Back in 1980, Kirkpatrick Sale wrote a great book called "Human Scale" about how things (government, business, infrastructure) in society are built beyond what humans can comprehend and manage. He pointed to studies that found that if we were to start over and build small 50,000 people towns 15-20 miles apart, each of these towns would have enough people and trades to support those towns. Scholars such as Plato and thinkers like da Vinci also believed that smaller towns of that size contributed to the overall well-being of citizens.