It's articles like these that make me wonder if the current paradigm of centralized production in general is a fluke. Before the industrial revolution there were a handful of cities that were big and mostly for political (cities where the sovereign reigned) or economic reasons (trading). But now, we seem to be overbuilding because that's what we're use to. The suburbs are just an extension of the same phenomenon where the ability to subsidize transportation costs via centralization of production has made this possible. Obviously, the steadily rising price of oil is slowing the growth, but in many ways if the societies before the industrial revolution could have kept the same inventions of production at the local level perhaps things wouldn't be as disjointed as they are. Imagine smaller towns and cities with the same tools of production, but not to the current scale as we experience. Only a handful of modern situations would warrant a big foot print (datacenters and certain factories come to mind), but those would exist in the regions and cities that make economic sense. Today, it just seems like everyone wants to go Stalinist/Soviet big with everything.