3 ms·

Is that more of a function of poverty, rather than density though? HK has a lot of density, yet if not for the shitty climate, would IMO have been the most desi

• joe5150 11y ago
  I think that poverty will tend to amplify and accelerate a lot of the negative effects of high-density living without conveying much of the benefit, so it's both.
• TheOtherHobbes 11y ago
  It's a function of both. Pack enough people into a small enough area and the support + infrastructure gets really, really expensive. There are many stupidities in the original piece, but one significant one is the apparent lack of understanding that cities have to be supported by political, financial and physical infrastructures which extend far outside the geographic boundaries. The effective footprints of London, NY, and HK stretch across the world. So you can make an argument for effective economic and ecological density being very much lower than the density you get from a naive division of population by immediate area. When the effective density is much more constrained, you don't just get financial poverty, you get somewhere that's a shitty place to live in many different ways. And when there's no political understanding of what an effective footprint is, you get disasters like the California drought - which is largely the result of to appreciate that water is a limited resource that comes from elsewhere, and has to flow into an area before anyone can use it.
  • yummyfajitas 11y ago
    Generally speaking, you don't get financial poverty at all as a result of density. You get wealth. London is wealthier than the rest of the UK. NYC is wealthier than the rest of the US. Hong Kong is the wealthiest city in China. Mumbai is the wealthiest city in India, unless Delhi has surpassed it since I last checked. I haven't checked, but I'd bet 5:1 odds that Dhaka is significantly wealthier than the rest of Bangladesh. The California drought is primarily caused by inefficient use of water in agriculture. City usage of water is pretty much irrelevant.
  • xixi77 11y ago
    That's a completely different argument though -- the way I read the article, this is about internal density of cities specifically. In particular, iirc the resource consumption of a person living in a dense city is shown to be smaller compared to that of a same-income person living in a low-density city or a suburb, so dense cities should contribute to a reduction in effective density that you are talking about here.
• gph 11y ago
  Yea, I agree, wealth can help fix many of the problems of density. Still, except for some global hotspots like HK, NYC, Tokyo, etc. there's not enough money to warrant crowding to such an extent. And in many of the global cities the problems of density are typically worst on the poorest.
  • xixi77 11y ago
    Not sure -- one question is, why are all those people staying in Dhaka? I've never been there, but I would suspect that their income/standard of living, while quite horrible, might still be better compared to Bangladesh countryside?
• rayiner 11y ago
  Dhaka is three times denser than Hong Kong. Though poverty is part of it--Dhaka is actually less dense than Manhattan. That said, Manhattan is gross too, despite being one of the richest places in the world.
• thaumasiotes 11y ago
  Have you been in Hong Kong? The summer is horrific, but it's quite pleasant otherwise. I'd guess New York's climate is much worse.
  • xixi77 11y ago
    I have, although indeed mostly in the summer :) I just don't really tolerate humidity particularly well.
• suyash 11y ago
  Have you ever been to HK, if you complain about housing prices in SF, try to get 1 bed room apartment in HK, worse try to go for a run there and see what happens to your lungs after some time.