> > > 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.
What I *said* is true :-) Even if you assume fundamentally agrarian rural society, you need a lot of infrastructure to get the required amounts of food to the cities. I didn't say that infrastructure depended on personal automobiles. Now, the fact that the agrarian folks are living far apart means that either they have long travel distances to things like schools and bakers and shops, or there are many smallish villages that provide replicas of same. In the first case, you end up pushing towards personal vehicles again. In the latter, costs go up a lot.
