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Comment by carapace | Hacker News Reader

Oh God, that was brutal. I wonder if Canada is still open?

The "problem that has no name" is, IMO, very real: I spent some time living in Lynnwood WA, just north of Seattle, for a job and it was "unrivaled in its monotony and depressing blandness" despite being quite nice in many ways. It was just so empty.

Christopher Alexander has done a fantastic job of putting forth a solution (Pattern Language; Nature of Order) and his main site is actually called "Living Neighborhoods". https://www.livingneighborhoods.org/ht-0/bln-exp.htm

What to do about the rest of it I have no idea.

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This was the best part in the article I think.

> Much of the rest of the world takes for granted architectural principles of how to build life-affirming human settlements. These principles evolved over thousands of years, and it’s no accident that so many cultures reached the same conclusions. Urban Europeans, and indeed Armenians, are accustomed to vertical growth, mixed-use development (shops on first floor, apartments above), sidewalks, plazas, public squares and street cafes. These are the fixtures amidst which your halcyon childhood days played out, where you walked hand in hand with your first love, where you met friends for coffee, and hopped the train to work. It’s the corner with the pastry shop, it’s the supermarket down the street, and the bench in between.

> Few people can prepare themselves for the degree to which Americans have, in the last half-century or so, taken this entire corpus of human experience and thrown it completely into the trash, with the exception of a few older cities–not the places where the majority of Americans live. What has replaced it is a surreal moonscape. For those accustomed to the traditional urban civilisation, the primary question in America is: where do I go? What do I do? Looking around leads to an intangible but intense realisation of emptiness. Suburbia is both a cause and an effect of the destruction of civic and community life in America: there’s increasingly little to come home to, and vanishingly little to go out to.

That reads as though it were written by an alien. L'enfer c'est les autres. The idea of being required to live in an apartment above and next to a bunch of other people I didn't choose, and where I am immediately confronted by teeming masses of humanity whenever I leave my residence, is a dystopian nightmare, like Winston Smith in 1984 or something. This is the exact opposite of "life-affirming".

(I am perhaps exaggerating a bit, but the writer acting as if this is some sort of universal desire is ridiculous.)

I grew up in a place like that where we had neighbourhood shops/cafes/eating places, all almost next door or at a walking distance. They provide the ingredients that make your memories rich and colorful. I have fond memories of the kind of food that I could only get at the corner shop, the barbershop that used to play corny movies while I got a haircut, the very odd place where we could buy coal for cooking AND rent comics. They are fodder for mutual jokes when I catchup with childhood friends.

One only realizes what the writer is talking about when it is part of their experience growing up. You can't universally desire it but only reflect back at what you had and decide how it was for you.

Have you ever lived anywhere at all outside America? There are plenty of spots in the rest of the world that are both tranquil and yet near amenities within walking distance.

It might seem a bit exaggerated, but I'd expect that's because he's comparing it to growing up in a generic suburb where going on simple errands likely requires a car, and anything other than rows of similar looking houses can be miles away. So, the pastry shop on the corner/ supermarket down the street that the author mentioned are likely inaccessible to those in their childhood days.

That might not immediately seem so bad, but imagine that you didn't own a car (due to being too young or too poor). Then, suburban life may start to feel positively suffocating.

Or too old to drive anymore

I think the key qualifier here is "For those accustomed to the traditional urban civilisation." Sure, if you're used to living in a European-style urban environment, American suburbia seems like an alien planet. Just like if you're used to suburbia, living in a city is shockingly different. I appreciate that the author is just laying it out here and and describing it as different, trying not to impart some kind of good/bad judgment.

I see what you're saying, but the oddness may feel apparent even to those growing up in suburbia. I can distinctly remember watching miles and miles of suburban settlements sprawl out from where I grew up and telling a friend that I felt like I was in the book 'The Giver,' which included a barren and (literally and figuratively) color-less landscape filled with occasional identical towns. This was exacerbated by the fact that quickly-developed cities had roads in perfect grid systems and public buildings/schools that adopted the same architectural styles. During travel sports season one could get on a bus, take a nap, and wake up in a town completely indistinguishable from the last...

Furthermore, there is a distinct lack of independence for teens who can't drive - the nearest non-residential building can be more than a mile away. Even if you can drive, the popular destinations for errands are big-brands like starbucks, walmart, and CVS. Public transport is practically nonexistant.

This is obviously anecdotal and I think you make a good point, but it should still be considered that being familiar with American suburbia does not mean that it's impersonal and almost surreal nature is invisible to those who grew up there.

