> Other cities like Chicago, LA and especially Atlanta can basically spread forever. In the case of LA, not really. The whole city is surrounded by mountains,

> Other cities like Chicago, LA and especially Atlanta can basically spread forever. In the case of LA, not really. The whole city is surrounded by mountains, and there are just a few mountain passes connecting most of Los Angeles County and Orange County to the rest of California [0]. The only part of Los Angeles County that hasn't been fully developed is the Antelope Valley around Palmdale, and that's separated from the rest of the county by the San Gabriel Mountains. I guess there's some room left to sprawl in the Inland Empire too, but that's technically not part of the LA metro area, and it still has the problem of the mountain passes bottlenecking any commute between LA and the IE, so businesses will have to embrace the edge city model and start locating their headquarters in the Inland Empire. [0] Here's a satellite map: https://goo.gl/maps/oK9Kt3zb3vr https://goo.gl/maps/oK9Kt3zb3vr (Edit: Oh, and as for Chicago... they're not quite as free as landlocked cities. They've got Lake Michigan to the east, and they can't go too far north because then they'll run into Milwaukee's suburbs. That just leaves the west and south. Landlocked cities can sprawl in all four directions.)