Tiles among cities.

Hello guys!

We've all seen it. You plan your city placement. You level rockiness and clear fungus to settle as best as terrain permits. But it seems the AI never does any terraforming in advance, just settle with the least effort. You settle here and then the AI settles there. And between the two cities, 7 perfectly usable tiles. Then you go to war and conquer the offending city, but the harm is done and those tiles will remain unused unless you do something.
The choices are:

1. Build a city in between, knowing that with only 6 tiles left available, it will never be beyond mediocre. Or share some tiles from the surrounding cities, now having 3 mediocre cities. And increase your city count, with could have been used for a better city elsewhere.
2. Empty the city and then abandon it, either by veeeery slowly making colony pods while stopping its growth, or just starving it, which seems a waste of a citizen. The whole thing is to avoid waste.
3. Raze the city! Incur an atrocity and a trade embargo, and again waste citizens.
4. Just leave the cities as they are, and crawl what little you can out of the unused tiles. Then move on with your life and pretend you're OK. But in your heart, you know you're not OK. It pains you to watch those tiles, so you avoid them as much as possible, and the memory of them haunts you and makes you uncomfortable for the rest of the game.

So what do you trascend players do? I do option 2, but it takes me forever to finally arrange my empire as I want it. I admit it might be more OCD than actual efficient placement, but if you guys have a good argument, I could go easier with placement and enjoy the game more.

I do this on transcend:

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=557447

For a 21-tile base I can easily get three 6-tile bases of 14 population each that totally rock. With the remaining 3 tiles I can get another 14 pop base as mentioned in the link. So I can use whatever the AI factions leave me. Less is more.

You can modify the terrain to an abusurd extent in this game, so just build near to bonus resources or features and borehole it up.

find some "garbage" land preferrably far away from AI basis and make a great big solar farm and you can blow away the AIs even on Transcend.

Honestly I use the space as Military protection, plant a couple of forests, then airbases and bunkers. Don't always need it but if the enemy makes a sudden counterpush, it's nice to have. Of course i don't play on transcend, so maybe not a good strategy for higher difficulties.