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Why are they too population dense? Broadly speaking there are usually advantages to economic specialization. It seems to make sense that cities specialize in
by tryitnow 11y ago
Why are they too population dense?
Broadly speaking there are usually advantages to economic specialization.
It seems to make sense that cities specialize in being places where humans live and work since there are advantages to being close to other humans.
And rural areas specialize in being places where food for humans is grown.
It seems like the solution is to free up more farmland near cities by reducing the suburbs and folding their populations into cities, making cities denser.
So I could see the argument that maybe the problem is that our cities are not sufficiently dense to prosper in the long term.
- Rhapso 11y agoMy opinion is generally is founded on a radically different premise than most economic models. I think we should be optimizing the arrangement of our people and society for fault tolerance. In the long-view, cities are deathtraps (I say as somebody who loves to live in one). Failures in any number of centralized systems could result in hundreds of thousands of deaths. A "fault-tolerant" society would look more like mostly self-sufficient communities of around 200 people with independent basic infrastructure: power, water, sewer, emergency services and food. These communities could be packed fairly tightly, but nowhere near as dense as modern cities. Independent critical infrastructures is required for any sort of real fault tolerance.