Nature has enormous emotional and cognitive benefits on people
npr.org
npr.org
There is no one solution, of course, since at the very least climates and budgets can be wildly different, but a good start is making sure every street has a green canopy above, starting with the largest. After that, take every space you can and put something living on it.
I actually have a different experience in Arizona. The masterplan communities here are great at prioritizing community space. My neighborhood is connected by an interior park-like trail that twists and winds for 22miles. Most houses are within 2 blocks of an entrance to the trail system, and there are two separate k-12 schools attached to the trails so kiddos can ride their scooters/bikes to school in the morning.
There’s also some of the best hiking in the world around here. The camelback ridge line is awesome, a bunch of abandoned mines with surrounding settlements to go explore, etc. and it’s only 45minutes to the rim where, thanks to the jump in elevation, you start seeing more green.
Part of the reason I am jealous of these other countries is there isn't as much of a divide between who gets the nice / and who is relegated to the commuting "concrete wasteland" as I phrased it. There's a strong sense of community / wanting everyone to have access. I'd love for our cities to start investing in the same way so everyone can reap the benefits (which I think are numerous, it has crazy dividends and life long impacts). Hard to push that here though.
Stockholm, as an example, does it very well: a dense but small city-centre with lots of parks and greenery with the remaining sprawl outside the centre being scattered urban areas in the middle of the green with great public transportation connections.
What's impressive though is that Stockholm manages to keep (most of) that water clean, and you can go swimming in the city center, without ever visiting a swimming pool!
On the contrary it takes quite a bit of effort to keep the nature at bay. Neglect a corner of your house and next thing you notices small ecosystem developing full with small grass, mold, insects and what not. When Indian cities were locked down for a few months all sorts of birds and animals started appearing in the neighborhood.
Is this a downside or a positive?
The idea is that citizens themselves are then responsible for the gardening, and as you say "keeping nature at bay". The city has become prettier because of it.
Where do you walk, then?
Most people don't like mold, ants or snakes in their home. Me neither, and I love sleeping outside.
There's a number of European cities that have made huge leaps in recent years beautifying themselves while allowing more people to bike every day.
even better, make them walkable.
5min walking through a park + 5-10 minutes in high speed, transport that is the future
Of course you can remove roads to create cycle paths, but there's a point at which this starts to affect public transport and services - after all it's not just cars that use the roads.
Walkability is an harder problem to solve than biking in modern car centric cities.
Bikes can easily use repurposed space from existing roads, walking lanes solve no problem if things are not at walkable distance.
what do you mean it doesnt fit your person? i am curious because it feels like such a weird statement.
1. I despise biking in non-ideal conditions (and where I live this is roughly 60% of the time) 2. From my observations as a pedestrian, driver, biker I have concluded that other bikers are bikers own worst enemy when it comes to the commute, a problem that has not improved with improved bike infrastructure 3. Bike commuting kinda never is at home anywhere, at rush hour you are not at home at the bile lane, you are way to slow for general traffic and way way too fast for the pedestrian sections and there is no solution to this, you have to cross at some point somewhere where you are the „bad guy“ 4. I get sweaty when I bike and I don’t like having to shower away my commute before I start my work day (I’ve usually showered already before taking off..) 5. Running errands on the commute route is also problematic with a bike as at rush hour there is just too much going on and too little space in European cities. If we assume that everybody/majority commute by bike this just exacerbates 6. there’s more but I think the reasoning becomes clear
All in all I applaud people for doing it, I just couldn’t live with it and prefer to be a pedestrian that uses fast transport for the big sections. And yes, I also think that mass bike commuting is a delusion, low hanging political fruit that is being pushed to pump greenwashing agendas and does only kick the problem further down the road. The future should be pedestrian first with well decentralised cities, work from anywhere Job culture and fast (ideally self driving) shared transport.
But that’s just my 2c
You've just described a wonderful and very intelligent form of traffic calming.
I’ve seen this sort of thing work in London, so my theory is that traffic calming only works if you don’t treat vehicular manslaughter as akin to petty theft or even less as we do in the US. Good luck changing that, way too many people operate a vehicle everyday for them to want to take on that liability. Also young men are going to continue to drive with a devil may care attitude. Traffic calming measures in a motorist society like the US, in my observation, ironically cause much more aggressiveness on the road, and to me are the transportation equivalent of hostile architecture.
Berlin is outstanding for this. Wherever you are, it's easy to escape loud traffic and sit in a green, public space. Some have cafés and Biergarten in them.
I find returning to Canada difficult because there is no way to escape loud roads. There's no path along the fields, forests or rivers. If you want to walk in nature, you have to drive to it.
Very slowly things are moving in the right direction, but it is a constant fight against a loud minority and old local and federal rules favoring cars above all.
In Berlin in comparison only 30% of the city area is green spaces and woodland, totaling ~260km2.
One of the reasons why Berlin population is 1.2 times larger than Rome, even though the surface of the city is only 70% of the Italian Capitol.
I have not seen ANY good examples of comparisions between cities, but I know these problems comes up alot when we discuss cities here on HN.
As a Roman, I also thought that Paris or Berlin were greener or bigger, they are not.
> You have to show these things on a map
Here it is
Berlin and Rome, same zoom level on Google maps
I've highlighted on the left the area that is actually Rome's territory, Google maps only highlights the area inside the "Grande raccordo anulare" [1], but the city of Rome extends much farther than that, also the area on the beach (the one called Ostia) is actually part of the city even though it is disconnected from it.
That's Rome, the city, then there's the Metropolitan City of Rome Capital [2], which is much larger and includes many smaller municipalities around it, which is in turn smaller than Rome metropolitan area [3]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grande_Raccordo_Anulare
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolitan_City_of_Rome_Capi...
Parks and gardens seem an afterthoughts in American urban planning. The National and state parks are gems but not accessible near the cities.
Edited to add, there's a very good Economist article about building miniature forests in cities, I can't find it right now but here's an article that was referenced: https://daily.jstor.org/the-miyawaki-method-a-better-way-to-...
Somebody mentioned Rome downstream, one more thing I love about Rome, all the public fountain water is potable. There's something so awesome about going to the fountain and getting water that you can drink. (Native Romans, don't crush my dreams by telling me I was a dumb tourist and who knows what I drank when I took my chances with the public fountains.)
It’s nice that they exist. But it’s not so nice that they’re a perk for the rich and not accessible by an average resident.
And AFAIK, there is no planning rule that requires they be added with new (re-)development. Only maintaining what’s there.
The Eaton Square viewed on Google Maps shows a variety. The main square is shoulder-high iron fencing. But many blocks have walked or internal gardens.
