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The Cumberland valley is home to six towns lying between Hagerstown, Maryland and Harrisburg,
Pennsylvania— Greencastle, Chambersburg, Shippensburg, Newville, Carlisle, and Mecanicsburg.
What’s exceptional about these small Pennsylvania towns is that they’re each almost exactly
10 miles from each other.
The distances deviate by no more than a mile from this rule.
This isn’t a coincidence and this isn’t planned.
Drawing equal sized radii around each town shows you their spheres of influence.
Assuming each town has the exact same shops and services, rational people will just go
to whichever town is closest to buy or sell goods.
Towns ten miles apart mean that nobody has to travel more than five miles to reach a
town.
Each one of these towns was founded before the formation of the United States, so that
means that, of course, nobody had cars and pretty much everybody walked everywhere.
10 miles, or 5 miles each way, is about the distance a person can comfortably walk in
a day with enough time to buy or sell goods at a central market.
Back in this era before cars, a 5 mile radius was essentially the largest possible commuter
zone to small agricultural towns and therefore having towns ten miles apart was the most
efficient possible use of rural land.
When you get a chance, take a look at map of a rural area that existed before cars.
You’ll see that the distance between medium-sized towns is almost always somewhere between about
10 to 15 miles.
Because the Cumberland valley is a valley, towns really could only develop in a line,
but in most cases towns develop in all directions.
This is what the ten mile rule looks like going out in all directions.
Each of these points is a town and the hexagon around it is the area from which people will
go to the town.
In the real world, each of these towns probably has a small grocery store, a pharmacy, a bank,
and maybe a restaurant.
Since everybody uses these services, there doesn’t have to be many people in a towns
sphere of influence in order to sustain these shops.
But where do you put something more specialized, like a mechanic.
People only need to go the mechanic every once in a while so you need more people to
sustain one mechanics shop than one grocery store.
Well, some of these small towns develop into larger towns with more people that can support
more specialized shops and services.
Putting these larger towns with more specialized shops closer together would be unsustainable
since there wouldn’t be enough people going to those shops but putting them farther apart
would be inefficient since there’s land that people would not go to a city from.
This happens once or twice more until you have cities.
These cities have the largest spheres of influence and the most specialized shops.
You of course still have grocery stores and pharmacies in cities, but you also have things
like luxury car dealerships, brain surgery centers, and airports.
The city’s sphere of influence is enormous because people will travel hundreds of miles
to buy an expensive car or get brain surgery or fly from an airport.
Think about it within a city.
How far would you walk to buy a latte.
Probably only a few blocks and that’s why you see Starbucks or other coffee shops on
almost every block.
Since almost everyone buys coffee, you only need a few blocks of people to sustain one
coffee shop.
But how far would you walk to buy a MacBook?
Probably quite far since its a infrequent and substantial purchase.
That’s why Apple stores are rather rare even in cities.
You need an enormous amount of people to sustain one Apple store and we can actually figure
out roughly how many.
In Connecticut, the Trumbull Apple Store is about 20 miles away from the New Haven store
to the north-east and the Stamford store to the south-west.
In the 10 mile radius around the Trumbull Apple Store there are about half a million
inhabitants which tells us that you need about half a million people to sustain one Apple
store.
We can compare that to the Starbucks’ of lower Manhattan which are spread out at an
average distance of about 600 feet.
Drawing a 300 foot radius around one Starbucks in lower Manhattan covers around 6,000 people
which means that one Starbucks needs 6,000 people to sustain it.
Of course both Connecticut and New York are places with higher than average incomes which
means less people are needed to sustain one Starbucks or Apple Store.
The numbers would be very different in, say, rural Kansas, but since each store generally
only builds in areas with higher-than-average incomes this gives a good sense of how many
people Apple and Starbucks looks for in an area before opening up a store.
So, our model shows where cities should be, but its not like this in reality.
This is the most efficient spread of cities if you’re assuming that the cities are on
a perfectly flat plane with no geographic features, no social influences, no variability
of income, equal distribution of resources—essentially assuming the world is one homogeneous place…
which its not.
In reality, of course, our world has an enormous effect on where and why cities develop.
To start out, let’s cut this down to one city on a flat, featureless plane for simplicity.
What affects the location of cities more than anything is water.
If we put an ocean on one side of our isotropic plane, our city will almost certainly locate
near it.
Oceans have always been and still are what connects the world.
There’s no other means of transport that can move such enormous amounts of cargo for
so little.
Any city needs to be economically efficient to grow and it will cost more to bring goods
to a city that’s 1000 miles inland than one right by the ocean.
Just look at Europe.
6 of the 10 largest European cities are within 100 miles of the coast.
But oceans aren’t the only bodies of water to affect cities.
Rivers are just as or perhaps even more influential.
Milan, the 19th largest European city, is the largest to not be either directly on the
ocean or on a river, and even then its only 15 miles from a river and 75 miles from the
ocean.
Until the last century or so, cities could not survive without direct water access.
If you need more proof, 14 of the 15 largest cities in the world are within a few dozen
miles of the ocean.
Perhaps the most obvious attractor for cities is resources, so going back to our isotropic
plane, putting natural resources anywhere on this map will draw cities near it.
Cities that existed before the last century or so generally sprung up right near the resources,
much like Pittsburgh, since they acted as manufacturing and transportation hubs for
those resources, but more recently new resource dependent cities don’t need to be as close
to the resources themselves.
