Living closer together
aeon.co
aeon.co
There's no right answer for everyone. Some folks will only thrive in one environment or the other, and that's fine. But as for me? You'll catch me continuing to peruse listings for acreage in far-flung places where I can be left alone.
Obviously, there is also a lower bound for density, too (gotta find a mate). I think this explains why young people like cities, but once a person has a mate and progeny they move suburban or rural.
It doesn't have to be Karachi or Manila.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_world_cities_by_popu...
The chart you cite is flat out wrong. It claims to be "metropolitan areas", but Paris' entry is only for the City of Paris. The comparable wouldn't even be New York city, which is very nearly as dense - It would be Manhattan Island.
Paris' metropolitan area density is 690/km2, which is less than the not-dense King County[1] that I live in, and comparable to the mostly-rural Snohomish just to our north.
People need room. A very dense city center is a great place to be for a few days, a few months, a few years, and it's not as if nobody ends up living their their whole life, but most people move to places with space because they want space. Paris is significantly less dense than it was 100 years ago[2]... for precisely that reason.
A strong city core with suburbs is a good way to live. We need more of them - More large cities with a 10^9 people surrounded by a suburb of 10^10, not megacities with 10^11 people cramped in endless rows of tenements.
[1] https://archive.ph/20200213233400/http://factfinder.census.g... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris#Demographics
There's a middle ground that is available in many places around the world, in which zoning allows for much denser building, but at a higher standard of noise reduction and stability, and not so dense we all live in high-rise apartments.
I don't think we should build high-rises everywhere, and I hate American-style wood frame apartment buildings with nothing but drywall separating apartments, even as I like the zoning changes that have allowed the "5 over 1" buildings to spread. Retail on the ground floor with apartments above is great! A variation on "5 over 1" that required concrete walls and better windows would be welcome, I think, although developers would always choose the wood-frame buildings if allowed to.
Overall I'm saying: think less of Shanghai and Manila, or Manhattan and Chicago, and more of Barcelona and Paris, of a sort of area that doesn't seem to exist in the US: with minimal roads and "soundproof" apartments.
American's go on cruises (a super high density vacation) that are very communal. Do you want to recreate the 'cruise' experience in every American city? American's go to Disneyland for vacation, does that mean American's love waiting in long lines and we should design cities around long lines and overpriced fast food?
I live on the very edge of the city. The farms start right after my townhouse. The urban environment stops at my doorstep, but I am fully in the city and have a convenient electric trolley bus line, walkable shops and restaurants and a great bike infrastructure. A new neighborhood of flats is going in, replacing the farms across the street which is about 800 units in 40 densely packed buildings, similar density to the city center. You would have to be in the center of NYC to see that density in the US.
I'm american and have been living in Europe for almost 15 years, and it still shocks me how unbelievably poor american cities are, almost universally. The modern trend of "re-densifying" has really only ended up building out load of expensive yuppie bullshit housing that no one will live in past the age of 35, much less raise a family in.
I think it's safe to say that city planners in the US just don't really get it.
No, nothing is sudden. It's always transitional; everything is a gradient. You have a gradient that starts at least dense all the way up to most dense. The problem is polarized American thought that immediately imagines mixed zoning to be someone building a mega skyscraper next to a single family home. In reality, someone will build a duplex. Further down someone might build a multilevel quadplex. Further down someone might build townhomes, then further down residential on top with business on bottom. This takes decades on time scale, but this is what people are advocating for.
>Do you want to recreate the 'cruise' experience in every American city?
Sure, in some places at the end of the gradient where things are most dense (and land is most expensive) it would make sense. There are people who absolutely want this experience for every day life.
>American's go to Disneyland for vacation, does that mean American's love waiting in long lines and we should design cities around long lines and overpriced fast food?
In my suburb, people love to wait in long drive-thru lines for overpriced fast food, so based on my experience, yes. But to answer your questions, should we design cities around one specific way of building and make it homogenous? No. There is a whole variety of different structures to be built before the cruise ship: https://missingmiddlehousing.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/...
There are plenty of places that would I would be interested in visiting but have no interest in moving to.
There is literally no reason for me to live in a flat other than if society does that silly thing where they don't build enough or let hoarders buy everything. It's race to the bottom BS.
Just don't let that happen and there you go, problem solved.
It seems prices have risen just about everywhere. Even rural raw land has gone up substantially in the past couple years (what I'm interesed). It should be no surprise with inflation, the increase in the money supply, and some increase in wages, that real assets are "expensive".
https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2022/05/housing-vacan...
Those numbers don't include unavailable units, such as the one's REITs might make unavailable.
> Vacant Housing Units. A housing unit is vacant if no one is living in it at the time of the interview, unless its occupants are only temporarily absent. In addition, a vacant unit may be one which is entirely occupied by persons who have a usual residence elsewhere. New units not yet occupied are classified as vacant housing units if construction has reached a point where all exterior windows and doors are installed and final usable floors are in place. Vacant units are excluded if they are exposed to the elements, that is, if the roof, walls, windows, or doors no longer protect the interior from the elements, or if there is positive evidence (such as a sign on the house or block) that the unit is to be demolished or is condemned. Also excluded are quarters being used entirely for nonresidential purposes, such as a store or an office, or quarters used for the storage of business supplies or inventory, machinery, or agricultural products. Vacant sleeping rooms in lodging houses, transient accommodations, barracks, and other quarters not defined as housing units are not included in the statistics in this report. (See section on "Housing Unit.")
