All the 'large areas of land' that people want to live in already have dense cities. This sort of ideas have been tried again and again, and it falls apart because people just don't want to move there.
Would you be enthusiastic about relocating if this was forty minutes away from Vegas in the desert?
UK has the feature that you can bootstrap new towns because from the new town you are probably within 1000s of jobs in neigbouring towns. I used to joke to myself you could get a C# job in commuting distance (car may be needed) from anywhere in the UK even in the sticks. (Before remote working boom)
> All the 'large areas of land' that people want to live in already have dense cities.
If by people you mean 18th century farmers or 19th century merchants, sure. I guess you could make some semblance of an argument for countries like Belgium or Japan, but it's downright ridiculous to claim United States, one of the most sparsely populated developed nations, already has all the large cities it can support.
Increasing population merely to EU average would create housing for hundreds of millions.
> United States, one of the most sparsely populated developed nations, already has all the large cities it can support.
That was not my argument, please don't twist my words.
I was replying to the idea that you should be able to take empty land and turn it into good cities. The reason that would not work is empty land nowadays is in pretty unattractive places. It worked 300 years ago I assume.
Sure you can turn a suburb or town into a city, that's how cities appear after all.
It doesn't. But it could. My point is if you offer something attractive besides just housing, people will come. Imagine company towns or things like that. They work because people get jobs there.
The areas where you could easily do something that provides work for a lot of people are already occupied by large cities, near river deltas, trade routes and coastal areas good for ports.
The only recent exception is SpaceX's Starbase town. And they could do this because of a very new 'requirement', frequently launch rockets where you have a south facing coastline as close as possible to the equator.
The "requirement" might be in this case "has cheap land and nice views". I see no reason you could not build such a thing, seems just difficult to kickstart.
Company towns are built because there is e.g. a mine in the middle of nowhere and then you have to build a town to support all the mine workers. If there was actually something like a viable mine there then it would happen on its own and if there isn't then it's still just a bunch of empty buildings in the desert.
Would you be enthusiastic about relocating if this was forty minutes away from Vegas in the desert?