Absolutely. The whole point of a city is to reject all that.
> You are not fully in control.
I know, which is why I don't bother with lawns. I'd rather fill the entire area with solar panels instead.
This is stuff you grit your teeth and put up with because it can't be helped. Who would choose to design a city with this decay literally built into it? That's mind boggling.
Leave cracks and potholes on the pavement for long enough, allow some dilapidated building to stand for long enough, and it just becomes part of the identity of the city and the people who live in it? It turns into the city's "character" ?
To me that sounds like a coping mechanism.
Like the roads actually being used and not closed so they can be constantly repaved.
The extreme opposite of that would hordes of people (or robots) with nail clippers patrolling everything 24/7. When any tile is even just chipped (or when when the scan shows the wind carried away a few molucules from the surface), it gets replaced. When tiles in that exact same color aren't available anymore, they all get replaced. Heck, when the sun was out and faded the color of something slightly more than areas that were in shade, the whole area has to be rebuilt.
Or take cutting your fingernails: do it once a week, do it daily, or why not every second? Every moment they're growing a bit, and they don't remain in the shape determined as well cut by their owner for even an hour! Unless you keep cutting/filing them. But while you are cutting your nails, you can't be cutting your hair, so that's gross. And even if you could, you cannot cut all strands of hair at the same time, it'll always be screwed up.
So of course the answer is somewhere in between, it has to be, and it's probably not the same for everybody.
Hordes of robots constantly and meticulously maintaining entire cities sounds awesome, actually. That's the post scarcity society I dream of.
> Or take cutting your fingernails: do it once a week, do it daily, or why not every second?
We only need to choose because we lack the technology. Maybe one day we'll have Deus Ex style nanobot pills we can swallow. They will invisibly and continuously maintain our bodies for us. Nails are just one of countless things they will maintain.
Decay is a never-ending process, as are the changing architectural tastes of city residents. Only through a continual process of demolition and rebuilding can they be kept at bay.
You see this in real cities everywhere: districts of shiny, antiseptic, newly-built towers, side-by-side with decaying warehouses and brownstones from a hundred years ago. The former are modern, the latter are charming, to be desirable a city needs a balance of the new and the old.
Agreed. Or xeriscaping, or something better than grass (which is a really low bar to be better than).
I didn’t realize cities were made with a point to reject entropy and weren’t mostly organic congregations of people for economic reasons
This is entirely orthogonal to economically efficient concentration. In fact, cities are an extension of it. We want to be safe and comfortable when we leave the buildings too. We don't want the cities to just look nice, we want architecture that makes our very souls feel safe and protected. We want facilities like well maintained sidewalks and roads so we can walk and drive with ease. This leads to economic efficiency.
No?
It’s just a building. I’d doubt there’s more than a handful of buildings that were made by hands that were explicitly rejecting entropy and just doing what they needed/wanted in the moment.
Do you think the builders of any randomly selected building, built said building as a rejection of entropy?
Like otherwise if we get down to philosophical bones then life is a rejection of entropy as it orders matter and energy, in which case the discussion is pointless if we’re at that level.
I'm just addressing the point about entropy that you made.
> Do you think the builders of any randomly selected building, built said building as a rejection of entropy?
I don't know. I'm just saying that every single building adds to the organization within the system, as does every single life form.
Entropy is a measure of the disorder and disorganization within a system. Any form of structure reduces entropy by definition.
You should probably engage with the second paragraph of my original reply:
> We want to be safe and comfortable when we leave the buildings too. We don't want the cities to just look nice, we want architecture that makes our very souls feel safe and protected. We want facilities like well maintained sidewalks and roads so we can walk and drive with ease.
No, you didnt. You said
> > You're rejecting the behavior of both human nature and earthly nature Absolutely.
> The whole point of a city is to reject all that.
Saying the "point" of a city implies intent. You cant motte and bailey back and forth between intent and happenstance.
> You should probably engage with the second paragraph of my original reply:
If I am going to engage with your _second comment's_ _second paragraph_ (cause were skipping over your first comment I replied to and the first paragraph of your second comment apparently) that I was replying to, I would probably quibble over you trying to entwine souls and economic efficiency