I live in a mid-sized city in the States, and all of our streets are tree-lined. Our fields too, which used to just be grass for sports, are getting more and more trees planted.
And the Roman water is potable, yes, and delicious because of the limestone it filters through. Although if you drink or fill a bottle from the bottom of the sprout, instead of putting your finger underneath and letting the water spurt up from the little hole, someone will tell you that's disgusting, because that's where the dogs lick. Nevermind that the water coming out the hole is still touching that bottom portion of the pipe.
For example moving parking space and roads to the back of the shops and create a green walking area in the front of the shops.
Efficient city planning is not easy, and requires well intended coordination on many fronts.
On the other side I'm personally convinced closeness to nature is a life saver on many aspects so renewing those policies is a battle worth having.
[1] https://arquitectura-sostenible.es/el-barrio-multiecologico-... [2] http://concellodelugo.gal/es/actuaciones/proyecto-lugobiodin...
where i live there is constant discussion of "we need high density housing" and this is exactly what comes to mind. eventually this would end up with something like soviet style block housing, which doesn't seem so well received around the world. not to mention this style of housing is very constrictive in terms of lifestyle - maximum 2 child family with minimal space for hobbies/interests, limited sunlight, high noise pollution, etc.
this city in Estonia [0] for example, is somewhat pleasing to look at from a birds eye view and seems to check the boxes for having green space but i wonder about the range of residents' experiences.
[0] - https://www.traveller.ee/blog/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/852...
Apart from that I do think it's true that block housing separated by large parks (as shown in your picture) doesn't work well; it's discussed in e.g. Jacob's _The Death and Life of Great American Cities_.
[1]: https://images.adsttc.com/media/images/6238/5b71/3e4b/31a8/5...
and of course we can't forget that many places are at an inflection point in population growth so all of this capacity could be vacant in 15-20 years.
Strong towns [0] advocates a more bottom up approach to development, and is a good resource for anyone interested in how to add density in a sane manner.
The CCP seems to have been very successful with their "build an entire city and move people into it model" (seeing the cities have filled), but I'm unsure how it works in a more capitalistic model.
The issue in the US is that zoning is excessively restrictive.
Terraced housing has kind of okay density, at least it's not a total land crime like US suburban detached housing but affords many of the freedoms associated with it.
This is how commieblock districts of my city look like: https://spoldzielnialsm.pl/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/Obecni... https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-ud9-Z0UHVHg/W7-qUjfNT9I/AAAAAAAAi...
Modern car-centric districts are much worse, and single houses districts are car-centric concrete hell in comparison.
Personally, I would not mind sharing a TV (barely use one) or washing machine or garden with more people, but the way western society works in terms of building defaults is biased towards individualism not community building.
Now it looks pretty shit (just imo), and it's hellish in summer - no shade, hot as hell, the buildings with their new windows and white finishes are blinding. I used to love walking there, now I avoid them.
And in the cities, people can do things like hanging baskets out of windowsills, or potted plants out the door. And of course things inside the house.
I will acknowledge though that this is from a position of privilege, we have a lively plant and flower industry in my country and hundreds of garden centers around the country.
It’s much easier to plant a mix of greens - clover, grasses, etc (effectively pasture seed blend). Requires less water, less mowing, and much less fertilizer.
At some point I realized they have zero trees in the streets. Also means no bird sounds in the background, no green leaves adding some colors to the concrete, no blossoming in the spring.
Being in a city where every street is filled with trees I realized how big of an impact it is.
It is however not "easy", the old big trees you want, destroy your streets, branches fall in storms, sometimes even whole trees fall over.
While I know London isn't everyone's cup of tea, it has a ton of parks, trees and nature compared to many other cities, and it's usually quick to dip away from the bustle into a relatively quiet oasis. You're rarely more than a 5 minute walk away from a small park.
I imagine a lot of it is “topographically forced” by the harbour / rivers intruding everywhere.
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EDIT: A lot of urban folks are rebutting my “substantial nature” complaint with references to their city’s parks, which is amusingly illustrative of our differing perspectives. I was thinking “mountains and forests”, not just green spaces scattered amid the concrete.
EDIT 2: A lot of urban folks are talking like the suburbs are swallowing up the countryside. I’m sure they’ve grown, but it’s still a big world out there people. I can’t recommend a cross-country road trip enough. Y’all need to leave your cities once in a while and see the world that you have such strong opinions about! :)
Personally, living in a city close to nature(seattle area) has been the best thing for me so far in my life; I have spent a stupid amount of money making it happen but wouldn’t trade it for anything. On the flip side it’s not for everybody, so don’t just take my word for it.
On the other hand I will be riding my bike to a ferry, and then riding to a camp site on a beach on an island after work on Friday- weather permitting.
Wow that's depressing, I live in a very high density area by western standards and there's 50,000 acres of pristine rainforest literally on my doorstep while the mall is 5 minutes drive away and the city centre is 15 mins. During covid even the rare and endangered gibbons would come out hang out in the street.
Everytime I go back to Australia it seems like a suburban dystopia with 8 lane roads 60kms from the actual city. People commuting 2+ hours a day is the norm there.
Woah. Where do you live? This sounds "impossible". Singapore or Kuala Lumpur?
What a hilarious example of what the original commenter was saying. Apparently you think having nature an hour away is acceptable, or at least counts as being close to nature. As a very anti-urban person, I consider that nightmarish. I'm glad other people like that kind of world, and hope they all keep moving to the cities to leave the rest of the world open and spacious for the rest of us.
Well. It may be that this kind of place only really works as a suburb. It does have a small center (shops, cafes, doctors, church etc) that people can walk to, which in turn has public transport to the actual city.
I love that city for that. Milan felt claustrophobic without all the parks.
If people that live in cities are to be relegated to never leave, I for one am not interested.
It’s usually cheaper than each person owning their own car, but more expensive than a household sharing a car. Of course, this varies widely from city to city and it depends on how often people rent cars or use rideshare or taxis.
The nice thing is you get fast, comfortable transit all the time, but the really nice thing is how much stuff you take advantage of that you might not otherwise. For example, I’m already paying for a car, so going on big road trips is only a marginal extra cost (rather than $100/day + hassle for a car rental). Similarly, I probably wouldn’t have gotten into camping if I had to rent a car for each trip. I probably also wouldn’t visit family as often.
I definitely see the appeal of not needing to own a car, but I tried it and it wasn’t for me. For my city, I’d love to see them start by cleaning up and policing existing public transit (for example) and then scale up from there.
