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Death in the city: what happens when all our cemeteries are full?
- iLoch 11y agoIncinerate your loved ones!
- sithadmin 11y agoWhy just incinerate them when you can boil them down into useful hydrocarbon fuel sources? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_depolymerization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_depolymerization
- blueflow 11y agoawesome idea. I accumulated biomasss for several decades, i don't want to waste it by just getting incierated.
- Mz 11y agoGreen fuel made from people. Soylent green...S-oil-ent Green. Green (s)Oil(ent. Someone funnier than me should do something witty with this.
- moogly 11y agoIn Sweden, the waste heat from many crematoria is used for home heating.
- njharman 11y agoHow much carbon sequestration is that forfeiting?
- ak39 11y agoWe can't just count the carbon cost of incineration without comparing the carbon cost of using a cemetery in the middle of town or of moving the dead for burial further away from city centers. It's a tradeoff that has to take into account the costs over the lifetime of city dwellers around cemeteries. Let's not be too hasty assuming that burying has zero carbon costs.
- crymer11 11y agoWhen traveling to LGA from Manhattan, I'd usually pass by what is a very large cemetery compared to what I'm used to here in the rural South; it always made me wonder how a city the size of NYC dealt with the deceased.
- koenigdavidmj 11y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colma,_California https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colma,_California might be interesting to you. When San Francisco ran out of space in the early 20th century, at first they banned any new cemeteries from being built, and then they moved all the existing ones just south of the city limit.
- Analemma_ 11y agoFor the interested, parent is probably referring to Calvary Cemetery [1]. I don't think it's the largest cemetery in the US by acreage, but it's the largest by number of burials. I've always thought it must drive economists and real estate developers nuts that there's all this land in New York City which is probably permanently off-limits to development. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calvary_Cemetery_(Queens,_New_York) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calvary_Cemetery_(Queens,_New_...
- mason240 11y ago365 acres = .570 mi². NYC population density = 27,858/mi². That's space for 15,723 (living) people. There are approx 3M people buried there.
- BuildTheRobots 11y agoHighly recommend people look for photos of the French Catacombs if you want some ideas of what to do with around 6 million skeletons. It's a very surreal day trip o_0
- meatysnapper 11y agoSoylent?
- davidw 11y agoCemetery places in Italy are not permanent - they get recycled and the remains dumped into some kind of common area. I think it's supposed to happen well after anyone who would remember the person is still around, but... still, I don't much care for the idea.
- leojg 11y agothis is mainly a cultural problem. We have to accept that if we want to be truly sustainable we have to make every proces of our life sustainable, including death. This mean using the death in some way(as a fertilizer, for example)
- ak39 11y agoIt is indeed cultural. Take how India for example - a place where 20% of the world's population steeped neck-deep in traditional culture is jostling for 2% of the earth's habitable real estate - dodged this economic disaster by its own cremation culture. Lucky culture on that.
- pxue 11y agonothing a couple generations of "re-education" couldn't fix. take China for example, took less than 2 generations to go from country of ancestry worshipping to "i don't know where my great grandfather is buried/from"
- USAnum1 11y agoI'd hypothesize a long history of relatively high population density created the cremation culture. Humans have been so successful because we adapt. Although the original motivation may be murky, I'd bet many arbitrary cultural institutions are actually adaptations.
- plonh 11y agoThis seems clear when you compare ancient religious texts side by side with what was known about the natural world in their respective times. Unclean animal species, menstruation rituals, etc.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- Someone 11y agoWhat happened in London was this: http://www.orderofthegooddeath.com/enon-chapel-londons-victorian-golgotha#.Vg7EO5RXerU http://www.orderofthegooddeath.com/enon-chapel-londons-victo... Also: http://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/jan/22/death-city-grisly-secrets-victorian-london-dead http://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/jan/22/death-city-gri..., and an attempt to solve the problem: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Necropolis_Railway https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Necropolis_Railway
- pyrrhotech 11y agoI encountered this problem when playing Cities: Skylines. Simple solution: build more crematories
- greggman 11y agoIt's not like there isn't space outside the cities. Take SF for example, they banned cemeteries in the city so there's a "city of the dead" just down the 280 freeway, Colma which is like 80% cemeteries. Of course a cultural change so they took no space would be fine with me but still, most cities are surrounding by vast quantities of mostly unused or under used land.
- zhemao 11y agoSomething similar happened with Shanghai. A lot of deceased Shanghai residents are buried in the nearby city of Suzhou. I visited my grandparents' graves there once and there were these massive graveyards covering entire hillsides.
