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this post was submitted on 26 Sep 2023
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Cities are noxious tumors on an otherwise beautiful planet.
Why not both? Have proper zoning laws in place and suddenly you'll find the balance. Kyoto for example is just amazing.
I don't disagree, doesn't mean they're not ugly.
Density is not height.
They don't have to be ugly. Check this video out. Looks like a jungle resort in some parts. Could you please honestly tell me that a suburb you see looks prettier than this?
https://youtu.be/fl9ZksmgmPs?si=robPs0cYFQsyPFuI
Never said suburbs were better, I just think that cities are ugly af when compared to nature. That's all I meant.
Did you watch the video I linked?
I did, and while it's certainly leagues better than somewhere like NYC or Pittsburgh, it's far from what I would consider beautiful. So many samey high rise apartments, gross.
Again, to be clear, not saying Suburbs are the better option, I just hate the way they look
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https://youtu.be/fl9ZksmgmPs?si=robPs0cYFQsyPFuI
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The entire point is they don't have to be that way. You are quite literally missing the entire critique. The US's focus on cars and suburbia make it that way.
Without cars and suburbs cities would still be filled with soulless concrete and steel monoliths and trash
You're projecting what many poorly planned, car-dependant cities look like as being a basic fact of all cities.
You clearly need to go see the world. Take this as friendly advice.
You would prefer urban sprawl? Humans gotta live somewhere, density is ecologically the best way to do it.
NIMBYs think if they just ban density that the 8 billion people in the world who need housing will just poof and disappear.
Personally, I prefer dense, walkable, transit-oriented cities so we can preserve as much nature as possible, and so the people living in cities aren't separated from nature by a sea of suburban sprawl.
I was on business in a major US city. I mapped the distance from my hotel to the edge of the wilderness. Including traffic, it would take hours to get there. It's nuts how sprawling and wasteful many of our cities are.
One of the key lines from Strong Towns was roughly "during a time of abundance, any decision you make works out". We've been building out cities during a time of abundance and that abundance has run out. Now we get to see just how badly we did by overbuilding infrastructure and constructing everything around a hugely inefficient car only model for transportation.
That's a very good way of putting it. We've developed our cities in a fundamentally environmentally, socially, and fiscally unsustainable manner, but we were insulated from feeling the full impacts of it by being in relatively good times. But now those debts are quickly catching up with us with the climate crisis, housing crisis, widening inequality, rapidly degrading infrastructure, and quickly draining municipal budgets.
I don't want to ban cities, nor do I prefer suburbs, I just don't think they're anything close to beautiful thats all they're dirty and soulless.
The modern north american cities are. That's the point.
But cities don't have to be the way, other places in the world have rich beautiful cities with amazing urban communities.
Never said that suburbs are better, I'm just disagreeing with the sentiment that cities are beautiful. I think they're ugly.
Is there a less ugly way to live?
I wish brother, I wish.
False dichotomies are fun! There's absolutely a type of beauty to a well-run, upkept city. Should everything be a city? Nope, we need green areas, probably even more green areas than cities. The two can and should coexist in harmony.
If you think cities are beautiful you are entitled to your opinion, I just disagree. I think they're ugly
I think that your opinion is overly reductive. There are a lot of differences between cities and even parts of cities. There is a lot of variance between
Sure, big difference, still less easy on the eyes, in my opinion, than an open field or a forest of trees. Nature will always be more attractive to me.
I think I'd rather have very dense population centers with intermixed accessible green spaces would be far preferable to the sprawling suburbs like you see in Texas
I don't disagree, doesn't make them not ugly tho
Walkable cities produce less pollution per capita than suburban or rural areas due to less pollution from commutes and increased efficiency delivering utilities (due to the population density).
Suburban sprawl is what truly makes ugly stains on our word - concrete everywhere, destroying the watershed, with no native grass in the medians, and so many cars spewing out fumes, micro plastics, and disrupting migration patterns. They're depressing places to live.
I feel the same could be said about industrial agriculture replacing the smaller family run farms. Nothing is more depressing than driving through hundreds of miles of monoculture fields in the mid west full of corn.
We need to tons of small permaculture farms to supply our dense cities. Not vast swaths of land devoid of native species to feed us as efficiently as possible with corn, the earth be damned. We need to learn to live in harmony with out stark urban rural divides.
Permaculture farming also has massive abilities to sequester carbon in the soil, as well as other farming techniques that involve plowing crop yields back into the earth, similar to the rich soils of the Amazon Rainforst which archeologists have determined was artificially made by man, and still holds the carbon they put into it.
That's a very fair point, and one I agree with. I also think it'd help to move away from capitalism though. Capitalism is the force that encourages so many companies to throw away excess food rather than give it away, because doing so would lower demand and be "bad for business". If we could just reduce our food waste that alone would do wonders in decreasing land use for farms, monoculture or otherwise.
I also think, over time the world should become more vegetarian. Even if you believe in food chains and that it's okay for us to eat meat in general, the farming of animals often in cartoonishly cruel conditions solely for our consumption is abhorrent. Moving from meat based diets to (at least mostly) plant based is a moral necessity, and on top of that will massively reduce emissions (15% comes from livestock), land use, and biodiversity loss
Not just from an ethical standpoint, but from a logical one as well. The amount of food and water used to make a pound of meat for human consumption is ridiculously inefficient, in the face of Climate Change reducing the amount of Farmable land on Earth. Its super easy to start with meatless Monday's to start reducing the amount of meat one consumes and is how i started down my road to becoming a Vegetarian.
The thought of not cooking meat and centering their meal around it is honestly scary for alot of people who tie it to their cultural identities, because they lack the imagination to even ponder an alternative so they dig their heels in, and refuse to change. Incremental change is bettet than no change, and the wheel is always slow when it initially starts rolling.
Y'all sure like putting words in my mouth. I don't prefer suburbs, I just think cities are ugly
I didn't assume you were a fan of suburbs, I just read your comment about cities being blights upon the earth and argued why I think suburbs are more blight-like.
The only assumption I made about you is that you'd appreciate an appeal to environmentalism, since you called earth our beautiful planet
That's fair, I suppose I misread your intent. I don't disagree.