If you want to see nature, you have to live way out in the boonies, on at a minimum, two-acre lots. If everyone lived like that, we'd all have two-hour commutes on twenty-lane highways.
> If you want to see nature, you have to live way out in the boonies, on at a minimum, two-acre lots. If everyone lived like that, we'd all have two-hour commutes on twenty-lane highways.
What a strange comment! Millions of people live with reasonable access to nature and most of them don’t have 2 acre lots nor do they need “twenty-lane highways”. Y’all urban folks need to venture out of your cities once in a while—it’s a biiiiggg world out there.
If the second, I really don't see how taking cars out of urban centers and making nice walkable people-focused areas stops you from taking a bus out and biking the rest of the way, or even renting a car once you're out of the city part
Both? I’m not really sure how these are different given that proximity is the limiting factor in access.
> If the second, I really don't see how taking cars out of urban centers and making nice walkable people-focused areas stops you from taking a bus out and biking the rest of the way, or even renting a car once you're out of the city part
I’m not sure what you’re arguing here. I certainly don’t have a problem with making urban areas more walkable. That said, an hour of driving after work isn’t going to get you past the suburbs in most US cities, which means you’re limited to weekend trips and if you’re spending every weekend trying to get out of the city it’s worth asking if city life is optimal for you.
Think about what happens if everyone does this. There are about 613,000 households in my city; what does it look like if all of them were to move out of the city and go somewhere closer to nature? Well, they'd probably each take up a lot more space, and... well, that sounds a lot like suburban sprawl! And suddenly you're not quite so proximate to nature anymore.
No, I'd rather let cities build up, and build/maintain better access to nature outside the city via transit. Leave nature be, and make it easy to get to when you want to.
Anyway, I’m not saying everyone needs to pack up and move out of cities—only that the gospel of urban density sounds dystopian to me.
Anyway, I’m not saying everyone should live in concrete jungles either. Think more like the Netherlands than New York City.
My position is "we don't need to move everyone into cities or expand public transit infrastructure to every corner of the country". It is not "we should move everyone out of the cities and distribute them uniformly across the country".
> Anyway, I’m not saying everyone should live in concrete jungles either. Think more like the Netherlands than New York City.
The Netherlands has 10x the population density of the US, and the US probably would come to resemble NL if we didn't have the luxury of space. The US has a whole range of density, however--if you want something like NL, we certainly have it on offer, and I'm fully on board with making urban and suburban areas more people-friendly. I just disagree with people who think we all need to live urban lives.
In any case, I don’t think everyone needs to live an urban life, I just think suburbia should get quite a lot more urban, and both cities and suburbs should be easier to get around without a car. That’s where the vast majority of people live anyway.
Massive projects to resettle people in urban areas or dramatically extend public transit networks will take many decades to break even from a carbon emissions standpoint. It's much faster (and far more politically tenable) to electrify as much transportation (e.g., EVs) and heating/cooling as possible while moving our grid to clean energy.
> In any case, I don’t think everyone needs to live an urban life, I just think suburbia should get quite a lot more urban, and both cities and suburbs should be easier to get around without a car.
I mostly agree with this, although I think we can decouple density and walkability. My grievance was with folks who want to impose an urban lifestyle on everyone.
Those places don't really exist, since most major US cities have been built to accommodate cars first. And even those are way less affordable (because people want to live in cities and theres not enough housing to cover it) forcing people who would rather live in cities to move to suburbs instead. That's what people are lamenting.
For what it's worth, I'm bought into walkability/bikeability/etc. I'm just tired of the density, social problems, and distance from nature associated with most US cities. I think it would be really cool to get some like-minded people together and build a little village with walkability/bikeability/nature in mind.
Vehicle turnover is very slow, so I don’t expect this to happen as quickly as you might be thinking: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/03/10/climate/elect...
Improving public transit doesn’t have to mean huge rail projects though, it can just mean running buses more frequently and giving them their own lanes to skip traffic. And we don’t have to massively resettle people, we can let (and encourage) towns to densify and build more bike/ped/transit infrastructure.
This also isn’t necessarily fast, no. But I don’t think it’s either/or; I think we need both.
> although I think we can decouple density and walkability.
I don’t think we can. The two are directly opposed to each other. The less dense a place is, the further apart everything is, which inherently makes it less walkable. Certainly you can (and should) build sidewalks anywhere if they don’t already exist, but past a low enough density nobody is going to walk anyway unless they’re forced to.
The best case for getting people to uproot and move to cities in significant numbers is still measured in generations, not years or even decades. The best case for extending public transit to every suburb and exurb (never mind rural community) is probably on the same order. The worst case for EVs is a couple of decades (to 80% of cars on the road; obviously there's a long tail that diminishes).
> Improving public transit doesn’t have to mean huge rail projects though, it can just mean running buses more frequently and giving them their own lanes to skip traffic.
The only people who are likely to take buses in the suburbs (with few exceptions) or exurbs or beyond are those who can't afford cars or who lack a driver's license. An extra lane to skip traffic isn't compelling because traffic is a mild problem outside of cities (perhaps with the exception in certain city-adjacent suburbs). Frankly, the same is true of rail.
> This also isn’t necessarily fast, no. But I don’t think it’s either/or; I think we need both.
I like the idea of more public transit and walkability, but I don't think there's any legitimate case to be made that these initiatives will meaningfully reduce our carbon footprint in the necessary timescales.
> I don’t think we can. The two are directly opposed to each other. The less dense a place is, the further apart everything is, which inherently makes it less walkable.
Walkable doesn't mean you can get to every place by foot, it just means you can get to the places you need to go to by foot. Today, suburbs and exurbs have huge zones for residential and commercial such that most people have to drive to get to the commercial areas, but we could easily rezone to allow for a finer-grained patchwork of residential and commercial zones. The finer-grained patchwork means that less of any zone needs to be reserved for parking/cars (it's not just breaking one big parking lot into many smaller lots with the same total area--in a finer-grained patchwork, fewer people need to drive so the total area for parking/cars is lower) which in aggregate means more space for other things. It may never be as walkable as a dense city, but there's still tremendous opportunity for improvement.
Why are you using the standard of "public transit to every suburb and exurb" for transit and "80% of cars" for vehicle electrification? There's a lot of low-hanging fruit in the first-ring suburbs that we can tackle before the exurbs; those may be a lost cause for now, but a lot of people live in those inner suburbs!
And that aside, we need to at least stop the bleeding, right? If metro area growth boundaries keep expanding outward, that means more cars on the road and more energy and materials needed to make that happen. If we don't allow existing towns to build up at all, the only way for them to build is outward.
