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vnxli

How is density a virtue?

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It breeds efficiency and self sufficiency. Less wasted resources on virtually every metric.

Suburbia on the other hand makes us all worse off.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVUeqxXwCA0&list=PLJp5q-R0lZ...

Except living in suburbia is a delight. I appreciate not everyone shares that perspective, but in my view everything from not sharing walls, to quiet streets for kids to ride bikes, to garages large enough for a boat or trailer, to large public parks. I think that's why you're seeing so many presently move in that direction. Densification is great, but for all the people. I lived in the city for ten years. I'll never do it again.

It is a delight, for those who can afford it. For others, and future generations subject to the effects of pollution, it will not be such a delight.

Having money has always and will always lead to a more comfortable life. Pollution is all a matter of degree, and cities produce plenty of it, even if per capita numbers are marginally less.

Energy = force * distance = mass * acceleration * distance .

I don’t think dense living energy usage is only marginally less due to the extra distance all the mass has to travel. And with current technology, the energy used is basically a proxy for pollution.

The more mass you move (water, sewage, gas, waste, supplies, people) longer distances, the more you pollute. I.e. the more space you use, the more you pollute. Just like using most other material resources.

I only mean “marginally” insofar as living in a cabin with no electricity and growing your own food would use even less. We are all living very high energy lifestyles. The difference, as always, is on the margin. Modern conveniences and comforts come at a price, both ecologically and economically. It’s just a question of whether that price is worth it.

> per capita numbers are marginally less

It's not marginal at all, but a huge difference. Rich inner suburbs ("Democrat suburbs" you might say) are the worst polluters per capita, and urban and some truly rural areas the best, but the truly rural case absolutely doesn't scale.

I'm sorry, but your boats-the-shed fantasyland is slowly killing us all.

Personally I wouldn’t be against suburbia if people could work and shop nearby (as in 5 min drive / 20 min walk at most), and if there would be sufficient cheap public transit to the center for kids to attend cultural events like the cinema or sports. However that is usually not the case when suburbia is zoned and we end up with nightmare land use and traffic congestion as suburbia commutes to work + leisure.

Honestly, I think the pandemic is driving some of this. And if you have a family, it's a lot easier to find space to comfortably work from home in a 3000 square foot suburban home than it is a 1500 square foot flat in the city. And with less people driving downtown, taking your car into the city for the symphony or a game is less of a chore. At least in Portland, Oregon, traffic jams have eased considerably in the last year. We'll see whether that persists, but I know my company is adopting a policy that will accommodate a lot more working from home long term.

> quiet streets for kids to ride bikes

Getting rid of cars would solve that problem regardless of density.

> large public parks

Denser everything else frees up more space for parks. (I sometimes think of a "fractal density" which is high on average but has tons of variation to keep things beautiful.)

I am not convinced there will ever be a universe where we are "getting rid of cars." At best, I think, we decrease emissions associated with them.

> At best, I think, we decrease emissions associated with them.

You are saying at best make them less bad, but used just as often? Forget other universe, what about the other countries that successfully do what I speak of?

I wonder if people said something similar about horses back in the 1850s New York: “At best we breed horses with that don’t leave as much manure on the streets”, DVDs in the early 2000s “at best we make better recycling facilities and our landfills won’t be full of plastic” or oil lamps in the 1840s “at best we will be able to find a plentiful hunting grounds where we’ll never run out of whale oil”.

How many planets would we need to support this idyllic lifestyle you describe for 7 billion humans?

If your lifestyle is inherently non sustainable or non scalable, then you only get to live it because you're at the top of a pyramid scheme.

I’m not sure I even disagree with that. Is your proposal that because everyone can’t have it nobody should?

No. There will always be inequality.

But we're already running over budget on the resources we do have, https://www.overshootday.org/newsroom/past-earth-overshoot-d....

Unless we want to accept some kind of extreme depopulation events (either by choice or by systemic failure) then we have to learn to live a lot more efficiently than we do now. And the long term costs of running suburbs are not fully internalized to the people choosing to live like that.

Try making faster CPUs without doing die shrinks.

Expecting perpetual economic growth without densification is equally absurd.

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