5 ms·

This is not about "city = good, suburbs = bad". It is about "walled garden = bad". The point of the article is that all those campuses are isolated from the lo

by benou 10y ago

This is not about "city = good, suburbs = bad". It is about "walled garden = bad". The point of the article is that all those campuses are isolated from the local community, and it is not good because it does not help to develop better infrastructure and it isolates people. At the end of the article the author mentions 2 SV projects which actually do things differently: Box HQ and Facebook HQ. In SV. Not in SF. To give you a personal example, what surprised me moving from Europe to SV is the bus service: public bus service is terrible in SV, and what is the answer from big corp to help their employees to commute? Having their own shuttles service... What usually happens in Europe is that the people, the corp, the city, the county etc. interact to build a public bus system. It then allows sharing between companies and benefits everyone. But in the case of those gated communities they do not do that.

VLM 10y ago
"isolated from the local community" What is there about the local community that is good, if most agree with the echo chamber view that all good exclusively comes from a small number of hyper selective ivies with very peculiar demographics? If the local community were good, why won't they get hired, why are they only vitally important to be nearby, yet not actually in contact? What is the metric or method where the quality of software, for instance, depends directly on distance to X, Y, Z? Why could someone possibly think X, Y, and Z only exist in urban areas? Ignorance not being much of a defense. If good can only come from young elite freshly grad white males as employees, is working near/in the ghetto a peculiar form of penance? "We wouldn't let them get an education for skin color reasons but we are good people because we will permit them empty the trash bins after hours out of the goodness of our hearts". "We don't hire coloreds or foreigners or girls here for culture fit reasons, only guys from the same frat at the same elite school, but we are a block away from several ethnic restaurants" appears to be the new "some of my best friends are blacks" for racists who don't get that they sound racist. Burb people and non-startup people are much more open minded than city people on average, more flexible, willing to try something new, a new lifestyle in a new area in new construction, etc. The article assumes parks and nature are an inherent evil, which seems outright weird. Also a severe case of neophillia where any historic architecture is inherently evil, but I like old buildings, they look cool... Something new is guaranteed to be new, not guaranteed to be better. Also history is long and something new is almost certainly a historical rehash that failed because of X, Y, and Z. History is circular not linear. "I wanna make a village (where I'm chief)" isn't innovative in 2016, it was innovative in 6000 BC. Its just part of the fad rotation today, and like all fads it can be ignored with little loss. Having worked in suburban office parks and extremely urban areas I'm mystified at the isolation thing. It seems to exist entirely in some peoples minds but not in reality. "support companies" seem to grow fabulously, sprawl like, profitably in the burbs almost despite local government opposition, endless buildings of retail and restaurants and bars. The city mostly seems to be where those employers go to die even after obtaining sometimes massive government subsidies. Observation would imply that something is killing those businesses in the city and expanding them in the burbs and its probably not the theoretical "isolation" that observably seems to exist primarily in reverse. If burb offices are isolating, why is the economic growth in the immediate area so explosive compared to the dying subsidized urban areas?
usrusr 10y ago
The most basic message is not even that the isolation is bad, it is just that any perceptions of these new campuses being innovative are greatly exaggerated. It's startups turning into the IBMs of the next generation in action, go have fun celebrating that.

by benou 10y ago

VLM 10y ago

"isolated from the local community" What is there about the local community that is good, if most agree with the echo chamber view that all good exclusively comes from a small number of hyper selective ivies with very peculiar demographics? If the local community were good, why won't they get hired, why are they only vitally important to be nearby, yet not actually in contact? What is the metric or method where the quality of software, for instance, depends directly on distance to X, Y, Z? Why could someone possibly think X, Y, and Z only exist in urban areas? Ignorance not being much of a defense. If good can only come from young elite freshly grad white males as employees, is working near/in the ghetto a peculiar form of penance? "We wouldn't let them get an education for skin color reasons but we are good people because we will permit them empty the trash bins after hours out of the goodness of our hearts". "We don't hire coloreds or foreigners or girls here for culture fit reasons, only guys from the same frat at the same elite school, but we are a block away from several ethnic restaurants" appears to be the new "some of my best friends are blacks" for racists who don't get that they sound racist. Burb people and non-startup people are much more open minded than city people on average, more flexible, willing to try something new, a new lifestyle in a new area in new construction, etc. The article assumes parks and nature are an inherent evil, which seems outright weird. Also a severe case of neophillia where any historic architecture is inherently evil, but I like old buildings, they look cool... Something new is guaranteed to be new, not guaranteed to be better. Also history is long and something new is almost certainly a historical rehash that failed because of X, Y, and Z. History is circular not linear. "I wanna make a village (where I'm chief)" isn't innovative in 2016, it was innovative in 6000 BC. Its just part of the fad rotation today, and like all fads it can be ignored with little loss. Having worked in suburban office parks and extremely urban areas I'm mystified at the isolation thing. It seems to exist entirely in some peoples minds but not in reality. "support companies" seem to grow fabulously, sprawl like, profitably in the burbs almost despite local government opposition, endless buildings of retail and restaurants and bars. The city mostly seems to be where those employers go to die even after obtaining sometimes massive government subsidies. Observation would imply that something is killing those businesses in the city and expanding them in the burbs and its probably not the theoretical "isolation" that observably seems to exist primarily in reverse. If burb offices are isolating, why is the economic growth in the immediate area so explosive compared to the dying subsidized urban areas?

usrusr 10y ago

The most basic message is not even that the isolation is bad, it is just that any perceptions of these new campuses being innovative are greatly exaggerated. It's startups turning into the IBMs of the next generation in action, go have fun celebrating that.