> I like the idea of more public transit and walkability, but I don't think there's any legitimate case to be made that these initiatives will meaningfully reduce our carbon footprint in the necessary timescales.
Alone they won't, just like vehicle electrification alone won't. We need to both reduce VMT and electrify, and we need both now.
https://rmi.org/our-driving-habits-must-be-part-of-the-clima...
> but we could easily rezone to allow for a finer-grained patchwork of residential and commercial zones. The finer-grained patchwork means that less of any zone needs to be reserved for parking/cars (it's not just breaking one big parking lot into many smaller lots with the same total area--in a finer-grained patchwork, fewer people need to drive so the total area for parking/cars is lower) which in aggregate means more space for other things.
This isn't separating walkability and density, this is higher density. This is the kind of thing we need!
That's not a suburb, at least not many of them.
In past topics I've asked for concrete examples of these suburbs where you can't walk anywhere and have not received many answer. Can you name a handful?
There is a ton of nature near my suburb, to an extent that is impossible in a city. A 5 minute bike ride gets me into the forest (not a manicured city park, actual forest) which extends for a long distance. I can ride my mountain bike all day without getting into built areas.
(To be fair, London has great parks)
Density can coexist with ample green space. Remember that you don't need anything like Manhattan density to make things walkable. In my book, suburbs are only a problem to the degree that their design forces driving on residents. My vision for a perfect city has plenty of parks.
Land area/space in general is not scarce. What is scarce is land area near job centers (or more broadly, near where people want to spend their time outside the home.) The more you spread people out, the more car dependent the city, necessitating more roads and parking lots.
1) Cities, whether they're sprawling or dense, or park-laden or not, can be suffocating. It just so happens that yours atm is less park-laden. Thus, your advice for exclusively urban people, is to actually put the effort in to get into real nature; into the mountains, the isolated wilderness, the lakes, etc.. because there's a serenity like that you can't get with facsimiles like neighborhood parks
2) Space between high rises isn't used all that effectively. I think this is particularly a problem with downtown core areas moreso than downtown adjacent areas in a lot of cities.
I'm personally not anti-car outright, just anti-car as a primary means of day to day utility oriented travel and the design of urban spaces that prioritize that over others. If you walk or bike or skateboard most of the time, you develop a feeling for the space you're doing that in, and it has an affect on your life. If you're only walking through parking lots, on broken old slabs of sidewalk that nobody cares about, with no flowers or trees or cats or people around, you're going to want to avoid that. I'm a huge advocate for building your immediate surroundings so they facilitate healthy and sustainable living (the opposite of broken parking lots in a suburbab wasteland) but also for getting the fuck out of the whole city pretty often if you can. I rent a car to do this, and might buy a beater in the future to have more flexibility in that respect, but definitely get the hell out once in a while if you can.
My city is “park laden”. I live next to a 1200 acre park. City parks aren’t nature; however, and having seen the real deal there’s only so much one can do to convince one’s subconscious otherwise.
But yes, I find daily life in an urban environment (however park laden!) to be depleting. Cities are still tons of fun to visit and explore, I’m glad they exist, etc. This might be different if I could reasonably make it to some nature between work and sunset, but in most cities you won’t make it past the burbs.
Hopefully that’s clarifying.
What exactly is it you are advocating for/against? If you want to live in “real” nature, like in a cabin in a forest, or on a ranch in the country, then go do that. Nobody is stopping you.
Edit: Just to put a concrete point on it, it now takes approximately an hour to get out of the suburbs from urban / downtown Dallas. Nature is further away than ever.
Edit 2: Of course you will find people on Twitter or whatever who want to “ban all cars”, but this is not a serious movement or position held by the vast majority of YIMBY/urbanism people. I think most of us would like exactly what you’re talking about: the freedom to let people do what they want on the land they own, and make their own choices as to what living arrangements best for them and their customers. Currently, this option is only denied to people wanting to build up, while suburban sprawl is allowed virtually everywhere. Where I live, Austin, TX, there are parts of our downtown central business district that are zoned for SFH only! It is absurd, we wouldn’t inflict this level of economic destruction on our worst enemies.
eg Silicon Valley would be one of the world's most productive fruit farming regions if we hadn't covered it in single family houses in 1950.
Note there is a kind of "towers in the park" urbanism seen in China that actually is a bad balance between the two and kind of unpleasant to live in.
Suburbia isn't nature either, at least not standard suburbia. It's carbon intense lawn, concrete and asphalt. A front lawn and a big tree isn't nature. The pro-car angle seeks to expand suburbia, and destroy more and more nature. You may see more greenery but it's just grass and the odd pasture.
I don't think anyone in the anti-car movement is saying, don't drive to a national park or mountain. The anti-car movement is about removing cars from the city and reducing the impact of suburbia on the greater area, which includes national parks.
Not Just Bikes has a video about that: https://youtu.be/CCOdQsZa15o
My hope would be that a city planned more around human level interaction with less focus on cars would reduce urban size overall, and reduce suburban sprawl. Better integrating nature all the way from the outer burbs and in toward the city.
Having visited many of Japans incredibly dense cities, and ending up yearning for the sight of a tree, I can totally see the negatives of extreme density, and that's definitely not what I'd want from a low-car city. I also live in a fairly exceptional city in regards to nature, I have national parks outside my doorstep and can ride from suburbia into the city and from the city to the beach along reserves and greenways, not just parks but regenerated forest, so I can see the very thing I'm advocating for and I fucking love it. The bad parts of my city are always related to how car infrastructure has ruined that in some way. That's why I'm passionate about it.
I'm glad we're clearing up the confusion. I certainly don't think that suburban zoning laws are the pinnacle of city planning or anything like that, and I'm optimistic that we can have walkable spaces without density. And even where there's density, I think there's a lot that can be improved.
I also think the anti-car message would go over better if there was less spite. For example, in Chicago anti-car activists want to remove Lake Shore Drive: the only major N/S thoroughfare--I90 runs NW/SE--it doesn't segregate the city, it isn't useful to commuters to/from the suburbs, and its removal will only push traffic onto the side streets making the city less pedestrian-friendly. But it spites drivers, so it's worthwhile. Instead, I wish these people would focus more on making our existing public transit more appealing: advocate for cleaner buses and train cars, advocate for the enforcement of laws and rules regarding (for example) stabbing, smoking, urinating, blasting music, panhandling, etc., advocate for punctuality. Once we have a good handle on our existing public transit infrastructure, we can then start thinking about smaller improvements--increasing capacity (especially during rush hour) so people don't have to be packed into cars like sardines, and then expand the network. Once you've made public transit attractive and practical for more people, then you can start working on deprecating car transit.
