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Comment by throwaway3699 | Hacker News Reader

Cities are the root cause, imo. As a society we need to spread out towards the countryside more.

Cities are more efficient and sustainable. Most importantly, cities bring people together to enable cooperation, therefore acting as a multiplier on what is produced and generally making humanity better off.

What’s needed are better run cities.

I'm not so sure that's even possible. The city reduces every single person's available personal space, naturally tensions will increase as a result.

How about towns, dense in the middle, with greenways out to nearby nature?

My thinking is there is more space for nature if people are a bit concentrated in one area. Hong Kong is an extreme example, over two thirds of the land is nature [0], the rest seems to be mostly high-rise skyscrapers! I think they did a good job with the small space they had to work within.

I was hoping that you weren't thinking like a giant suburb or exurb where we are in cars all the time? That can be such a drag.

[0] https://www.pland.gov.hk/pland_en/info_serv/statistic/landu....

The connection to nature one finds residing in the countryside is pretty much impossible to replicate while living in a city. Wildlife diversity, fresh air, ability to grow and harvest a garden - all of these are much more accessible outside a city and I believe lead to much more wholesome human experience. The concrete and glass of a modern metropolis do not make me feel like humanity is “better off”. Just my two cents though

I don’t disagree with you. I am an avid backpacker and really enjoy nature. Many studies show people have better mental attitudes when they can view trees daily, etc.

I’ll just note that there are a lot of different points on the spectrum between country side and concrete/glass metropolis. Many of these points are great places I would still count as cities, and they still allow for gardens. I am NOT arguing for us all to live in high rises in midtown Manhattan. I do think that we should build nice, dense areas that still have green space, while allowing humans to live close together to gain the increasing returns that make society great. Hopefully we cut down on cars and get the fresh air as well.

>enable cooperation

If this were the natural state of large cities, it wouldn't require government regulation (better run cities) to accomplish.

If not done very carefully, that's just sprawl and bad in its own way. What we need IMO is not to move to the country so much, but back to smaller towns and cities. Some centralization of infrastructure - schools, hospitals, police and fire departments, roads and sewers etc. to connect them - still makes sense economically and ecologically. Somewhere between 50-100K or so new scaling problems always seem to appear - traffic, crime, the waste and corruption that comes with a larger bureaucracy, and so on. Big cities have historically had some advantages to outweigh those costs, but in the world of the last year or so I think more people are starting to reconsider whether that's still true.

After the city of Detroit had lost most of its population, there was a real problem with the cost of providing infrastructure and services to a single home in each multi-block area. There were proposals to concentrate those things into multiple "villages" with the space in between (other than roads) reverting to nature. Unfortunately they never got to try it because too many of those isolated-home owners refused to move. I'm not saying who was right or wrong, but it prevented the experiment from happening and I think we might all regret that some day.

Ah, I'm not from the US, so it might just me the phrasing. "Countryside" where I live is the small towns and vily.

My opinion has only been made stronger since having been to San Francisco.

Well, if that's what you meant, then I guess we're in full agreement. :)

Dense cities make the problems more visible and makes decentralised solutions less effective, but the problems aren’t inherent. There are plenty of well functioning cities with high population density. And there are plenty of low density urban environments that suck hard.

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