An issue with this is that the urban environments will have so many more people in them that so many changes pushed through will benefit urban areas at the expense of rural. Australia deals with this on a massive scale since ilke 80% of the entire population lives on the coast (23 million and 10 million live in only 5 cities)

How is that worse than the alternative, with changes pushed through that benefit rural at the expense of the urban?

I mean this seems like a case where some sort of medium between the two extremes is desirable.

Surely there are more alternatives than that.

Yes, yes, some sort of cross between a city and a state. A "city-state," if you will. How come nobody ever thought of this?

I'd argue cities were the de facto governing unit until last century.

> This sort of thing is fascinating to me. I think that somehow, humanity needs to transition to a political structure where cities are the primary unit of governance, rather than nations. That won't happen quickly or soon, but someday...

> More immediately, it's becoming increasingly clear that the "polarization" that we're seeing in U.S. politics isn't really between left and right or Ds and Rs. It's between the urban and rural. I'd love to see a version of this that drew boundaries between urban centres and the countryside. That would give us a way to start thinking about how to craft policy that recognizes the differences between them.

Well rural-urban differentiation is certainly not something new. Marin Držić, a Croatian renaissance playwright, and his novella "Novela od Stanca" comes to mind since it was in my reading materials in high school..

The story takes place on a carnival night when the old peasant Stanca comes from the hinterland to the city of Dubrovnik to sell his wares where he rests at the fountain. There he gets made fun of by the youth who assure him that fairies will come and rejuvenate him. The fairies are ofcourse masked carnival goers who paint his face black with soot and trick him from his goats and cheese he wanted to sell. He points out the nuances in the mentality of the city and the village and other cultural differences be it in speech, mannerisms, thinking or expectations.

But to get to my point, the urban-rural conflict is certainly not something new. It's probably present since the first cities and it's more got to do with ingroup-outgroup mentality than anything else. Crafting specific policy in that sense which explicitly recognizes the percieved differences would certainly not be wise and would possibly be ridden with fallacies. Also one could argue that it already is implicitly recognized which brings its own set of questions..

What you're suggesting is rather interesting.

You're essentially suggesting a collection of nations operating in a union. (More of an EU approach) With that you'd have extremely strict segregation between the different areas. [In that approach, borders would mean a lot more other than an imaginary line on the ground]

Let's try not to take every opportunity to turn a thread into a re-hash discussion on the election.

I'd say the opposite cost her the election. She failed to realize where the split was. If she had she would have campaigned in all the right places. It's not like both sides didn't know exactly how much each piece on the board was worth.

But not, by a long shot, the Popular Vote.

Spending much more than Trump, campaigning in the wrong places.

Winning the popular vote big and losing the election is a manifest sign of a failed campaign.

Let's not take the bait to turn every thread into an election discussion.