Beggars belief your response to an article on the psychological and health benefits of nature is… more cars?
Building roads, urban sprawl, the noise and pollution from the cars themselves, the destructive invasion of all the infrastructure associated with car-use - all of it is directly destructive of the nature we’re talking about.
Of course, I didn’t say that, I only said the pro-density utopia sounds super bleak to me.
Anyway, there’s still plenty of space out there and all of the urban people in this thread are talking like they’ve never seen other parts of the country before—there’s still a whole bunch of space between New York and San Fran—it’s not the endless suburbs you seem to be imagining.
But now it's back to SF as the office is reopening. I won't miss driving 3+ hours to see friends, but I will miss the scenery.
One important aspect of nature is the ability to escape people. Most city parks cannot do that.
Most major cities have at least one park that is a few hundred acres.
My criticism of cities is that a lot of them are hours away from anything that anyone would call nature (although this thread has made me aware that there are a shockingly large number of people who have never actually seen nature and for whom the word conjures up images of their local urban park).
This is only because the suburbs are often sprawled in between the city and any nature that might have been nearby. It’d be a heck of a lot easier to get to from the city if you didn’t have miles and miles of low-density suburbs in each direction.
Anyway, “local urban parks” is a pretty broad category. It’s not just tiny parks we’re talking about; here’s one near me: https://fow.org/visit-the-park/photo-gallery/
Agreed, but I don’t think there’s a realistic world where you have dense urban cores immediately juxtaposed with forest, especially considering how m any people are advocating for accelerated urbanization (moving people from suburbs and rural areas).
Sure, that park looks pretty legit. I think that’s with pretty exceptional or those photos aren’t telling the full story—my city has similar parks but behind the photographer would be rows of houses and the city would still be loud around us.
At this point, maybe, because we’ve leveled any forests immediately around cities for suburban sprawl. But in the general case, if you’re starting fresh, urbanization makes it easier to leave the forest intact than if you sprawl out with low-density housing.
> Sure, that park looks pretty legit. I think that’s with pretty exceptional or those photos aren’t telling the full story—my city has similar parks but behind the photographer would be rows of houses and the city would still be loud around us.
I’ve hiked there a bunch and the photos are representative. If you’re near the edge of the park you’ll be able to hear cars as there are unfortunately large roadways nearby, but for the most part the trees tend to block out the noise.
In the general case, we've leveled forests for food production--originally Native American tribes cleared forest to help them harvest bison en masse and then the descendants of Europeans cleared forest for agriculture. Cities and suburbs eventually came to displace land that was previously used for agriculture.
But in the general case, if you’re starting fresh, urbanization makes it easier to leave the forest intact than if you sprawl out with low-density housing.
> But in the general case, if you’re starting fresh, urbanization makes it easier to leave the forest intact than if you sprawl out with low-density housing.
I mean, this is true in a contrived sense--if you plan your city from its initial settlement and create strict nature preserves then yeah, you can probably have your urban/natural juxtaposition, but that's pretty hard to achieve in a democratic context (good luck keeping this a popular priority over the decades and centuries). Your best bet is starting next to a federally-protected forest so residents of your city can't easily decide they want to expand into it. In whatever case, "starting fresh" is the least realistic option.
Not "in" them obviously, but suburbs can often have expanses of nature right next to them unlike dense cities.
Living in a suburb, I can walk to all the necessities of day to day life but in just a 5 minute bike ride I can be into the forest where I can ride for hours on end without seeing any sign of civilization. It is a wonderful escape from the stress of 24x7 slack and jira.
I got nervous towards the end of the walk because I was seemingly in the middle of nowhere - no one in sight - and I was losing the light.
If I take the train the other direction, I can walk up a mountain (actually a dormant volcano) and enjoy the park there. That tends to be a bit busier, but then again, humans are also animals that exist in naturally, and they tend to be less intrusive than other animals in parks.
And I didn’t even mention the rivers, islands, and beaches I can get to on foot or by transit. I haven’t tried visiting the buttes yet, but I know at minimum one is accessible by bike.
All of that nature is available and present in part because of an urban growth boundary that constrained the expansion of suburbs.
It certainly sounds appealing!
But everything I shared about access to nature would be just as true if the urban core was made more dense. Replacing sfh lots with multi use buildings doesn’t affect the access to nature in any way. If anything, it would help the situation by providing more ridership and tax revenue to support transit to nature and investment in parks.
It may if it just pushes people who prefer sfhs farther outside of the urban core, thus increasing the distance between urban core and nature. Maybe if you can pass zoning laws to prevent it, but that seems like a politically uphill battle (if there's already an existing state or national park or conservation area, it's probably not at risk of becoming a subdivision, but it will be hard to keep a patchwork of farms, acreages, and privately owned timber from being parceled off to meet the demand for single family dwellings).
Most pro-density/pro-mass-transit people aren't arguing against rural lifestyle. They're against suburban, car-dominated lifestyle.
I'll conjecture that, for many people, the potential benefit of living "close to nature" is more than negated by driving everywhere. Commuting in a subway in a mega-city easily racks up thirty minutes of brisk walking per day.
I mean, it’s fine if you want to live somewhere rural, but why should that be subsidized?
It costs a lot more to provide infrastructure to rural areas than urban ones. If we expect both of these to be fully paid for by our taxes, and if we expect the tax burden to be similar, that means those of us living in cities are subsidizing those living in rural ones. (And note I'm not talking about actual agricultural industries that require that much space, I'm talking about people living in rural areas just because they like it better. Everyone depends on farms, we can subsidize those.)
I'm fine with people living in rural areas if they want to, but I don't think we should expect city-dwellers to subsidize them if they do.
So what about the people who live there to provide education to the farmers' kids? What about the people who work at the local restaurants and grocery stores that serve farmers? What about the people who live there to provide trash service for the people who serve the farmers?
Where does it end and why does it end at that point?
Society [noun]: the aggregate of people living together in a more or less ordered community.
It's not like we can lay out roads and say, "this is for farm machinery only, nobody else gets to use it." So, via subsidizing agriculture, you are going to subsidize some people who choose to live out there.
I don't get how you could possibly disentangle that in any way that isn't completely unsustainable. I also don't understand why you would want to; something, something, common good.
I’m not saying I have all the answers, but something has to give.
In theory, urban pays for theirs and rural pays for theirs is fine. But how do goods get between urban centers? Is it magicked there, or is it brought via rail and road that goes through rural areas?
