> I live in a prewar neighbourhood in Montreal. It's dense, beautiful, and loved by locals and tourists alike. If you could clone it and build it elsewhere, it

> I live in a prewar neighbourhood in Montreal. It's dense, beautiful, and loved by locals and tourists alike. If you could clone it and build it elsewhere, it would be worth trillions to cities across North America. I wonder though, to what extent this is success and love by scarcity. i.e. if you outlawed oatmeal in 99% of cities, sure there'd be an absolutely booming tourist destination around that 1% of cities which will specialise in artisanal oatmeal. It'd create lots of jobs and become an attractive place to visit for its rich, unique and vibrant food culture, and attract all kinds of wealthy people who have financial and mental bandwidth to care about something like a $25 unique oatmeal recipe. It'll be a clean and wealthy city attracting students, artists and tourists. (I'm exaggerating the effect of oatmeal here haha but you get my point). And so you may conclude that if you'd clone that, it'd be worth trillions for cities across the country. When in reality, if you'd deregulate oatmeal, there's none of that boom, oatmeal is just oatmeal like it is today, a boring staple of a lot of people's breakfasts that has none of the flair of the city described earlier. Quite a lot of people will eat oatmeal and there'll be a substantial industry behind it sure, but there'd be no particular love or specialness about it. At scale, it's quite likely that a lot of the old zoning laws just wouldn't work, and were changed (dare say fixed) for a reason. Inevitably some old neighbourhoods of cities which thrived for various reasons (perhaps including, being connected to a larger city with modern zoning laws) may do very well, like pre-war Montreal. But that may also just be survivor-bias. All over Europe there are thousands of old villages with similar old infrastructure, beautiful too, that are just not appealing and where the population is shrinking, and where modern zoning laws could make interesting improvements to public infrastructure. Lastly I feel people are appealed by some more older building materials and the notion that age correlates with authenticity. It's not that in newer neighbourhoods people are uninterested in living there because the zoning laws create too large or too narrow sidewalks, or too low or too high buildings, it's probably more about a new office made of glass rather than brick isn't appealing to the well to do stereotype hipster, despite there perhaps not being any specification that new buildings can't be made of brick in the zoning laws. But even if you clone an old neighbourhood's style, and build it new, but the tourists you mentioned wouldn't come to such a new place because it's new. In fact they'd be more more interested to visit parts of Montreal that were built under newer zoning laws, than an entirely new city with none of the culture, built similar to Montreal's old zoning laws. So I'm not entirely convinced you can just clone it and get great results. Just thinking out loud.