I think you are giving examples of fads not long term changes. It's the "grass is greener" syndrome. People living out in the suburbs look at their long commute, the cookie-cutter culture, and think that urban life is more exciting and sensible. After a while, they look at the crowds, the filth, the noise, their tin-can car or lack of one at all, and think that suburban space and quiet and freedom looks pretty good all of a sudden. So it's an ebb and flow.
While I can see individuals existing in that cycle, why would a whole society synchronize around it? You would think market forces would keep all people out of sync to level out prices.
Actually, somewhat counter-intuitively, oscillations are very normal and natural and arise all over the place under fairly common conditions. An entire semester of differential equations and this is just about the only thing I took away from it, but in some ways it was still almost worth it.
The point I was sort of alluding to is that right now urban life has certain undeniably advantages, along with certain undeniable disadvantages. I also suspect the advantages are still going to grow for another decade or so. But looking ahead to even some perfectly straightforward applications of trends already in development across a wide variety of fields, I see a lot of technologies emerging in 2025-2030 or so that will start bringing parity back to the "sprawl", or, to invoke a buzzword that I think actually works better, "decentralization". (I think the 2010s will come to be seen as the last dying gasp of industrial-age centralization.) Our grandchildren will be aghast at the horrors of our era of driving, for instance, not merely that we killed ourselves by the thousands for it but that it took up all our concentration for the duration. A fifteen minute drive in a rented car that automatically picks you up and doesn't drop any of your net connections for the duration, well heck that's hardly an inconvenience at all. In fact, "drive" is the wrong word, it's a ride. Better delivery systems; robotics will make practical things like grocery delivery in all but the most remote of areas. All of this automated infrastructure can work on even existing battery technology, because they remove the biggest problems with batteries which is the human issues of charge time (these can use industrial strength chargers) and the downtime of a given car is much less relevant. And so on for quite a while.
So what I see is a wave that will continue to go towards the cities, but then recede back away from the cities, but actually in some sense, drag all the good things about cities with them.
And my god, the hands that will wring as that is happening. We could probably power half the shift with the mighty power of wringing hands. Which won't do a damned thing to stop it.
Well, I think that is the natural life cycle of people going from young single college grads to married and family life. I love NYC, I like living there, I wouldn't want to raise a family there.
I'm not sure how much of NYC's growth is related to any larger trend, or if it is simply for the last 10 years crime has dropped like crazy because the police have done a great job tackling hard problems. Anytime you see crime dropping 50%+ it is going to change who wants to live there.