And then what is my incentive, as a rural resident, to listen to the voices of the individuals in the urban areas when it comes to matters like state laws? Why not get rid of those, because the impact of people who have zero input into my life is wildly disproportionate because there are so many of them? They don't pay for anything out here, so why should they get to tell me who is in charge?
Again, there isn't a clean way to do this, because we are all connected, and we are acutely aware of it. I would argue that's what separates us from animals.
I don’t think we should in the general case, but I also don’t think we should abruptly pull funding from one area (letting the infrastructure fall apart) just because it becomes abruptly fashionable to move out of that area in the near term (we’re talking about decades long time scales here). Seems like you should want some easing so you don’t have to rebuild from scratch if/when dynamics change.
But ultimately if you want less spending on rural infrastructure, that’s probably fine with me, but then don’t also complain when rural life is a luxury for the wealthy.
I mean, it’s fine if you want to live somewhere
rural, but why should that be subsidized?
I don't think we should necessarily subsidize more heavily for folks who want to live rural, but many want/need to. Of course we should subsidize schools, utilities, and other human rights for them just like we do for urban areas.
I'm also not convinced rural areas are more expensive to subsidize. Clearly many things are more expensive in rural areas, but also many things are more expensive in cities. That's a complicated equation to put it mildly.
...suburban, car-dominated lifestyle.
I'll conjecture that, for many people, the potential
benefit of living "close to nature" is more than negated
by driving everywhere
It's close to nature, and my driving is very minimal. In an average month I spend maybe 3 hours in a car. Can walk in the park every day, etc.
No, it just isn't. Humans have transformed seventy per cent of the land on Earth[1]. Including the deserts. Suburbs are the second most land intensive thing we do, after farming, and for almost every other developed-world country, this problem is more acute than in the US. Get some perspective.
That is a "wind turbines cause global warming" level of bad take. More succinctly, so close to a lie I no longer have the patience to differentiate them.
No, at no point have I been discussing the whole world.
> Or are you dishonestly using non-representative figures?
No, but feel free to correct me if I made a mistake in my calculations.
> The US has a much smaller proportion of the developed world's men, women and children than it does the land
Yes, this is my point. The US has a lot of land per person.
> and those men, women and children are extremely carbon-intensive.
Yes, but that has nothing to do with this conversation.
I would want to meet this person.
I am a huge proponent of walkable cities, and I definitely see a city that is urban, high density and with a lot of nature.
Heck Copenhagen, where I live, do it quite well -- within 20 minutes from the absolute center of the city (eg. Noerreport), I can be with grassing Alpacas (https://goo.gl/maps/jcA6VFMPHC5qmYCp6) or I can be with large herds of deer (https://goo.gl/maps/8YDPDfTPCHhTbdps5) or I can be on huge grass lands (https://goo.gl/maps/3YxztVvYeUwSJge89), and no, these areas would not be considered regular parks.
Seriously: walking/cycling on Amsterdam, Lisbon or Paris when the weather is 15 °C, mostly on flat ways, is a pleasure. You arrive at the office just a little heated up, I imagine.
For me, thankfully, there was an easy solution: I moved to one of the towns just outside of the city. Now I have ample access to lots of trees, birds, flowers, etc. If I get on my bike, which I do frequently, I can be in some really beautiful regional parks within 40 minutes or so, and the ride there ain't too bad either.
EDIT: I'll add that last fall I was biking around there with my wife and we found some most righteous porcini mushrooms growing on the side of the road. It really is nice out there.
I should also add that nearer Paris is Forêt domaniale de Meudon, which is in the direction of Versailles. Nice forested area. I can't speak to the walking/hiking but I assume it is not bad (I've only been out that way on bike).
According to a 1993 UN Food and Agriculture Organization report, it takes about 1.25 acres of agriculture land to feed one person. That value doesn't care about whether a person lives in a city or a suburb. The median suburban American lives in a 2.5 person household on 0.2 acres of land, which means about 0.08 acres per person. I'm not sure what the average urbanite lives on, but let's say it's a quarter of that: 0.02 acres per person. So we're talking about 1.33 vs 1.27--suburbanites require only about 4% more land than urbanites. Hardly a major threat to nature compared to excessive and unsustainable agricultural practices.
Yes, but agricultural footprint is the dominating factor.
> And what do you think was there before the farms?
Nature, to my point. Recall that you're the one arguing that suburbs rather than agriculture is threatening nature:
> The enemy of wilderness is not urbanists, it’s suburban sprawl.
Perhaps, but you also need to consider:
- transport to work / school / hospitals / entertainment
- food distribution
- sewage
- electricity
- emergency services coverage
- etc…
I don’t have any hard stats for you but my background reading has suggested these are significant.
> Nature, to my point. Recall that you're the one arguing that suburbs rather than agriculture is threatening nature
Yes, because we could be rewilding, creating new national parks etc. but instead are building suburbs. We can also replace existing suburbs on longer time-scales.
We're not only conserving space, we're conserving distance. Consider a uniformly populated city with a circular boundary (spherical cow). For a density of X, the mean distance from anyone's residence to nature is L. If that density becomes 2X, that distance is now 0.7L. A denser city directly puts its residents closer to nature — real nature, although we can't move the mountains!
Your argument is a complaint about the size of cities, which is mostly orthogonal to density (Honolulu is much denser than Atlanta!).
My ideal vision of the future is we mostly live in luxury in dense, beautiful cities that are walkable with good, seamless transit (think like escalator-like seamlessness). People spend weekends camping in vast, re-wilded nature reserves.
Year 2100 scenario: Get rid of most suburbs and staple-crop farms eventually (vat-grown staples—think Calysta FeedKind or Solar Foods—replace the need for highly processed staples like corn or wheat or soy or factory farms). Replace with rewilded nature reserves which people get to via tunnels or electric VTOL (with special consideration to low-noise design).
Pedestrians in very dense cities walk in park-like surface paths. Solarpunk-style. :) Solarpunk cities and vast nature reserves (accessible via low-impact transport, and commonly used for camping) instead of endless row crops and suburbs. :)
Doing these things frees up space for other things. That could be housing or green space.
And if there’s less traffic overall, it becomes easier to get out to the mountains/forest/etc.
I don’t disagree that true nature is different than groomed parks. And I like nature. But I’d rather not spend 3 hours in suburban traffic to get to the mountains that are 40 miles away.
I would also add that nature is at its best when there is not many people, or better yet no people around you. Human dense places always strike me as very unnatural.
If I could have a house truly situated in nature, I might like that, but that’s not what happens. You get a house situated in a suburban sprawl, and that sprawl is the day to day environment, and it is mostly artificial but in the worst ways: all the human art and ingenuity is directed towards the best interests of the cars instead of the people.
