<aside> 🌎 I’ve updated this post! In hindsight, I was wrong about a few things. Read the new one (from July 2025) here.
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July 5, 2022
<aside> 📝 This is part of my 30-post speed writing goal I’m calling my Dry Run. Judge me not for my quality, but that I wrote this at all. More here: Writing
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A screenshot from a map I made highlighting these cities
Like I said in the post before this one, I like to waste time staring at maps. I play around with Google Maps all the time, zooming in and out, clicking on random restaurants to read the reviews, and noticing the terrain that shaped the geopolitical borders.
I’m often asking myself things as I do this*. What’s it like there? Who lives here? Why is this city even here?* One of those questions has led me down more than a few rabbit holes.
Why is this city even here?, I ask myself while reading the Wikipedia page for the Toldeo Mud Hens. Turns out Toledo, Ohio was once one of the most important cities in America—the somewhat-lucky placement of the Erie Canal made it a useful trade center, and later became one of the country’s largest manufacturing hubs. There’s a world where it’s one of the largest cities in the country today.
Of course, Toledo isn’t one of the largest cities in the country. There’s a huge mix of factors which led to New York, LA, Chicago, Dallas, and the rest of them being what they are today. It starts with geography, plus a big dash of sociology and history, and finishes with a huuuuuge amount of luck.
You can really scale up that why-is-this-city-even-here question into a larger question about the role of chance not just in our day-to-day lives, but in society as a whole. I ask myself this all the time:
<aside> ❔ If we went back in time to the start of human civilization and let history play itself out a second time, which of todays global cities would exist again, and which are only around now from random chance?
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I’ve thought about this a lot, and while I’m no anthropologist or geographer, there are some obvious answers. I’ll get to a list in a moment, including a few places that aren’t global cities today that maybe could have been.
For me, the simplest form of this question is judging important, global cities. If a city is in the top 300 or so cities, in terms of importance, there has to be good reason for that, right?
There are a few measures of city classification, but I’m going to use the Global and World Cities Research Network classification from 2020, which I’ve mapped here.