this post was submitted on 06 Sep 2023
1204 points (86.6% liked)
Fuck Cars
9817 readers
656 users here now
A place to discuss problems of car centric infrastructure or how it hurts us all. Let's explore the bad world of Cars!
Rules
1. Be Civil
You may not agree on ideas, but please do not be needlessly rude or insulting to other people in this community.
2. No hate speech
Don't discriminate or disparage people on the basis of sex, gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, or sexuality.
3. Don't harass people
Don't follow people you disagree with into multiple threads or into PMs to insult, disparage, or otherwise attack them. And certainly don't doxx any non-public figures.
4. Stay on topic
This community is about cars, their externalities in society, car-dependency, and solutions to these.
5. No reposts
Do not repost content that has already been posted in this community.
Moderator discretion will be used to judge reports with regard to the above rules.
Posting Guidelines
In the absence of a flair system on lemmy yet, let’s try to make it easier to scan through posts by type in here by using tags:
- [meta] for discussions/suggestions about this community itself
- [article] for news articles
- [blog] for any blog-style content
- [video] for video resources
- [academic] for academic studies and sources
- [discussion] for text post questions, rants, and/or discussions
- [meme] for memes
- [image] for any non-meme images
- [misc] for anything that doesn’t fall cleanly into any of the other categories
Recommended communities:
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
A truth most people don't want to hear is that densely populated cities are overall better for nature and resources. You need less roads and tracks, fewer concrete overall, compact cities are much easier to make walkable, etc.
Really the only argument against tight packed cities is "I don't like people". That shouldn't really be a priority.
For nature to recover we need to give back space. The worst you can do is build rural homes or spread out suburbs.
There's also: "I want to have nature around me" - and there's "I have pets that need to go out" - and there's "In a big city it can be dirty, smelly and loud" and "People neglected by society hang around big cities" and "Big real estate firms crank up housing prizes".
What we really need is better city planning, to reduce traffic & roads, and make areas pedestrian only - at that point, quality of life in a city improves. Also, we need to kill big real estate corps and regulate housing prizes. And there needs to be a will in politics to actually address social issues, including but not limited to violent crimes.
I think not having sprawling cities means you can have nature nearby a lot moreso than in endless suburbia though. Unless you count lawns as nature.
Nearby is relative to the quality of public transportation though, as not everyone can afford a car, and even if they can, it kills the environment and quality of living in the city to have traffic. And public transportation infrastructure is sadly still next to non-existent in many metropolitan areas in the world.
Public transport is cheaper too when cities are not sprawling. We are talking about the benefits new dense development, where public transport should be a core consideration and not an afterthought.
Don't forget "We've had a pandemic going for over 3 years, I'd like to not be around a bunch of sneezing and coughing people" at this point, particularly because public transit is objectively better for cities than driving, but also a better place to catch COVID than your car.
fair enough
You are right, this is of course argumented from an ideal perspective. Building and managing cities like they are now, just denser, wouldn't work.
In an utopian world that really put the environment first there would be no greedy investors and greedy landlords, no one would feel left behind and instead of using farms we'd have some kind of ultra efficient vertical hydroponics stuff going on.
It would be amazing having sci-fi mega cities, perhaps connected via underground railroads and between them just nature undisturbed. It feels like we are so close from a technological standpoint to make that happen. At least it's not completely unimaginable.
I wholeheartedly agree. And I believe we have everything needed to make that happen - but if everyone has good living conditions, that just isn't profitable / exploitable for the corporate world. Happy people means it's harder / impossible to scare them or make them angry at some perceived threat / enemy, and exploit their dividedness. All megacorporations without exception and a lot of mid- to large size businesses thrive on exploiting workers who are too divided to unite and demand a fair share of work and profits and acceptable working conditions.
ꃋᴖꃋ
More people. More problems. Crimes happen where people are.
Ain't nobody commuting from a high rise to the farm field where that city gets its food.
Imo, we should have dense, walkable villages in rural areas to serve farms and whatnot, and they should have train stations connecting to the nearest city. That way neither our cities nor our towns are sprawl, but rather compact, walkable, and transit-oriented.
After all, that's how we traditionally built cities and villages before all this modern automobile malarkey.
At least in the US which has a lot of non-dense areas, there is so much land that there is still a ton of land for nature, and a lot of the biggest consumers of nature are non-residential developments like farmland
I wish I had a way to share a certain GIS-generated image of projected development growth in my US state over the next 50 years without doxxing myself. Needless to say, it's ABSOLUTELY INSANE - with planning relegated to Counties (some of which don't even have zoning), and those counties being ruby red with their local governments captured by builders and developers that don't care whether the world looks like a strip mall or a forest, sprawl is the name of the game and it is eating into both farmland and forest on a scale that is hard for a person to fully comprehend.
I'm sorry, but that's a really great fucking argument. I don't like people. I don't want to share walls with people. I want a quiet, private, green space to live in without the density porn half of this thread is fellating (and a significant number are also condemning).
Dense cities are uninhabitable to me, and I can say it from experience - having lived in cities having from 1-10m people including NYC, and including not owning a car and being fully dependent on public transit. The city life was always worse in every way than living in the suburbs. In the suburbs, it's easier to get groceries, it's easier to enjoy nature, it's easier to go to the gym, or get to work. Everything about living in the city was harder, shittier, and more expensive.