- derefr 11y agoThe usual reason people prefer burial over cremation isn't so much the sanctity of the body, as that there is a permanent space to visit, lay flowers, etc. I've always been fond of the idea of funeral-home "rememberance rooms", where urns of ashes are stored in small "shrine" spaces that can be visited instead. Japan's pet cemeteries[1] in particular take this to its natural conclusion: grids of cubby-hole shrines creating the mortuary equivalent of a rental-box consignment store[2]. [1] http://japanvisitor.blogspot.ca/2012/10/jindaiji-pet-cemetery.html http://japanvisitor.blogspot.ca/2012/10/jindaiji-pet-cemeter... [2] A.k.a. "Cube stores": https://www.google.ca/search?q=%E6%A0%BC%E4%BB%94%E8%88%96&tbm=isch https://www.google.ca/search?q=%E6%A0%BC%E4%BB%94%E8%88%96&t...
- sliverstorm 11y agoCubby-holes lose something along the way though. I have faint memory of visiting a relative whose grave is a marker on a wall- likely a soldier- and it comes up very lacking compared to a headstone in a field.
- stevep98 11y agoHow about this: When a cemetery is "full", temporarily remove all the headstones, add 10 feet of dirt over the whole site, then replace all the headstones in the original positions. Now you can start burying more people. What's wrong with that? People are still buried, you don't have to dig people up, what difference does it make if people are 6 feet under or 16 feet or 26 feet.
- moheeb 11y agoSan Diego did almost exactly this. There is an old cemetery there where they removed all the headstones and buried them in a mass grave, but left the bodies. Then they put a city park over the bodies and children play there now. I'm serious.
- JBReefer 11y agoThat's how Cheeseman Park in Denver was created, too
- rm_-rf_slash 11y agoDeath and cemeteries are different than they used to be. Cemeteries used to be places to go on picnics, for kids to play, and so on. It's a relatively recent phenomenon for death to be seen as something to be removed from daily life. Perhaps due to modern medicine and disease? I'm not sure. But I am sure that cemeteries are unsustainable unless we reincorporate them into a part of our communities, rather than being places to avoid.
- chimeracoder 11y ago> Death and cemeteries are different than they used to be. Cemeteries used to be places to go on picnics, for kids to play, and so on. Yeah, parks in cities are a relatively recent phenomenon. Previously, cemeteries filled a lot of the role that parks did. Central Park was not the first, but it was one of the first (and most prominent at the time) example of a park that was explicitly not a cemetery.
- peterwwillis 11y agoIt seems that this has to do specifically with public parks. Lavish private parks and gardens have existed for a few millennia as a respite from homes and cities and as a way to contemplate nature. (Seeing as it took so much money to build and maintain them, they typically were kept for their owners' pleasure alone)
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- drzaiusapelord 11y agoWhat we do in Chicago is bury people in the suburbs. The rates are better there and there's availability. Its also less cramped and allows for larger tombstones and such. People just need to get used to driving 30-60 minutes to visit deceased loved ones as opposed to taking a stroll to the nearest cemetery.
- tshadwell 11y agoIf Cities: Skylines has taught me anything, I can answer this question without reading the article. First, dead bodies start to build up in various buildings, especially well-trafficked buildings such as high density commercial buildings and offices. The presence of the bodies dramatically decreases land value and happiness resulting in an exodus from the city. As people leave the city, demand for new development rapidly decreases, along with revenues. The city quickly digs itself into deep debt as it quickly becomes a ghost town, thousands of buildings become derelict, further decreasing the land value. Nobody wants to live here any more. Chirpy wheezes his last tweet as the last person complains they no longer want to live in this city and leaves. (though, in cities skylines this usually happens because you have so many garbage trucks and hearses trying to collect the dead people & garbage that they all get stuck)
- zeidrich 11y agoIt's interesting though because this is not a technical problem. A cremated body's ashes don't take up much space, and don't need to be housed in an urn. It's entirely a cultural issue, in that we have special feelings about death and the treatment of a body after death. But thing about culture is that it's really flexible, but really resistant to change. It's never going to be a problem that can't be solved. People are resilient and eventually if cemetery space does become completely unavailable, we'll make due. But it doesn't mean we won't be upset while we learn to cope. It's more that it's a problem that we don't want to solve (because it would mean changing our cultural habits) but not a problem that is hard to solve. It just needs to get to a point where we actually need to solve it before anyone will worry about it.
- drjesusphd 11y agoI view the regulation argument against nuclear power similarly (i.e. that it's too expensive and time-consuming to get a nuclear plant licensed). Once energy becomes more scarce and/or the externalities of fossil fuels are priced in, this is a problem that will solve itself when needed.
- logfromblammo 11y agoThis problem has been solved already, even for cultures that do not cremate bodies. The scarce cemetery space is devoted to recent burials. The corpse is left in the ground long enough for all the soft tissues to decompose. It is then exhumed, and given a second burial in an ossuary, or for the more prestigious deceased, a reliquary. The mass of a dry skeleton is about 1/5 that of a wet body, and without the connective tissues, you can stack bones more efficiently. Or just borrow a trick from hard disk drive manufacturers and orient the corpses vertically instead of horizontally. In other words, bury bodies in a standing position, rather than lying down.
- linkydinkandyou 11y agoRay Kurzweil predicts that "aging" will be solved very soon. So this problem will go away. http://www.singularity.com http://www.singularity.com