Of course, spread out populations are harder to control, so "sprawl" is evil and government has to "do something" about it.
P. J. O'Rourke had some good comments about anti sprawl" measures.
-Eric
Not exactly. Most people will hover around the amenities that drew a crowd in the first place: the food tent or beer wagon, the entertainment, the athletes giving autographs, the cheerleaders flirting with the guys, etc. Same thing with a city. Most people will want to live in reasonable proximity to jobs, school, shopping, church, etc.
What changes the equation from the traditional model of compact city design is centralized planning and massive allocations of state and federal money for roads, water, sewers and schools. If suburbanites had to pay the full incremental costs of development, cities would still be much more compact. But we've largely socialized the infrastructure costs and, here as elsewhere, centralized socialist planning leads to waste.
"Waste," of course, is regarded as a lifestyle enhancement for those on the receiving end. The suburbanite regards the new arterial road as his by right, and never mind that building it involved the forcible taking of other peoples' property, and that it slashes through and degrades other people's neighborhoods. He takes it for granted that the state is supposed to scatter new schools across the landscape every time a developer throws another 10,000 houses out amongst the farms, with the cost being spread district, county, or statewide. Public money, private benefits. Socialist planning in action.
If the libertarians ever managed to establish their utopia, suburbia would be one of the first things to virtually disappear, as very few of the necessary roads could be built without eminent domain.