Unless they’re actually demolishing the houses (and they’re not) then it counts regardless of whether it’s currently on the market or not.
EDIT: Though sure, those might not be reflected in the rental or homeowner vacancy rates. So I looked this up and it has indeed not dropped lately... it also hasn't particularly gone up lately either though: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/EOFFMARUSQ176N
Once, I lived in a small rural college town (land grant - the U of Idaho). I could walk or bike anywhere I needed to go. Cars were required in practice if leaving the city.
I used to live in outer ring Seattle proper (Roosevelt/Ravenna n'hood junction). It was a drive to the store, but an easy walk to the bus. Buses got me where I needed to go, mostly - if I needed to go to specific zones. Most of the surrounding blocks were SFH, with a business corridor nearby.
Later on, I lived just outside of the 'urban core' of Seattle( Lower Queen Anne ). This was a full mixed use zone. I could walk to daily needs, but busing was frustratingly constrained to specific target areas (Downtown, Capitol Hill) in practice.
In both of the Seattle scenarios, I lived in an apartment building. Neighbors were deeply uninterested in talking to each other, as a rule. While I could get to know some of the baristas, in general, social behavior was limited to organized clubs, not place-based friendships (unlike the usual predictions). This is a known thing about Seattle.
Now I live in a smaller city (Spokane), in a 1900-1920 era neighborhood, and I can walk to my daily needs still. I live here in a SFH. The local culture is much more welcoming than Seattle.
One of the angles that I personally ran into and found frustrating is that apartment buildings _as they are built_ are not set up for families with children. Things from outside decking (painful to fall on) to railings (easy to fall over for climbing kids), lack of adequate play space, etc. LQA in particular was _remarkably_ unfriendly to children, and most families I encountered in the daycare seemed to be on the road to moving out - as I did as well. Part and parcel of increased density thinking - for it to be successful as a long term strategy - has to incorporate design elements that address the full human lifecycle and experience: children are a pretty fundamental part of that, that is _left out_ of much (most?) urban buildouts in the past 1-2 decades.
There are other issues in density - if you hold crime, drug abuse, and homelessness constant per capita, when you have more people per sq mile, you have more social issues per square mile, and _that_ seems to be a problem the United States hasn't solved in its cities at all.
Nowadays cities are needed:
- by dictatorships since very few can control very many, making them dependent on city services and so unable to revolt;
- by surveillance capitalism to keep people surveilled and as above dependent from ton of services since there is not enough space to be autonomous in any case.
MARGINALLY cities are needed for having enough people together to meet interesting people from any cohort of interests, but that's now marginal thanks to TLCs and IT development, not from today in the era of the anti-social networks, but already in the past in the usenet/BBS era.
MARGINALLY cities are needed by certain cohorts like elder people to being able to live well while being not able anymore to travel and not interested anymore in different activities in nature.
To being able to evolve, just toward the flying cars McKinsey want [1], just toward a retail-delivery economy, just toward renewables, just toward resilience we damn need FAR LESS dense areas. Single family homes mixed with small buildings for various working/service purposes with enough space to evolve, to have room for p.v., drone landing, delivery of large stuff etc. Modern smart-cities are just old capitalism factories fusioned with their old slums to keep a handful of slaves ready to work in slavery condition.
[1] https://www.easa.europa.eu/sites/default/files/dfu/uam-full-... and
Take a look at this study by UC Berkeley [1]. It is quite clear that we need to be reducing our carbon footprint, and living in cities is the responsible choice unless the global population begins to plummet.
Similarly if instead of computing a hypothetical new city you compute a REAL present city and the "needed investment" to improve it keeping the density at a similar or even more dense scale than you obtain horrific results for ALL cities, especially for the big and dense ones.
Carbon footprint concept is just a classic management game, meaningless in scientific terms, but dressed as science to be sold to a receptive public. The reality is that we know we need to evolve and we know cities can't evolve. UN New Urban Agenda was made as a way to force people in factory-cities, like nazi interment camps or soviet union gulags, to use them to produce a new society for some others.
Capitalism simply have reached a point John Maynard Keynes and Rosa Luxembourg both predict a century ago: now that the entire world is run by capitalism there is no one to steal we need to create one. That means enslaving a vast cohort of population to try replicating a classic colonialism development model. Carbon footprint as a social score is try to classify people by census, since of course if you are poor you likely live in an old building, typically an apartment, your score is then horrific. If you are wealthy you likely have resources to build a new house, with p.v. and co to improve the score computation as a result your score is good. Since your score is good you are obeisant (in the sense that you use your resources to enrich those behind the Green New Deal, and you still been able to pay more in the future) you are allowed to live in a luxury building profiting from the poor's who work in the modern smart-city.
Oh, you might state that that's an ideological position, but in that case try to design a new society from the present to a projected 2030+ future. Try to be honest in the simulation and see the results. Similarly see the Toyota Smart City demo https://youtu.be/p-9X8Z2kJt8 and read about https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/sep/19/why-greeces-ex... try finding similarity and differences. Go ahead and imaging a new modern city made to be ecologic, compute how many things are needed to make it and once built how can or can not evolve. Do the same for a vast riviera of small buildings where general infra (like roads, water, electricity, ...) are reduced to the minimum. Try to see what McKinsey publish in their future vision, like https://www.easa.europa.eu/sites/default/files/dfu/uam-full-... and try to imaging how such vision can work ONLY for VERY FEW on top of all others simply because of density scale.
It's quiet clear, at least to me, the future some want for humanity, and it's also clear most humans do not even have tried to imaging a realistic future based on their public agenda.