I'm envisioning these new "microcities" would be about a mile and a half to two miles in diameter. You should be able to walk from one end to another in ~30 minutes. But they'd still be able to hold +100-500K people. The footprint would be small enough that you should be able to fit it anywhere. Even small European countries have a bit of farmland that could squeeze one of these cities in it.

Here in the Netherlands, we have a huge population density. About 50 years ago, we created a shit-ton of land (Flevoland) and plopped down some cities. Those cities kind of worked out, but there is very little life there. They mostly function as suburbs, where people live but don't work.

More recently, in the north we tried placing new cities, turns out that people don't go and live somewhere if there isn't work, and there isn't much work in the north. Those cities are now failures. Heck, the big established cities in the north are being drained by people moving towards the cities in the middle.

Cities grow organically because people want to live in that city.

> Cities grow organically because people want to live in that city.

That doesn't mean you can't stimulate that growth. You can take the initial steps to make an area a little more desirable and then let the rest happen organically. Nobody will randomly desire to live in an empty rural area.

It's a bootstrapping problem. Sometimes a single employer can make an area desirable, but that single employer may never move there because it's not a desirable area.

That could very well be the case. I don't know if my idea will work out at all. Plenty of planned cities have been built and failed. I've been thinking that you would need a lot of remote workers to be the first settlers or get some sort of large anchor employer (Amazon?).