1) Coasts (and to less extent rivers) are the king, you can't just place a city at random and call it a day.
2) Why would you want to live in an 100,000 population city that is 120 km apart from other major cities? Seriously - it's too big for small community feeling, and not nearly enough for vibrant cultural life (theatres, museums, live concerts). Also it's too much to just utilize the land around them, and not enough to be e.g. finance center.
Such cities IMO are inherently not stable, they will gravitate towards either increasing their population to 300-600k (metropolitan area) or lose people until they shrink to 30-40k.
The whole grid thing is stupid. People want to either spread out or concentrate. They don't want to be stuck at an "average" density.
"Vibrant cultural life" is a function of more than just city size. Smallish towns I've lived in (5-10k people) have far more vibrant cultural life than the large suburbs I've lived in (because in the suburbs, people just go to the nearby larger city, but that's simply not an option in small towns). Just to pick one random example I'm familiar with, Burlington, VT (~40k people) has a great cultural scene largely because it's more than 100km from the next larger city.
Nitpicking aside, I agree with the general thrust of your argument, especially point #1.
In a bureaucrat's ideal world, maybe, but not in Christopher Alexander's. There, small disconnected neighborhoods make locally optimal decisions, and you end up with structure without large-scale symmetry or repetition.
This article already goes wrong with "with capital city City1 in its center". That should be "roughly in the middle" (yes, I know that pattern is for making a good town square, but I think he would certainly like that better for placing the capital city than "exactly in the center")
2) Why would you want to live in an 100,000 population city that is 120 km apart from other major cities? Seriously - it's too big for small community feeling, and not nearly enough for vibrant cultural life (theatres, museums, live concerts). Also it's too much to just utilize the land around them, and not enough to be e.g. finance center. Such cities IMO are inherently not stable, they will gravitate towards either increasing their population to 300-600k (metropolitan area) or lose people until they shrink to 30-40k.
The whole grid thing is stupid. People want to either spread out or concentrate. They don't want to be stuck at an "average" density.