Urban vs rural is a lousy binary. There’s at least 8 levels
- Traditional rural (mainly Asia)
- Large-industrial-farm rural
- Small hipster rural
- Dying industrial town
- Charming lifestyle town (incl college)
- Small modern town
- Medium real city
— criticality —
- Megapolis
Conversation
There's also the dimension of how functional the nominal infrastructure is. If it actually worked as well, Mumbai would roughly be like New York, but of course it is way more overloaded for the infrastructure so you have to navigate a 2x cognitive burden of hacker knowledge.
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This multiple increases rapidly from simplest to the most complex habitation. The cognitive burden multiple for a broken small town over a healthy one is maybe 1.2. For a megapolis scale, it is at least 2 (can't be too high because there's minimum viable functionality effect)
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Replying to
i remember reading something about gurgaon or someplace where they built all these skyscrapers but no sewer system
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Yeah that sort of shit is unfortunately endemic in India where cronyism lands people the plum private profit opportunities, but nobody wants to/has funding for the necessary civic support piece
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I think they could be good, and occasionally come close, but cronyism kills the potential. It's basically a globalization-neocolonial blueprint.
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