But my point about scale is not the cities themselves, but the
surrounding area. The larger the city, the larger the required
food infrastructure to support it. The larger that infrastructure,
the more vast the distance between the housing to manage the land.
Is that necessarily true? If you assume industrial farming, certainly,
but not if you assume an existing fundamentally agrarian rural society
composed of lots of small family farms. You need a way of aggregating
the production and a transportation infrastructure, but that doesn't
imply widespread ownership of personal automobiles.
The economics point to industrialization. Switzerland is attempting
to maintain its small family farm rural society (both socially as a
matter of self-image, and capitalistically as an investment that
produces high returns in the tourism sector), and from what I see
from the outside, industrial agribusiness (especially in the eastern
EU) has a free ride on their externalities, making it very difficult
for the small farmer to compete. One small mitigating factor here is
that the swiss consumer is not especially price-sensitive.
-Dave
(I believe the per capita automobile ownership is much lower here
than in the States, but I think that's due more to a relatively low
rate in the urban regions, not the rural)
