effort to grow their cities and move people away from farming - it will be for economic reasons and that will change as economic trends do over the next century. I think cities will continue to surprise us as they have for millennia.
There’s plenty of major metropolitan areas that, some 40 or 50 years ago, were just specks on the map … Orlando, Albuquerque, Colorado Springs, Fresno, Huntsville, Las Vegas amd Palm Springs come to mind. Around that same time, cities like Houston, Dallas, Miami and Atlanta were in the same league as Buffalo and Rochester. Wait another 40 years, and you’ll wonder where the hell the major metropolises of Las Cruces, Fort Collins, St. George, Naples and Grand Junction came from.
You might also ponder why there’s more people living in Asheville than Cleveland. Lots of once-mighty, up-and-coming cities with more than their fair share of Gilded-age buzz stalled around the turn of the last century; consider Utica, Williamsport, and St. Joseph. They were the Boulders of the era; incredibly wealthy, and booming beyond belief, until … something … happened.
Major cities were, until the early 1900s, established at break-in-bulk points. With the advent of air conditioning, Interstate highways and cheap telecommunications, break-in-bulk points became irrelevant.
By the way, I forgot to post my sig. Check out the bulletin board there, where you’ll have a ton of urban planners who would love to answer your question.
The next major city will be built somewhere along the equator because that’s where the space elevator has to be built in order to reach a geosynchronous orbit. The primary supporting industry will be the production of carbon nano-tubing.
I’m not sure if you’d count it as a city, or as independent of surrounding urban development, but Disney pretty much created Celebration, Florida, out of scratch.
Proximity to the Hong Kong border. The 1980s Chinese adoption of capitalism, added to the 1997 handover of Hong Kong, stimulated enormous inward migration, and eventually the big money got in there and started putting up skyscrapers. It was home to the second-ever Chinese McDonalds, too. I don’t know how much of its growth was planned by the Chinese government, and how much of it just happened.
Celebration is an unincorporated portion of Osceola County, like any other subdivision there. It’s just a subdivision designed on New Urbanist principles. Not really a new city, IMHO.
Not to post-pad, but here’s how I interpret the OP:
New city: includes a new metropolitan area, on the order of what could be considered a medium-to-largeish city, in a place where there was either no city, or only a small settlement. Classic examples of new cities in the late 20th century include Las Vegas, Nevada and Orlando, Florida; major metropolitan areas with populations of around 1,500,000 where only 50 years before, they were just small towns.
A new city does not include edge cities (Overland Park, Kansas; Tysons Corner, Virginia, etc.), suburbs of existing cities (Aurora, Colorado; Mesa, Arizona; etc.), or newly incorporated cities that may not have the population or amenities to be considered medium or large cities.
Just wait fifty years till the west runs out of fresh water and everybody moves back to the North Coast!
Since I’ve been harping on the importance of economics in the establishing of new cities, I have to agree wholeheartedly with your analysis of cities to come, with only the caveat that it is very, very hard to predict the future and that no one in 1903 could possibly have foreseen the city structures of 2003.
You mention edge cities, a term that people outside the profession may not understand. It was popularized by Joel Garreau’s pioneering book, looking at the ways economic conglomerations were springing up around central cities. It’s a decade old now, but I would still recommend it if you want to understand the modern evolution of metropolitan cityscapes.
Which do you think has affected the layout of cities the most: automobiles, electricity, or artillery?
Do you think the Internet will spark a renaissance in smaller communities? (I know that I couldn’t live in the city of 20,000 that I live in if I didn’t have online bookstores, message boards, and newspapers; others have credited chat rooms, streaming porn, and Napster & its descendants to making the burbs bearable.)
I was just nitpicking nitpicks. You’re right, of course, it is Lake Havasu City, officially and on maps.