A Decade of Urban Transformation, Seen from Above
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
There's a classic format for side-by-side image comparison. It's called "side-by-side image comparison".
Display both images (or all images in a series), and allow the reader's eye to move between them at will, picking out differences and similarities.
By scroll-hijacking and overloading, this is defeated. I cannot toggle between images, and instead have to scroll up some indeterminate and majickal amount before ... I'm parked several paragraphs or images above, or my viewing position simply jumps randomly about the page.
Some designer is having a fun time, but this is too clever by half.
Please stop.
The presentation detracts massively from them.
Little boxes on the hillside, Little boxes made of ticky tacky Little boxes on the hillside, Little boxes all the same,
There's a pink one and a green one And a blue one and a yellow one
And they're all made out of ticky tacky And they all look just the same.
And the people in the houses All went to the university Where they were put in boxes And they came out all the same
And there's doctors and lawyers And business executives
And they're all made out of ticky tacky And they all look just the same.
And they all play on the golf course And drink their martinis dry And they all have pretty children
And the children go to school, And the children go to summer camp
And then to the university Where they are put in boxes And they come out all the same.
And the boys go into business And marry and raise a family In boxes made of ticky tacky And they all look just the same,
There's a pink one and a green one And a blue one and a yellow one
And they're all made out of ticky tacky And they all look just the same.
Like, sure single family homes in suburbia tend to look the same. You know what also looks the same from the outside? Apartments. Literally all you can see for each one is a window and maybe a balcony, and they all look identical.
The problem with American suburbia is not that houses are similar looking, or that the people in them raise families, go into business, or go to university. The song seriously reads like r/im14andthisisdeep material.
It really kind of depends. People focus on the "And they all look just the same" element of the song and glance over the fact that they're "made of ticky-tacky."
In an urban setting large solidly built structures slowly form accretions and extensions to them that slowly help a neighborhood develop character and personality over time. Large apartment blocks that don't permit something like that, as you see in lots of East Asian countries where they had to throw up tons of housing REAL fast, can also end up looking really bland and dehumanizing.
But then you go to a place that has had time to really develop character as multiple generations of residents have written over them without ever fully erasing what came before and you end up with beloved urban centers like New York or Paris.
The suburban development model doesn't really allow for that. The houses can get extensions in theory, but often deed restrictions or HOAs insist on things adhering to specifically defined code about how they can look and what they can do. The conformism is a willful aesthetic choice rather than just a pragmatic shortcut.
Personally, I've always found it a great example of irony. The condemnation of sameness and uniformity, from someone self-consciously countercultural and generally trotted out by others who are self-consciously counterculture stereotype compliant. A song lambasting people for their smug and thoughtless conformity from the perspective of someone thoughtlessly smug and superior for their conformity who marks the difference by sneering.
It's really a remarkable piece.
This same thing seems to have happened in many other cities around the U.S. as indicated by the 'bullet wound' pattern all over the map.
(Doesn't have the 'after' images though.)
The US sure painted itself into a corner with suburbanization. I doubt that it's reversible. Or at least, that it would ever be reversed before it was far too late.
https://www.strongtowns.org/the-growth-ponzi-scheme
A bit of a read in a 5 part series but well worth it.
Strongtowns.org refers to suburban sprawl as the "growth ponzi scheme". Low density sprawl requires more infrastructure with less density to pay for it. The density of suburbs can never hope to pay for the renewal of roads, water, sewers, schools without massive transfer payments from denser areas. By the time the bill comes and the illusion of growth has stopped, the center of development has already moved out to the next ring of farms to pave over for subdivisions, shopping plazas and highway expansions.
Alternatively, sufficient numbers of people stop having children altogether, and then don't mind living in dense cities.
There are many more mental health issues in densely populated areas, much less biodiversity, more pollution, etc.
>Alternatively, sufficient numbers of people stop having children altogether,
We tried that, it was called billed as a "aging population crisis" and used as justification to import millions of people from other failed countries into the US.
>mental health issues related to loneliness
Citation? It's a fact that urban living is associated with higher levels of mental illness, not just conjecture.
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/fullarticle/...
Of course, there's always the issue about whether suburbs and exurbs count as rural or urban, which leads to people talking past each other.
Anyway, I like Christopher Alexander's "Interlocking Fingers" pattern: It seems someone has posted it here: http://iwritewordsgood.com/apl/patterns/apl003.htm
> People feel comfortable when they have access to the countryside, experience of open fields, and agriculture; access to wild plants and birds and animals. For this access, cities must have boundaries with the countryside near every point. At the same time, a city becomes good for life only when it contains a great density of interactions among people and work, and different ways of life. For the sake of this interaction, the city must be continuous - not broken up. In this pattern we shall try to bring these two facts to balance.
> ...
> Therefore: Keep interlocking fingers of farmland and urban land, even at the center of the metropolis. The urban fingers should never be more than 1 mile wide, while the farmland fingers should never be less than 1 mile wide.