New transportation technologies can bring the resources from their source.
Just look at Dubai.
Of course the UAE has enormous oil deposits, but they’re much closer to Abu Dhabi and
the South-West than Dubai.
In 1900, Dubai had 10,000 residents, less than half that of Carlisle, Pennsylvania—one
of the farming towns we talked about at the beginning.
That only grew to 40,000 by 1960, but today its known worldwide and has more than 2.5
million residents.
It was able to grow at this enormous rate—even faster than Abu Dhabi—since it cemented
itself as the economic and administrative hub for the oil industries of the region.
Another geographic feature that we can add to the plane is mountains.
Now, mountains don’t always have a uniform affect on cities.
Mexico City, Bogota, and Addis Ababa are all enormous cities at elevations above 7,000
feet.
Mountains do make transport and trade difficult, but they also provide protection.
Many ancient cities grew in these locations since they were easy to protect, which left
more time to focus on growing the city, but mountains can also hinder development.
For quite a while, the United States could not develop west of the Appalachian mountains.
They just served as an enormous barrier.
In 1800, the average center of population for the entire United States was here even
though the US had sovereignty over this entire area.
Of course technology eventually conquered this barrier and moved the mean population
center all the way out to Missouri today, but if the Appalachian mountains didn’t
exist American history and geography would be completely different.
We would have seen urban development much earlier in the mid-west.
But mountains can have another effect.
You see, coal, silver, gold, and other mineral deposits are all often located in mountainous
regions, and, just like Dubai, cities can develop in less hospitable and easy places
due to resources.
The economic advantage of exploiting the resources overpowers the economic disadvantage of being
in an inhospitable location.
Denver, Colorado grew 650% between 1870 and 1880 with the opening of a railroad branch
connecting with the transcontinental railroad.
It served as an access point to transportation to the gold miners in the rockies.
So mountains can either push cities away or bring them nearer—it really just depends
on the circumstance.
Let’s exchange our isotropic plane for a world map.
Where should cities be on here?
Well, our world’s cities are not necessarily all in the most geographically efficient locations.
While there is a certain level of natural selection that grows the efficiently placed
cities and shrinks the inefficiently placed cities, humans are not always able to put
cities in the most efficient locations.
Let’s put up the 224 cities in the world with a population over 2 million.
You can immediately see some patterns.
Putting up the equator, you can see a clear divide.
Only 32 of these cities lie in the southern hemisphere.
One might think this is because there is so much more land in the northern hemisphere,
but that’s not entirely true.
You see, the southern hemisphere still has 32% of the world’s land, but only has 14%
of the world’s large cities.
There’s clearly a higher density of cities in the northern hemisphere.
You can pretty much trace this all back to Europe and Asia.
The first large civilizations and empires were on these two continents even though the
human race likely originated in Africa.
There’s hundreds of different theories on why civilizations succeeded in some places
and failed in others, but one of the more plausible and interesting theories is that
Europe and Asia succeeded because they’re wide instead of tall.
The very shape of the continents may have changed the course of human history.
You see, when a continent is wide, you have a ton of land with roughly the same climate.
Climate tends to change when you go north and south rather than east and west as a nature
of how the earth rotates around the sun.
Much of the success of early civilizations had to do with the domestication of plants
and animals and the corresponding technology.
When expanding horizontally, the climate is similar enough that an empire can use the
same successful plants and animals, while expanding vertically requires the domestication
of new plants and animals.
If a civilization started in central-america, for example, there would be very little land
on the continent with a similar climate and their expansion would be severely limited.
In Europe and Asia, on the other hand, theres thousands upon thousands and miles of similar
climate that can be reached just by traveling east or west.
There’s evidence to back this up.
Just look at the maps of the four largest early empires—the Qing Dynasty, the Abbasid
Caliphate, the Umayyad Caliphate, and the Mongol empire.
They were all in Eurasia and they all expanded horizontally.
When some of the more modern empires expanded, they had the technology to do so overseas.
The three major modern empires were the British, Spanish, and French empires—each of which
came from relatively similar climates.
A major reason why America was able to succeed is because all the agriculture from Europe
worked there.
Climatically, Europe and America are nearly identical.
The majority of developed colonized countries are in the northern hemisphere just because
they were closest to Europe, but formerly British countries like South Africa, Australia,
and New Zealand are all highly developed and in the Southern Hemisphere.
Their success over more northern countries in the southern hemisphere can also be partially
attributed to their greater climate similarity to Europe.
Let’s ask one more question.
If our world only had one city, where would it logically be?
Well if you take the location of every person in the world and average it out, you come
to south-central Asia.
That means that this general region is the optimum place to live on the planet, but where
more specifically should our world city go.
Well, this region is already in the Northern Hemisphere and in Eurasia, so we’ve already
covered those two criteria.
We want a place within a hundred of so miles of the ocean, on a navigable river, near mountains
with rich mineral deposits—the single best place for a city on earth just might be…
Dhaka, Bangladesh.
Every geographic model and theory says that there is no better place on earth to put a
city than here.
There’s evidence to back this up: Dhaka is between the 4th and 18th largest metropolitan
area on earth depending on how you define metropolitan area, and Bangladesh is the sixth
densest country on earth—there are 161 million people living in an area about the size of
England.
History has affected geography enough that the largest and most advanced civilizations
are not all in South-Central Asia, but if we started all over again, did humanity a
second time, every geographic model says that this region could be the origin and central
point of human civilization.
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