It's easy to see how settlement patterns follow topographical and geological features when you look at satellite photos/maps of the United States. People tend to live near rivers, lakes, harbors. Population density declines rapidly away from those features. The easy availability of water, and the cost of infrastructure like water and sewer and roads tends to concentrate people in those areas. Often those areas are historical transportation hubs, too because large rivers and bodies of water tend to be near flat, open land. (e.g. the Mohawk Valley)
There's often a corresponding flow of money tokens through those regions. Money concentrates like water from creeks, to streams, to rivers, to oceans. Resources also flow through those regions and become similarly concentrated in larger and larger markets.
The continuing flow of money and resources through these geographical features is mostly an accident of history, today. The Internet and even old engineering technology like trucks and automobiles can make completely new market geometries feasible or advantageous.
It's analogous to a mesh network topology versus the trunk and branches topology that provides Internet service to most people today. With the right mix of components, a mesh network is much cheaper and even more reliable than a trunked network--however, there are no large scale mesh networks out there today.
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