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: A “Dry Run”
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https://embed.notionlytics.com/wt/ZXlKd1lXZGxTV1FpT2lKaFl6RTVZVGhtT1dNM016ZzBaamN6T1RVM1lUZGxOMk14WlRaa09HVmtNQ0lzSW5kdmNtdHpjR0ZqWlZSeVlXTnJaWEpKWkNJNkluTTBNR1I0WVc1cmRVeDJOR3BtTXpjMVMwUlFJbjA9
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> âť” 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.
There are 394 cities on this list, with New York and London tied at the top as the world’s two most connected cities, all the way down to a hundred or so cities simply deemed “self-sufficient”, including such esteemed locales as Tulsa, Oklahoma and Lomé, Togo.
Though there’s undeniably room for debate regarding the order of this list (is London more “important” in 2022 than Beijing? Probably not), it’s a good proxy for a binary question of important-or-not-important. So, let’s use it.
I’m seeking out cities on this list which, if we spun back time and threw another roll of the anthropological dice, would be founded, built, and populated a second time, eventually appearing on a similar list of cities when humanity again hits ~7.7 billion people (assuming that would happen—but that’s its own question).