Montana is one of the most beautiful places on earth, yet hardly anyone lives there. Why do sprawling metropolis pop up in places like Cleveland and Phoenix, but not Montana?
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Most big cities happen where trading routes cross – which often means ports; but not always.
Basically, humans start where there’s food. Once they have food, they start looking at other resources. But most things that aren’t food require special resources, which usually means it’s really easy to make them in some places, and hard to make them in others. Specific types of food are like this too: Rice needs lots of water, and some warmth; while potatoes are fine in the cold, and can’t grow in standing water.
Because of this, people move stuff around – a lot. There’s evidence of people whose only job was to move special resources or things made of special resources around for longer than we’ve been building cities. Often, these people would tend to naturally meet up in certain places to trade things: meeting in one place meant that traders could trade things between more than two people at once, and have access to more different kinds of special resources or things made from them. And over time, if there’s a city near that place, it’s often easier to just meet up in the city.
Once traders are meeting in a city; it also makes sense for people who make things to be in that city also. If I need two or more special resources to make my thing (like bronze – tin and copper don’t come from the same place; or iron and glass), it’s easier to get those special resources if I’m in the place where people are trading them. And, even if I can get all my resources easily, it’s easier to sell my things if I’m near the traders. So the city grows.
Now, it also makes sense to be in the city if you need to be near people – if your job is something like a leader (mayor, king, or anywhere in between), or a record-keeper (for taxes, laws, etc.), or anything similar. Because there’s already a lot of people there, you can be closer to more people; so you spend less time going to people, and more time working with them. So these people move to the city as well.
This all happens faster in ports because traders often like traveling by water (it’s easier to move a lot of stuff over water than over land), and because food needs water – either to water plants, or fishing. Traders particularly like ports where two bodies of water meet (either two rivers, or a river and a stable body like a lake or a sea), because it means you get traders from both bodies of water. With more trader and more food, port cities tend to grow faster than other cities.
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The two cities you named both follow this. Cleveland is near where a river (the Cuyahoga river) meets Lake Erie, which later made it a good place to run railroads to. Phoenix is where the Salt and Gila rivers meet; and is one of the best places to do farming in a very long distance, as well as having copper mines nearby.
In contrast, Montana doesn’t have a lot of special resources, and isn’t between places that do. Most of what Montana produces is food (cows mostly); and most of the resources you want to bring across Montana are going between other big cities. Because of this, what few “stop and meet” locations there are just aren’t as interesting as other places; and Montana’s cities are mostly endpoints for trade (sell your stuff, buy new stuff, turn around), not crossing points.
The exceptions to this tend to be the result of legal or political matters. Making a city a capitol tends to fuel some growth, for example. However, many of these exceptions tend to be because something is legal or illegal: Las Vegas grew massively after Nevada legalized gambling, for example.
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