So basically that one city has the population of caifornia.
If i were a wantrapeeneur id be seeing what app services tokyo specifically from and economic and cultural perspective as if you can monitize just fraction of tokyo businesses......
The special wards of Tokyo are even called cities in English by the wards themselves. One example is Shibuya City: http://www.city.shibuya.tokyo.jp
The population of Canada!
I've lived in both rural and urban areas, and strongly prefer the former; the latter may be more "efficient" mathematically, but at the cost of a substantially-worse quality of life in my opinion.
There's a difference between "countryside" and "wilderness". I think you're talking about "wilderness", because "countryside" is kinda defined by agricultural use (which traditionally implies people living on their farms/ranches). Houses and barns are - IMO - understandably okay in a countryside. Wilderness, not so much; I agree with you 100% that it's better to not actually live in places that we should be conserving for future generations (or at least not build permanent structures; camping is fine, IMO).
Regardless, you don't have to stick to the extremes. Smaller cities/towns that allow for close proximity to either countryside or wilderness (or both!) without outright sprawling onto it would give you the benefits of both. Reno, NV is a perfect example of this: urban living in the valley, surrounded by mountains and deserts where it's easy enough to entirely avoid civilization if you so choose.
I'm ok with smaller towns and cities as long as they are very high density. They tend to sprawl however.
When these things become practical and ubiquitous and cheap, then sure, farmland could become wilderness again.
> Ireland
That kinda explains our differences in opinion, then. The US is a lot bigger and roomier, so more space to spread out beyond the small 1-5 acre plots (you do see them still - I grew up on an 8-acre ranch - but they're typically surrounded by plenty of more open fields, albeit typically fenced).
> [smaller towns and cities] tend to sprawl, however
Only if allowed to do so, which doesn't necessarily have to be the case. We could be surrounding those towns with protected wilderness, for example. Reno's an example where the very geography makes significant sprawl less practical (though it's still happening in the north and south to an extent).
Also, one thing that often slows the sprawl is the sheer cost of extending utilities further and further from the population center (and that cost - at least here in the US - is the responsibility of the property owner). Even building your own self-sufficient alternatives (wells and septic tanks and solar panels and such) is expensive enough to be at least somewhat of a deterrent (if they're even practical in a given climate). When these towns do sprawl, it tends to be along roads that already have power lines.
More rural living is what will save us, imho.
Cars should be the most taxed and difficult to obtain. Cars are why humans in dense to be areas suck. Work backward from eliminating cars from daily life.
I know its not a popular opinion, but the things that take so much oil to make and transport and deliver to the people, are there so that city people can live another day without pitching into the abyss.
Rural living is better for the Earth. If I can walk to my neighbour and get butter, instead of driving to a shopping mall (air conditions) to buy it from a source originally half a country away, please explain to me how this is 'more energy efficient'. It makes no sense whatsoever, unless one is simply so enamoured by the luxuries of city life that one can't see the forest for the trees.
Cities are expensive to build, maintain, and they are destroying our future. Abandon!
Yes, cutting back to medieval times, wearing homespun, most amenties supplied by the local blacksmith and cobbler and some things supplied by traveling merchants , that'd obviously be more environmentally friendly. I doubt most people are ready to do that. And also -- Malthus would like to have a word with you. No way you can supply this many people with such technology.
Yes, the ultimate green solution is to decrease the amount of people living on Earth but check how China did with the one child policy.
Local and small scale may 'feel cozy' but they aren't efficient - they were abandoned for a reason.
You should realize that population density makes it much easier to avoid driving long distances to get things, as distribution points can be centrally located. You seem to have an issue with vehicle-dependent suburban sprawl, which is justified, but ultra dense walkable "New Urban" cities are much better at resource distribution than rural communities.
A person living in a big city uses drastically less resources and energy than a rural person does.
Less/no driving, smaller more energy efficient dwellings (apartment blocks = way more efficient heating/cooling), vastly less infrastructure per capita, etc.
An honest appraisal cannot lead to the conclusion that cities are good for us, energy-wise.
You need to be more specific, what specific resources are you talking about? All the resources that city dwellers depends on are also required in the villages (if we want to maintain the same standard of living), but there you usually need more of them per capita.
Because they have immense numbers of people living in them?
Anecdotally, living in a high-rise building, I am amazed how much more inefficient living in a single-family house is. From unused space and heat loss to the accumulation of junk in the garage/basement/backyard and constant ongoing maintenance of everything, it just seems to be so much waste of resources for the benefit of 2-4 people living in it.
Because those people do less to support their own survival locally, and therefore cities require immense intake of energy and resources every day, in order to maintain that lifestyle.
That seems to be a critical modification what you originally said. Are you trying to argue that humanity can keep its current quality of life in a less resource intensive manner by spreading out, or are you arguing that we should decrease our quality of life and go back to creating food and goods on our own?
If you take city dwellers and put them all in rural areas, 90% of them are not going to start farming enough to keep themselves fed or farm at all. They are just going to order the food from somewhere else and have it shipped to them, only now the shipping will have to travel a much wider area to get to everyone
Both. We should spread out, gain more local independence in terms of energy harvesting, and we should also change our lives to be not so dependent on massively energy-hungry activities .. like driving 4 miles to get a burger from a drive-through.
That sounds like suburbia. People who live in high density cities don't really do these things. We just walk downstairs.
If you can show some math that shows how having a few thousand people in walking distance of a few restaurants has a higher energy requirement than spreading those same few thousand people around the country and having them stay fed _without them farming their own food_ then you might start to have an argument here but for now this seems in the realm of impossibility
It's less resource intensive for me and my neighbors to have one person do the agriculture than for all of us to.
It's cheaper and more efficient still if I have 30 million neighbors.