Comment by challenger22 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by challenger22 | Hacker News Reader

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>In fact, the Centre for Urban Design and Mental Health estimates that city dwellers face a nearly 40 percent higher risk of depression, 20 percent higher chance of anxiety, and double the risk of schizophrenia than people living in rural areas.

>In their review, Meyer-Lindenberg and van den Bosch found that some potential threats had been examined more thoroughly than others. For some, including pollen, there wasn’t enough information yet to show a convincing link to depression. However, the team did find a number of studies suggesting that heavy metals like lead, pesticides, common chemicals like bisphenol A (BPA), and noise pollution may contribute to depression, although further research is still needed to confirm that this is the case.

The article gives me the distinct impression that the author is in denial of the stress associated with living in a crowded place. I doubt that it has to do much with fumes in the air- stress is a side effect of spending all day hustling, bustling, and competing. The popular opinion in the zeitgeist is that urban development is a good thing- so any bad effects are treatable. Adding green space may be a decent way to treat the symptoms of city living, but I think it will always be a stressful, mental illness-inducing lifestyle.

>The article gives me the distinct impression that the author is in denial of the stress associated with living in a crowded place.

The fact that he doesn't even address the "human factors" that basically don't exist in rural areas (you can leave your house unlocked and it will probably never be robbed, you don't have to worry about the tax man screwing you if you misread a sign about when you can park, you don't have to actively avoid stepping in human feces) are kind of a tip off. Worrying about other humans who you have not chosen to interact with doing things that screws you over is a whole category of stress that's basically nonexistent in rural areas".

Consider: for pretty much any animal I'm aware of, there's a notion of the minimum amount of space it needs to live normally. Somehow for people we've convinced ourselves that there is no such minimum (or it's so small as to be absurd).

Cars have not been around that long. If humans are adapted for a particular density, it's one we managed on foot and horseback. That would put it much higher than contemporary America's legal limits. The masses were certainly not doing 15 mile daily commutes in the ancestral environment.

If you're interested in the historical/humanistic perspective on urban planning more generally, check out the New Urbanists. Understanding pre-car settlements, how and why they worked, long-term norms, etc. is kind of their thing. It's also worthwhile to visit some old (500+ year) built environments in person.

I agree that the settlements themselves would have been relatively dense. However, this is missing two critical elements: they were (a) tiny by modern standards, and (b) surrounded by vast expanses of open, uninhabited space. That meant that, while you wouldn't have necessarily had much in the way of privacy in your own dwelling, you could easily walk out of the village and seek solitude for as long and as often as you wanted. I think this makes a huge difference to social dynamics and we basically haven't properly coped with it since cities of any substantial size have existed.

But within a species (I'm thinking of human's naturally) there seem to be cultural variances.

Some cultures have learned to tolerate minimal personal space as a necessary evil. But when people from those cultures get wealthy they almost always choose to buy more space and privacy.

That is an untrue generalization. Every large city has several high income, high density neighborhoods where wealthy people live when they prefer shorter commutes and access to amenities to larger living spaces.

Do these wealthy people you speak of live in studio apartments?

They live in modestly sized apartments that are typical of urban an urban lifestyle, not the giant isolated rural plots of land that half this thread is insisting are necessary to preserve one’s sanity because they can’t differentiate between personal preference and fundamental aspects of the human condition.

What do you consider acceptable minimal amount of space for a human being?

I don't consider myself qualified to answer that question, but I do think someone should study it. It would be interesting to try to correlate various empirical outcomes with available living space (though of course it will be tricky to control for all the variables, because I'm sure this correlates with e.g. wealth).

At a minimum physically separated kitchen, bathroom, living room, bedroom. So I'd say somewhere around 40sqm for a single person and 10sqm for every additional person. Anything less is a deal breaker or only acceptable in the short term during college, etc.

Why are you narcissistic enough to believe that your idea of the “minimum amount of space” is the canonically correct one, and that city dwellers are idiots who don’t know how to live their lives correctly?

So you at least accept the theory that human beings are not unique from other organisms regarding needed a minimum amount of space and that finding the amount is a valid goal?

The amount of space an animal requires refers to the total amount of space available for them to roam. It is not analogous to the size of a person’s home because people can leave their houses any time they want.

No, but it does relate to high density living where the home range of a person is more condensed. Additionally, we have studies regarding the negative effect of visitor density and intensity on animals.

Our inherently isolating automobile-scaled environments will always be a stressful, mental illness-inducing lifestyle. Humans are built for complete walking-distance communities, not subdivisions and collector roads. People cling to city centers because they are the only places it is legal to build the kind of pedestrian-scale density we would have recognized as home through most of human history.

I found this piece on "Sabbath as alarm" [0] through Slate Star Codex, and it resonated for me:

>One more useful attribute of the Jewish Sabbath is the extent to which its rigid rules generate friction in emergency situations. If your community center is not within walking distance, if there is not enough slack in your schedule to prep things a day in advance, or you are too poor to go a day without work, or too locally isolated to last a day without broadcast entertainment, then things are not okay.

[0] http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/sabbath-hard-and-go-home/#Sab...

Just because you don’t like city living doesn’t mean living in a city is inherently stressful. You’re projecting your idiosyncratic preferences into everyone else and pretending you speak on behalf of the entire human race.

How do we know what is cause and effect? What if cities naturally happen to attract people at a higher risk of depression, anxiety and schizophrenia?

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