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Comment by patagonia | Hacker News Reader

The flip side of density increases is the changes in culture and required increase in shared resource organization.

I’ve lived in NYC and in the country. You can’t simply increase housing density and have it work. You have to learn different ways to interact with people. You have to create shared transportation and parks infrastructure. And you have to admit there are trade offs.

You do lose a lot when moving toward very high density cities. The night sky. Quiet. Calmness. Yards.

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You dont need NYC levels of density to achieve big improvements though. You just can't have a "city" full of single-family homes like you do in places like San Francisco.

I'd also posit that the culture changes follow, and are directed by, the density. That's my speculation though.

No, but you do need to incorporate public features that bigger cities have, like parks. That doesn't happen magically, you need to plan for that.

The SF Bay Area was designed like LA... to require burning as much fossil-fuel as possible by spreading residential and commercial areas out far from each other, making walking impractical. Heck, even local trams and bus systems were destroyed by General Motors.[0] I remember seeing the remnants of a defunct local tram platform about ½ mile / 1 km west of Gunderson High School in San Jose across the way from where the first Light Rail line was installed.

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_consp...

Human beings have adapted to environments as diverse as the arctic, jungles of Borneo and the Kalahari desert, all without 'modern' technology.

I think we can handle a style of city that's already pretty common throughout the world.

I'm moving to London next month and I'm already feeling a weird mix of excitement and absolute dread.

FWIW, London is an incredible, vibrant city and one of my personal favorite places on Earth. Something you might like if you are feeling dread from being in such a dense city is how close it is to the country. A short train ride will take you far outside of the city and there are plenty of places to go that give you that 'small town' feel.

Also, go to Terry's for breakfast in the city.

http://www.terryscafe.co.uk/

> The night sky

There's no night sky in any suburb though ?

You can generally see more of the sky in the suburbs and there is about a 1 mag difference. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bortle_scale

Are you asking a question? Yes, you can definitely see 1 or 2 orders of magnitude more starts in the suburbs than you can downtown.

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