A simple, wrong model of human settlements is that they have a “tech tree” of amenities. As your population grows, you unlock more of them. Here’s an example with made up numbers:
pop 500: 1 elementary school, 1 convenience store
pop 5000: 1 bank, 1 Tim Hortons
pop 50,000: 1 movie theatre, 1 community centre
pop 500,000: 1 good independent record store, 1 local airport that no one uses
pop 5,000,000: 1 fancypants museum with Greek revival architecture and a wing dedicated to large dinosaur skeleton reconstructions, 1 large amusement park complex
As your settlement grows, the tech you unlock at lower populations proliferate. At a medium city of 500k, you might have 80 cafes, 35 elementary schools, 18 grocery stores, and 7 DMVs (the first one of each amenity being “unlocked” at a lower population, and then increasing every so often as the population grows). One interesting thing I’ve noticed is that there are often benefits of having specifically one of a specific entity, for reasons that rhyme with the concepts of schelling points, natural monopolies, and network effects.
Continue reading “Unitary Advantage Windows: Scale, Schelling Points, and City Size”