(Apologies for miles instead of kilometers.)
> The total land surface area of Earth is about 57,308,738 square miles, of which about 33% is desert and about 24% is mountainous.
In [1]: total_land_surface_area_square_miles = 57308738
...: total_land_surface_acres = total_land_surface_area_square_miles / 0.0015625
...: non_desert_non_mountain_acres = total_land_surface_acres * (1.0 - (0.33 + 0.24))
...: acres_per_human = non_desert_non_mountain_acres / 7000000000.0
...: print '%f' % acres_per_human
...:
2.253052
> we have not allowed for any amenities such as highways, schools, hospitals, shopping malls, stadiums, agricultural fields, rivers, lakes, reservoirs, parks, golf courses, etc.
The amount of land, excluding Antarctica, is less than five acres (about 2 hectares).
The notional "40 acres and a mule" threshold was crossed in 1800.
When you consider that land are translates directly to renewable energy flux, this becomes all the more interesting.
Some growth trends from a few years back:
The world population has doubled in the past 50 years. I would hazard a guess that 4 billion is bearable. Optimal would be 2 billion.
Edit window closed.
There's not more pollution, it just seems so because it's more concentrated. The pollution per capita in major US cities is quite a bit lower than the US average.
Similarly, there's plenty of biodiversity in the spaces that people are leaving free by spreading less.
The reason why the PTB oversell high density is because of high paying jobs and high property taxes.
Funny..in CA, only Bay Area has a high density general plan. Not Visalia or Healdsburg. Because high density has nothing to do with sustainability. It only promises sustainability for the care and feeding of public sector employees who are guaranteed a pension and are racking up unfunded pension liabilities in CA.
A 400k home in Visalia with 3 acres gets much less property tax than a 1500 sq ft 1.5 million dollar condo in Bay Area. So it is ok to stress the Bay Area resources. None of the services are cheaper. We are not gaining economies of scale due to the high density. What gives?
As we automate and find alternative renewable energy(the only solution is nuclear), two things will happen..UBI and sustainability.
From my POV, clusters of high density townships(Dunbar number is a good community head count) surrounded by enough land for sustainable closed loop systems networked and interconnected to other small townships to form a large townships and large townships clustered to network etc. This fractal design would ensure that cities are decentralized and yet the veins exist.
A good example is Paris. The city’s design of Paris with its snail shape is close ..but there are other issues, but from city design perspective, it is a good functioning example.
The problem with achieving sustainability goal is government.
Edited to add: also..schools are another example. After California instituted the general plan to build more, all tax monies went into a single pot and redistributed
https://www.cde.ca.gov/ds/fd/ec/documents/currentexpense1718...
Higher density areas get less money per student and lower density get more. But you can buy more in Oroville than in Berkeley. Or the value of a dollar is less in Berkeley than in Oroville. So people in high density areas.. usually highly educated with smaller family sizes and paying more taxes get less out of the public education system.
This is to say that California should have get equal opportunity for education regardless of economic status. Because in a strange world of progressive politics in California, a school in Bay Area doesn’t have a proper swimming pool or PT equip and AP classes are cancelled because of anorexic school budget. But a blue collar town in Southern California has new buildings and smaller class sizes. It’s just bizarro world.
You're approaching the idea from a perspective that has been tainted by a false consensus bias. If the desire for single family homes was really as pervasive as you believe, then heavily restrictive zoning that is intended to preserve SFH zones wouldn't be necessary in the slightest...you could dismantle the zoning system completely and nothing would change. It would never make financial sense to tear down single family homes and build apartments and condos if nobody wanted to live in them and everybody wanted to live in single family homes.
In reality, increases in allowable density are almost always accompanied by increased actual density.
Even if one doesn’t desire the actual quality of life of less dense areas, they rarely want to sacrifice the chances of their children’s future. See what is happening with NYC public education currently. Hence, the zoning requirements against high density housing is to keep certain socioeconomic classes of people out, especially as it would allow their children into the school system.
That housing stock will eventually rot away as people age and their local governments can't afford to maintain the infrastructure anymore. Entropy will win eventually as future generations can no longer afford to live so far away from job centers.
Plus, it's not as if you can't have urbanism and still have garages and yards. They just end up being smaller. Plenty of places have yards and garages in urban Pittsburgh or Philly. The template for density doesn't always have to be Manhattan or Hong Kong.
The hollowing out of the middle class will get there first. Already the outer ring suburbs and excessive McMansions are becoming concentrations of poverty. As the jobs go, so will go the young people and these suburbs without any real economic anchors will become ghost towns of lonely, elderly folks with nobody to take care of them.
They will be without the means to move elsewhere because they're stuck owning a house nobody wants to buy or rent. Their best bet is to hope someone builds a bus or metro line to the nearest job center so a real estate developer might come by and buy up a block.