I arrived in the United States in 1989, after living in Adelaide, Australia for all of my life. At the time Adelaide had a population of 1 million people, and the entire country of Australia was 17 million people. The land mass of Australia is roughly the same as the landmass of the continental United States, which had 285 million people back then if I remember correctly.
The one thing that many come face to face with in Los Angeles is that there is no real "city" center. Sure, there is a downtown with skyscrapers, etc. but the city of Los Angeles is really a network of smaller cities all interconnected by a freeway system. I very well designed freeway system. Sure, it is easy to criticize it (as I did) for the traffic, hours sitting in parked cars in peak hour trying to get anywhere, but if you consider that the greater Los Angeles/southern California area had about 23 million people living in it, for me that was comparing that region to the entire population of Australia.
There are factors that stop the expansion of the region - it is land locked by sea to the west and mountains to the east. It has grown north and south, but although Los Angeles and San Diego are not "connected" per se, they may as well be. Once you start on the 405 freeway south, you really don't leave the city area at all. It may as well be one big city area, although the locals would argue that the cultures are very different between LA and SD.
Why is this all important? It shows that rather than centralizing a city (like most others), a more decentralized network model can scale far better. It comes down to the method that traffic travels on between the nodes. Like in a computer network, you need alternative paths if one pathway fails, is blocked, etc. Freeways give you that, albeit at the cost of convenience. But they represent that if you design a city to scale, it can. And despite it not being "perfect", it is a hell of a lot better than a centralized city.
In the time of crisis, there isn't a center that is vulnerable to attack. Work can be moved closer to where people live. Why anyone would spend the ridiculous money to put their business HQ in downtown LA baffles my mind. I mean the burden you put onto employees and workers to travel there, high cost of parking, high cost of real estate, high costs of restaurants for lunch, etc. When you embrace decentralization, you get the ability to support your team better, and by making it easier for someone to work, they will do better work.
If we don't learn anything from basic city planning, we will never build a self-sustainable world to live in. I've previously written about the challenges of mismanagement of population
https://steemit.com/australia/@k0d3g3ar/population-epidemic-australia-is-the-canary-in-the-coal-mine and it shows that poor city planning is the root cause to chaos.
Putting "growth" before "planning" is stupid. This is the antithesis of the saying "Build it and they will come". But it takes leadership that are willing to invest first and see a future, and in a world of polarization in politics, short term elected periods, etc. no one is taking the long view here and investing for the next 10 or 20 years.
Just as we see the incredible benefits of blockchains, the Internet and decentralization in technology it is nothing more than a mirror of what we witness in day to day reality, and what we never can forget should be a model for the future.
A truly decentralized world should not exist solely in technology but we technologists need to evangelize the rest of the world that we've modeled what is proven to work and they should then take a similar approach to city planning and be well ahead of any ambitions of growth. Clearly they are not.