Urban dedensification

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The consistent finding that cities add built-up land faster than they add people, so average density falls as they grow. The Atlas of Urban Expansion, which measured a global sample of cities from satellite imagery, is the standard reference for it; the pattern holds across income levels and across planned and unplanned expansion alike. It is the least glamorous fact in urban policy and one of the most consequential, because almost every network cost in a city scales with distance rather than with population — pipe length, cable length, road surface, pumping head, bus kilometres, collection rounds. A city that doubles its population while halving its density has more than doubled the network it must build and then maintain forever. This is where the announced-versus-actual gap becomes physical: the announcements concern buildings, which are a one-off capital cost, while the binding constraint is network length, which is a permanent operating cost carried by whatever municipal revenue exists.

A node is not a place. Drawing it on a map would assert something about the world that no stored fact supports.