I don't think this diary is well-written to spark discussion. I'm not sure where the question belongs...

Maybe it is:

Do we actually want to centralise the population of Europe?

(And along the way, centralise the population of each country around the biggest cities?)

And even if we do, is there a humane way to organise the transition?

I'll move to the city when they clean the air to tolerable levels, until then I'd rather tighten my belt and breathe clean(er) air.
Yours in resistance to this sucking dry of the countryside to create urban housing bubbles and favelas.

'The history of public debt is full of irony. It rarely follows our ideas of order and justice.' Thomas Piketty

This article takes up a slightly different viewpoint, that of migration both within and from outside the EU:

The exploitation of migrants has become our way of life | Felicity Lawrence | Comment is free | The Guardian

Equally dishonest is the myth that migration can be controlled, if only we had sharper razor wire, or more border dogs, or more deportations of illegal immigrants. As the Ministry of Defence's strategic trends programme makes clear, today's large-scale migrations are a historic force, just as those from rural areas to emerging cities were in the industrial revolution. They will increase in coming years as the global population grows, as the tectonic plates of superpower relations continue to shift, as the world's resources come under increasing pressure from our patterns of consumption - and as more and more people flee war, climate change and poverty. Our failure to curb emissions will bring the victims of our footprint to our door.

We are all interdependent. We have enjoyed the growth globalisation has brought to advanced economies, but we cannot escape its flip side. The Dover-Calais route, with its queues of holiday-makers and freight lorries is the perfect symbol of the contradictions inherent in the anti-immigration view. It wants the free movement of goods and capital, the ability for its own to come and go as they please, but it wants fortress Britain for everyone else.

There has been a lack of honesty on the left too. The flexible workforce was a mantra of the Labour years. While insisting that migration has been of overall benefit to the economy, Labour was slow to acknowledge that the benefit has flowed mostly to capital and the rich, and far too slow to articulate that at the microeconomic level some British groups have clearly have lost out. But to imagine now that the solution to these new global realities can be found by tacking to the right, or by turning back to the answers of the 1970s pre-globalisation is deluded.

I used to be afew. I'm still not many.

We may also being seeing an intensification of "lifecycle migration" were 20 somethngs migrate from the periphery to the centre in search of better employment/career opportunities only to return to (much cheaper) peripheral areas when they have made their money - to start small business or retire and raise their kids in a more congenial environment.  Many in the metropolitan areas also retire to the periphery in search of better weather or more affordable lifestyles.

I suspect the net migration of wealth is still to the metropolitan areas, but the demographic trend of an aging population will turn peripheral areas into giant retirement homes away from the hustle and bustle of metro life.

There will also be a huge concentration of political power in metro areas.  The 2 Million British expats in France and Spain will have almost no say in the UK Brexit debate.

Index of Frank's Diaries

The Irish solution to the centripetal forces of global capital is to compete with metropolitan centres on the basis of lower headline corporate tax rates  (although effective rates are often even lower in (e.g.) France, Holland and Luxembourg when all the tax breaks and dodges available to global corporations are taken into account.

Not only is this socially regressive, it accentuates the trend towards lower corporate tax rates globally. Additionally, as there is a finite amount of FDI available, it is not a strategy replicable to other peripheral states without greatly diluting the amount of FDI available to any one state.

In addition, such corporate tax breaks and dodges greatly advantage global players over smaller local companies which cannot avail of them as they are particularly targeted at attracting FDI by global corporates.

There are also huge centripetal forces within global corporates, with all strategic management, marketing and R&D activities concentrated in HQ in metropolitan centres for the convenience of Board members, if for no other rational reason. (The centralization of marketing functions usually degrades marketing performance in peripheral markets).  Smaller or regional companies are taken over, all their core functions are centralized with often only a token manufacturing presence remaining in the markets they serve.

Much of this is rationalized on the basis of economies of scale, the availability of specialized skilled work-forces, and proximity to transport and communications hubs. However the figures often don't really add up when the increased costs of operating in metropolitan centres are factored in.  Mostly its a plain power grab by central management keen to reduce local autonomy and to enforce a more uniform corporate culture.

This centralization within corporates is happening in a way almost completely hidden from local and national political cultures and processes which are powerless to prevent it. The residual national political structure within the EU are almost irrelevant to this process - serving mainly as useful idiots and scapegoats when the national economy of peripheral countries crumbles in direct consequence.

Ireland may not get away with its corporate headline tax rate competition strategy for much longer, but at the moment it is probably the main thing preventing the systematic asset stripping of Ireland of it's human and natural resources a la Greece and Portugal.

Index of Frank's Diaries