That's where I grew up! I know exactly what you mean. I heard that it was a test market for new product introductions by national fast food chains. I'm not opposed to fast food businesses, and I think they have a right to market their products, but it was oppressing to live in a place where they defined the entire culture. It seemed like most people living there didn't care, or even preferred it that way.

I suppose they did prefer it that way. They voted with their dollars and they ended up with main drags that run for miles, filled with parking lots, strip malls, mega-stores, and fast food restaurants.

When I've gone back in the last couple of years, it's not quite as bad as it was in my memory. It still has the same nationally marketed conformity, but it is not as uncontested as it used to be. There are a lot of mom and pop ethnic restaurants, for one thing. It's not as uniformly crass as I remember.

I took a long, rambling walk while I was on a visit last year, and I was pleasantly surprised. Off the main roads, in the residential areas, it can actually be an interesting place. Maybe this is true of almost anywhere. Of course, it is all built for people to get in their cars and drive to the business districts.

Growing up wasn't all ${nationalBurgerChain} and car culture, though. My friends and I rode our bikes for miles, and anywhere we found woods or swamp we built forts and played make-believe games with D&D themes.

Yeah, the weird thing about Lynnwood was that pretty much each piece of it, each house, most of the buildings, and even the national fast food chains, are nice! And there's tons of nature. There was a glorious bike/ped path near my house. But somehow the "macro-structure", if you will, is "atomized". By being spread out and organized as in-fill from the road grid you wind up with car culture and weirdly lifeless neighborhoods.

Otho: "We're dealing with negative entertainment potential. There's absolutely no organic flow through."

Delia: "I noticed that, too. It's like a giant ant farm."

I don't know that Canada is that different. Vancouver, for example, struck me as very similar to SF, and the Anglo culture was similar between the two countries. Montreal is rather more European, but I spent less time there, so I can't say for sure what the culture is like.

Considering the vast majority of Canadians live within 100 miles of the American border and there's a ton of cross-border traffic, I don't find it that surprising that the cultures are similar.

As an Washington DC area kid who visited Ottawa as a teenager (Canadian relatives), aside from having to go through customs and everything being in French as well as English, I felt right at home.

It was mostly a joke.

I spent some time in Canada, and yeah, it's "America, but civilized." ;-) The main cultural difference is that they never threw off English rule, they're still technically subjects of Her Majesty the Queen of England (or something like that.) Quebec has this dual culture going on where the French were overthrown by the English and are still a little huffy over it from time to time.

I don't have any idea how CA stacks up to the USA on all the points the article raised though.

> The main cultural difference is that they never threw off English rule, they're still technically subjects of Her Majesty the Queen of England (or something like that.) Quebec has this dual culture going on where the French were overthrown by the English and are still a little huffy over it from time to time.

It boggles the mind why people think this of Canada. The queen takes up a combined 0% of our collective thoughts and concerns. English rule is non existant, we're a sovereign nation.

With the possible exemption of some archaic laws 99% of people wouldn't be able to cite, England has 0 influence over Canada.

Likewise your assessment of Quebec is quite dated by a few hundred years. It's the equivalent of Europeans wondering if the US south is still dealing in slaves. With that said, tensions in Québec are not imagined, but they often miss attributed. As an English Québec I feel I can confidently state that issues are almost 100% due to how the government of Quebec desperately seeks ways to preserve their French culture while being in the middle of North America. Most of their laws and issues, no matter how misguided come from this very understandable motivation to keep their culture.

The south today is still far far far worse to be in if you're African American. I expect that you're slightly downplaying the role that the queen has in Canada's affairs. For one thing, Canada will come to the aid of the UK far more quickly than the US would in crisis times. That's the whole point of the "Commonwealth of nation's"

I'm still mostly joking. No offense intended.

In re: Quebec specifically, I was obliquely referencing the 1980 Quebec independence referendum (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1980_Quebec_referendum) and the laws about having French names on stores, that kind of thing. But yeah, FWIW, I agree with your assessment.

It's Her Majesty Queen of Canada. Yes, she is Queen of England, but also Queen of Canada, a separate role (though yes, I don't see her moving from Buckingham Palace to say Ottawa anytime soon).

The role of Quebec can be understood as Aboriginal, British and French are considered the founding people and English and French should have equal status throughout the government. It's also a very populous province that, by uniting around a single Quebecois political party, has to be considered in deal-making.

That may be the role of Quebec federally, but "historic anglophones" are definitely being pushed out in Quebec proper. More and more places it's becoming illegal for the government to speak French - no more English power bills are legal, for instance, and no more English pay slips. "Hi" was outlawed three years ago in shops open to the public; now legally, it must be Bonjour. So, to say that they have equal status in Quebec or that there are not tensions isn't entirely accurate.

I'm not sure why you think Canada is going to be any different.

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