> Even if you stop moving people, you still have to move goods (and electricity, and sewage) which is less efficient if the people are spread over a larger area
That's not necessarily true. Centralizing leads to congestion, for instance, to say nothing of the other failure modes of centralizing (single point of failure being the big one). I expect there is an optimal density for each of those, and it's not clear that "large city" is in that region.
Losses in distributing electricity are fairly negligible, and distributed generation should be encouraged for some of the same reasons.
