Last week I was musing about why cities are default alive while companies are default dead.

My friend Rohit reminded me he has an old essay on this topic: https://www.strangeloopcanon.com/p/thinking-like-a-city

Someone else pointed out to me another reason: cities are fixed in place; they don't compete (directly) for resources.

They also don't have to compete with other overlapping cities because geographic space is partitioned such that each unit of land has one entity with a legitimate monopoly on governing it.

(This of course is somewhat complicated by the government hierarchy of country < state < country, but still, at each layer there's only one state authority).

What would happen if cities could move around?

The post-apocalyptic steampunk movie Mortal Engines proposes an answer: they'd try to kill each other to get an edge!

... Maybe that's not too far off what would happen for anything that can directly compete with others over scarce resources.

Companies don't "move", but by default a legitimate competitor to any given company could sprout up at any time, and legally impede on the original company's "territory."