I will push back a little on your claim that suburbs are different: postwar sprawl is a remarkably homogeneous product, the codes from jurisdiction to jurisdiction are very consistent, the home builders largely national chains, the businesses in the strip malls also largely national chains. I’m sure there are exceptions but really for such a big country with so many ostensibly different places and identities, it makes very little difference which sprawl-agglomeration you live in. “Local character” and distinctive building styles mostly belong to the historic walkable core districts. The suburbs could be anywhere.
I agree with this, but I don’t see what that has to do with our conversation.
> I will push back a little on your claim that suburbs are different: postwar sprawl is a remarkably homogeneous product, the codes from jurisdiction to jurisdiction are very consistent, the home builders largely national chains, the businesses in the strip malls also largely national chains. I’m sure there are exceptions but really for such a big country with so many ostensibly different places and identities, it makes very little difference which sprawl-agglomeration you live in. “Local character” and distinctive building styles mostly belong to the historic walkable core districts. The suburbs could be anywhere.
My claim wasn’t that suburbs are diverse, but rather that there are exceptions which suffice to prove that suburbs can be done differently. If we can rethink our cities then why can’t we also reimagine our suburbs (or at least more creatively than “make them dense and urban”)?
Automobile era towns have the same forms as the suburban sprawls attached to cities: stroads, strip malls, parking lots, subdivisions containing homogeneous uses and interfacing at few points with fast arterial roads. They're just disembodied suburbs. The disembodiment if anything makes them worse.
I visit lot of auto-oriented towns on cross-country roadtrips. They're vile places. I wouldn't want to be there any longer than necessary to get gas, food, use the restroom, etc. Sometimes when I take a wrong turn I catch a glimpse of the pre-car main street rotting away, behind the gleaming cloverleaf-adjacent McDonalds. It's sad.
I visit urban towns on vacation, on the way to and from hiking, etc. Sometimes I look up the real estate listings. They're even more expensive than the big city, but without any kind of local industry to pay those prices. They're for second homes or retirement, I guess. Also sad.
- Small sample sizes (O(100))
- Low correlation coefficients
- Everybody is predisposed to believe the conclusion (what kind of monster doesn't like nature?)
- There is zero incentive to report a negative finding
And even if some of the studies do replicate, the response variable is often either self-reported, or performance on some written test or survey: so it's not really clear what we are even measuring. What is the unit of "general connectedness" ? How about "eudaimonic well-being" ? These are not legitimate scientific concepts.
Nature is great. I find that a long walk in the woods is a good way to clear my head. But I'm not convinced that these studies add anything to my common sense intuitions about the matter. And by using weak methods to justify something we all already believe (or want to believe), we risk degrading trust in science that will be greatly needed when scientists reach a conclusion that isn't politically convenient.
(1) If you want to know how people feel, I’m afraid self-reports are the gold standard
(2) Some other studies have large sample sizes (e.g. this one, which is based on my PhD: https://eprints.lse.ac.uk/49376/1/Mourato_Happiness_greater_...)
"How people feel" can't directly be measured scientifically, but it is a function of many things, some of which can be measured reliably (weight, blood pressure, money, etc). I'd rather have a reliable measurement of quantity that I believe contributes to well-being than a direct measurement of well-being that I think is unreliable.
This is brought into sharp relief when you consider the applications of this research. Suppose intervention A is know to promote subjective well being, whereas intervention B is known to promote healthy blood pressure levels. What would you rather spend money on?
> Some other studies have large sample sizes
This is a fair point. The 2019 Nature study also has large-n. I also like that the authors of that one write "Future studies would ideally collate as much data via non self-report measures as possible."
But as far as I can tell, all the large-n studies are observational. As other commenters have pointed out, when the treatment is so general it's really hard to control for confounding factors. The study you've linked (and the 2019 Nature study) both implemented controls, all of which look reasonable. But when we find an effect, we are still left the question: "What if we just missed a major confounder? What if the cumulative impact of small confounders for which we can't control for is responsible for the signal?"
People are typically pretty unhappy following a heart attack.
Sometimes there's a difficult trade-off here, especially since (un)reliability isn't binary.
But a heavy prioritisation of reliability over direct measurement (which seems to be your position) is probably why governments have spent decades obsessing over GDP, which is a very poor wellbeing measure for all sorts of reasons.
Section 3.2 and Table 1: does the 'continuous urban' category cover e.g. a fairly large park in the middle of a city? I can't see a category for 'parkland'.
As a concrete example have a look at Cannon Hill Park in Birmingham [1]. It struck me that it is possible to be surrounded by green semi-natural parkland within the inner ring of a city of 1 million.
[1] https://www.ceh.ac.uk/sites/default/files/2021-11/LCM2000%20...
The HN post title (at time of writing):
> Nature has enormous emotional and cognitive benefits on people
Yours:
> Being constantly trapped in a world made of concrete and drywall causes enormous emotional and cognitive detriments to people
It's just "Things could be better" vs "Things are bad". They are pretty much the same in terms of what they say/imply about current reality.
I think the HN title is actually closer to an objective statement than yours. Yours is ornately, floridly pessimistic. I think a lot of people (esp. engineering types, including me) suffer from a recurring tacit belief that: pessimism is better than optimism for getting at objective truth. I used to argue that both leanings are equally likely to result in poor judgement, with 'realism' smack in the middle. But I now go further and believe that fostering a slightly optimistic lean is actually better than 'no lean' – not just in the sense that 'you'll have a nicer time', but in terms of maximising how often you are correct in your observations of reality, in the long term. Because zero lean is impossible to maintain all the time. Our observations almost always rely on heuristics to accommodate for incomplete data or insufficient time. So you are going to err in your objective judgements about reality sometimes. And when you err on the optimistic side in a way that matters, reality tends to tap you on the nose and correct you fairly promptly. Which can hurt a bit, especially for someone who spends most of their waking life working with complex systems that are unforgiving about tiny details being incorrect - this trains us to to think of all the ways something might go wrong, so we feel bad when we failed to predict a negative event. But for most of life outside of solving engineering problems, eg, dealing with more organic/nebulous things like 'other people' or 'long term goals' or 'relaxing', being optimistically incorrect in your judgements and then being corrected by reality is better than being pessimistically incorrect and not being corrected. When you make pessimistic errors in judgement, you don't get actively corrected as much, so your ability to make objective observations drifts further pessimistic, worsening your decision making, worsening your situation, and it cycles downward. Eventually some kind of correction comes, but usually after hitting a new low, by which point a few things have gone wrong in your life and the climb back up is difficult. A slightly optimistic lean doesn't seem to have the equivalent problem (of drifting ever more optimistic until you're problematically divorced from reality). At least for me, anyway. I think this might be because a positive state of mind tends to be more active and therefore able to run more thoughts in parallel, including thoughts that can gently correct others that have gone a bit too far, while a negative mindset is more monotone.
