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Comment by yazaddaruvala | Hacker News Reader

The American style mall should end.

We need more superblocks.

Roughly on a 10 city-block sq area - a giant parking lot underneath, a floor for public transit (eg train station), 2 floors of mall (theater, groceries, bars, food, gyms, sports centers), with residential living towers the rest of the way up, with green space above the mall between the towers.

e.g. https://www.vox.com/platform/amp/energy-and-environment/2019...

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These ways of life and ridiculous scale came with fossil fuel and will go away with it, within this century.

The mall of the future is probably something close to a farmer's market where people will come to sell goods with bikes/animals.

If you think the current lifestyle of developped nations will continue its trends, you're in for a surprise, as early as the next decades.

Within this century? Not even a chance.

Skyscrapers in Tokyo are similar to this. Subway stations connected to the basement, retail and restaurants in some floors and office or residential above.

The bazaar is dead, long live the bazaar!

I'll do you one better. Behold - the communist superblock where I spent half of my childhood:

https://www.google.pl/maps/@52.1409132,21.0491488,16z/data=!...

Without going over a single pedestrian crossing you can reach a:

-school(grades 1-8, with a soccer and basketball field available to the public) and kindergarten

-mini-mart

-clinic

-dentist

-playground

-culture center

-hairdresser/barber

-tire shop/car wash

-mini spa which somehow is still there after 25 years.

Bars and cafes are across the street. The grassy area in the northern part is used for festivals and the like in the summer.

Note how almost all the parking spots are around the superblock.

All that without being a human pile-up like Barcelona because - and I can't stress this enough - that is not a requirement for having a decent, walkable neighbourhood.

I also grew up in areas like that in Finland. They still worked as intended when I was a kid in the 80s and early 90s. Then most services went away. As living standards increased, population density decreased, as people could afford more space. And as real wages increased, businesses needed more sales per employee to be profitable. Medium-density areas no longer had enough people to support local services.

Some of the buildings here were built much later than the rest - my take is that that spoiled the original idea (removing, among other things, a local farmer's market), but they did increase population density considerably.

But yeah, a few corner shops didn't survive.

Like Begich Towers in Whittier, AK?

See https://stories.californiasunday.com/2015-01-04/begich-tower...

A lot of communist designed spaces seem quite nice. Though maybe they just have the potential to be nice like the one that you linked but a ton of them in less developed areas are falling apart from lack of maintenance.

Communist places are nice as long as you can keep your people from leaving to EU or America where they are paid 20x more than at home and have more freedoms. And once those floodgates open it's a nasty negative feedback loop.

Industrialization has shown to decrease happiness and create more stress and health issues. The United States is huge, with the average farm size being approximately 444 acres. Rather than further condense society into cages while the entitled own the vast amount of resources, why not further distribute society into actual green communities that don't require massive cement structures everywhere and instead promote self-sustaining communities that provide actual practical and fair values.

Your comment uses so much loaded language that I'm not actually sure what you're arguing against or for.

> actual green communities that don't require massive cement structures everywhere

I interpret this as meaning more single-family homes rather than apartments and condos.

That would mean urban sprawl which is anything but green. The lower the population density, the less effective mass transit becomes, and more people are driving. Most jobs can't be done from home.

> self-sustaining communities

I interpret this to mean not needing external resources, but this would mean your food choices are limited based on the whims of the local climate. Live up north? Then you're not getting any mangoes or other tropical fruits.

It's more efficient to suck the productivity from the masses when they're actually massed up together, yet still separated enough from each other not to fight it. Smaller communities that are more self-sufficient and connected would upset that, because the people wouldn't agree to giving up their productivity to some non-local entity. Therefore, our overlords ensure that "society" treats that type of lifestyle/community as something anti-modern and degrade it to "3rd world" status, as if the "3rd world" label was anything other than a way to feel superior. This is done through their captured communications channels, such as the media and various blog platforms they control; if they didn't have their fingers on the scale people would probably see that some good ideas could come from a different worldview.

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