6 ms·
there's almost no room left on the planet for building "new" cities of any significant scale (meaning of course not just the meticulously designed city
by cbr 10y ago
there's almost no room left on the planet for building
"new" cities of any significant scale (meaning of
course not just the meticulously designed city core;
but the whole meta-city that will grow around it --
with suburbs, transportation links, etc)
No way. Spend some time in satellite-view in a mapping program and you'll see that there are huge areas of farmland that could be cities. There's a lot of space on the planet.
- kafkaesq 10y agoThere are huge areas of farmland that could be cities. Which aren't ringed by (and hence, downwind from) mega-ranches? Or correctional facilities? Which have access to adequate water resources (already heavily constrained in many of these areas) to support massive human settlements? And close enough to lakes, parks, and other attractions so that people would actually... want to live there? Not so many. And the genuinely fallow areas which do exist should probably be protected as such, and/or restored further to their pre-cultivation state.
- jonathankoren 10y agoYeah, convert farmland. What does farms do anyway?
- cbr 10y agoA new city would be much denser than the suburban and exurban sprawl that currently fills our demand for new housing, and so would end up in taking much less farmland than continuing along the current path. (And the amount of farmland we're talking about, both for new cities and for sprawl, is small as a fraction of total farmland.)
- jonathankoren 10y agoOr you could infill the existing urban and suburban areas, and not lose any food production. This idea of building a brand new city is just stupid.