Natural systems are effectively infinite fractals, most urban structures are flat and relatively featureless by comparison. Living in a city is sensory deprivation combined with overwhelming discordant stimuli (engines and sirens mostly.) And that's before you get to the incredible chemical burden of living in a city. In fact, until very recently, cities were populations sinks. People died in cities faster than they were born.
But I'm more skeptical about this in the article:
> Need a quick break from your "work screen time" for some "fun screen time?" There's a nature fix for that: Check out the #FindThatLizard game on Twitter and Instagram. Science communicator and herpetologist Earyn McGee posts a picture of a lizard "camouflaged in its natural environment, and people have to find the lizard in the photo." You don't even have to leave your couch to play.
I can't imagine there's the same benefits to looking at nature on Instagram or Twitter.
Angie’s List
General Motors Corporation
Lumber Liquidators
Northwestern Mutual Foundation
Novo Nordisk
Progressive Casualty Insurance Company
Prudential Financial
State Farm Mutual Automobile Insurance Company
https://media.npr.org/documents/about/annualreports/NPRSpons...
If there was any light where your head is, you'd see your last meal.
Would you be similarly frustrated if an article on recent history references WW2?
I've examined a number of phds on this topic as a relative outsider to the field and have been pretty unimpressed by the claims of env-psych on green/bluespace. The methods used to unpack confounding by class/wealth are pretty minimal and, although lip service is occasionally paid to this in discussions sections after reviewers require it, nobody in the field seems to take it seriously. The effects are an order of magnitude smaller than those of social class. The real story here is 'don't be poor' rather than 'get outdoors more'.
On any similar metric you map the city by you see the same effects. Air pollution, noise level, and heat in the summer vary hugely by neighborhood but always follow this pattern.
This year I made a resolution to add more plants to my office and home, and slowly both are filling up with various ferns and mosses and other indoor plants. The relaxing effects of being able to walk over to the garden shelf and have my thoughts to myself while I inspect them is something you don't get to enjoy often.
If you find yourself staying at the desk for long periods and want to get up more, get a few plants, find an area with some light or a lamp and see what you can do. It is pretty cozy!
Something that I have found very satisfying is to have a couple of small planters with herbs growing in them. Most don't take much effort, can survive fine by a window with decent light, and the net result is some fresh herbs once in a while.
It is nice to have so many conveniences and things to do available in the city (a trip to the store isn't a once a month thing because it's so far away), but the spiritual/mental benefits of living in and near nature are second to nothing for me at least.
It’s not exactly the most nature-y thing to do, but it was so refreshing.
Same thing in Los Angeles, just climb up the canyons and enjoy the view. Amazing really.
I think the view does it for me more than nature. Being in front of some spectacular landscape gives me perspective (perhaps it’s why we call it persoective?)
I write this comment while sitting in a local garden to start my day.
Actively looking for a cofounder who can develop full stack. If interested, please email abhi@healinggardens.co
In this regard, parks and such are a poor substitute.
/Slow clap
</sarcasm>
tl;dr "go outside."
Any documentation on the variance of percentage of C02 and oxygen ? Do polyphenols (via pollen?) have relevant effects intranasally ?
off-topic but related to title is plant blindness https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190425-plant-blindness-...
Not sure about pollen but trees produce chemicals that kill pathogens which attack them. Which is why it's healthy to breath forest air especially when you have a cold. Plus they are great at filtering air.
btw 'Think of time in nature as a "multivitamin" — it's best to take it every day' - I don't know how this ends up in articles like this with so much research against it (multivitamins that is), they might have as well been suggesting draining your blood everyday.
Loosing blood has many beneficial effects including increasing blood oxygen levels as new blood cells are generated with better mitochondrial activity
Re blood, I said every day. Losing blood can have some benefits. Just like taking multivitamin can if you have high deficiency of something it contains, although you likely need higher dosage of that thing then. But you don't want to be doing it every day. I mean, I admit I'm less confident about that statement regarding losing blood that I am regarding multivitamins, but draining blood used to be popular for.. pretty much everything and modern medicine somehow got rid of that.
However, I think improvements in insolation are much more significant in this respect.
Some cultures practice „forest bathing“ which would probably reap the greatest benefits (besides living in the woods, obviously).
Maybe this sounds gimmicky, but boosting immunity has a lot of downstream effects, from heart health to brain health to structural integrity and longevity. The body can put the resources it otherwise needs to do damage control into useful things like producing enzymes and correcting metabolic shortcomings.
* City A: $1,903/mo, 6,158 persons / km²
* City B: $3,685/mo, 6,659 persons / km²
Can you guess which is Tokyo (prefecture), and which is Hong Kong?
2019 report from Deutsche Bank https://www.dbresearch.com/PROD/RPS_EN-PROD/PROD000000000049...
Another fun data point: Seoul is ~16,000 persons/km² with rent around $1100/mo.
Can you please share your sources?
Does spreading houses further apart make infrastructure per unit more or less expensive?
Are you seriously anti-housing? Are you pro-homelessness? I honestly don’t get how someone can seriously take an “anti-housing” position, which is what I assume you are when you otherize “pro housing” people.
You should study induced demand. Has building more highways in LA improved traffic? No, it has only made it worse. Ever notice how every airport in the world is always under construction, and still always overcrowded? Yep, induced demand.
Induced demand also only occurs because demand is elastic. It is the natural result of supply increasing.
It is often considered bad in the case of cars by people who are opposed to expanding roads specifically because if reducing traffic on roads or total miles driven is the goal then induced demand will not be a good idea, but it is important to realize that induced demand from expanding roads also means that more people are able to, for example, live farther away and commute longer distances in the same time. In other words, whether induced demand is good or bad depends on whether you want people to consume more of an elastic good or not from a policy perspective, which should probably be no in the case if driving cars.
Housing is something that everyone needs, not something that people adjust consumption of based on availability. It is also something you want everyone to be consuming, so it is extremely weird to apply the idea of induced demand to it, unless you think that not everyone should have access to housing.
Here is the definition of induced demand from wikipedia:
> Induced demand – related to latent demand and generated demand[1] – is the phenomenon that supply increases result in price declines and increased consumption.
Notice that it says "price declines" right there.