5 ms·

> People will move to cities Why tf would you want this? As an European, what I loved about US was that people don't like being all crammed up in small, old an

by nnq 10y ago

> People will move to cities Why tf would you want this? As an European, what I loved about US was that people don't like being all crammed up in small, old and disgusting cities, and they are OK with long commutes as the price for their "house with lawn"... Population dispersal should be encouraged! It dramatically increases quality of life, and if you take a look at google maps you'll see that the Earth is full of unused space. Yeah, energy and climate change and all that are serious problems... but let's solve so that having solved them we can enjoy un-crammed living... Ideal world imho would one where cities and towns simply don't exist: it's individual homes or small-group-homes sprinkled around the planet, with "leisure centers" and "shopping centers" and "health centers" sprinkled uniformly between them, and large chunks of forest here + agricultural land here in-between them. It may sound extremely inefficient, but we have the technolgy to make it work now, so let's do it. Find something else to optimize, like making agriculture vertical instead, and let people live in the wide open spaces they enjoy! Why TF do we insist creating and optimizing these Urban Hells and then complain that anxiety and depression are eating us alive?!

adrianN 10y ago
That's all fine and dandy as long as you don't have a butt-in-chair job. I live in a city because I don't want to spend 20% of my waking life stuck in traffic. Once we figured all the post-scarcity stuff out, we might live like the Solarians, but for now it's just not practical.
- pif 10y ago
  > I live in a city because I don't want to spend 20% of my waking life stuck in traffic. That's an effect of too many businesses being concentrated in city centre, too. Disperse jobs as well as people, and life will be better.
  - lazaroclapp 10y ago
    Businesses are concentrated in city centers because that's where the people (i.e. potential employees) are. Even better, there is a robust market for both employees and employers, meaning people are not stuck in an area where only one company exists and everyone living in a 20 miles radius is not either a coworker or someone working a service industry job that gets half of its revenue from people working at your one available office employer. I don't think it would do much for ones quality of life to have to move every time one changes jobs.
    - pif 10y ago
      You presented an extreme vision. I was talking about spreading businesses around in suburbs, just like malls.
  - CalRobert 10y ago
    Sprawling cities welcome you with their better quality of life. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Angeles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Angeles See also: Atlanta, Houston.
    - pif 10y ago
      I don't know enough of those cities to understand whether you meant to be sarcastic. Please, add some context.
      - CalRobert 10y ago
        \s
- nnq 10y ago
  I have a "butt-in-chair" job, but it's more like "butt in any chair, anywhere one Earth, as long as I can get to a few in-person meetings every week"... yeah, I need to get my privileges checked, I know.
monodeldiablo 10y ago
I think you're romanticizing rural life. Statements like "it dramatically increases quality of life" or "Urban Hells [increase] anxiety and depression" are not backed up by any studies that I'm aware of, and make a lot of unreasonable assumptions. Cities are not part of some grand conspiracy. They're an emergent phenomenon. They exist because they're more efficient at delivering all sorts of value to individual citizens. They aren't just more efficient at concentrating physical resources (a fact you casually wave off, but that's nevertheless very important), they are also more efficient at concentrating social resources. Opportunities increase proportional to the number of connections in a human network, roughly following Metcalfe's Law. So, by moving to a dense urban area, an individual increases their slate of choices and potential for social/economic mobility. And, crucially, each new citizen increases the per capita value of the network to all current citizens. So individuals have powerful incentives to move to cities, and cities have powerful incentives to attract new citizens. This is the primary reason for the continued urbanization of the globe, but there are others. I take it that you're probably not gay, disabled, poor, politically subversive, or otherwise significantly different from the average rural person. If you were, you'd have a unique appreciation for how lonely and hostile your ideal world would be to people who don't fit the norm, and how much easier it is for people to find a welcoming community in a city than in a village. I was born in a tiny farming town and live in a rural village on an island these days, but I am extremely thankful that I spent 20 years of my life in a major city, with all the opportunities and diversity that entails. Yes, cities have their downsides, but I much prefer a world in which we have a choice of living densities, instead of your "utopia" of suburban monotony.
- nnq 10y ago
  My opinion is that dense cities unfairly favor extroverts and minglers/hustlers. People who like deep thought or long deep conversations with few people under not much time pressure (if you've already commuted 20min to talk to someone for 1h, you're gonna listed to them for that 1h most, likely not go adhd on them after first 15min...) Also, "social homogeneity" (all people in a spatial region having the same cultural background) is really underrated - it really helps you focus when you have deep intellectual/technical work to do when you don't have to always be on alert for "what makes everyone different" or "what joke/metaphor could happen to offend anyone different enough from you"... Interaction with "special people" who actually want to be recognized as such robs you of waaaay too much brainpower that could be invested in other things. Or mabey I just miss what I never had and I know I'll not have at least in the next 10 years :) ...in my brief interactions with "suburban monotony" in developed countries (rest of the world is a different story) I've really perceived it as heaven/utopia for people loving more personal space, depth, uninterrupted focus and "free attention".
CalRobert 10y ago
I gather you grew up in a European city. I can assure that that sprawling asphalt hellscape suburbs aren't exactly great either. However, I grew up in sprawling suburban asphalt hellscape, and now live in the core of an old European city. I still love it.
mahyarm 10y ago
Which european city did you grow up in? Some are better than others...
xtreme 10y ago
This is something I don't get about the HN crowd. I grew up in India, where overpopulation is a huge problem. However, if you look below the surface, it is not overpopulation; it is uneven distribution. There are only a few cities, and they are way too cramped with people. The decrease in quality of life is real. And most Indians do not own cars, they rely on public transit. If there were more smaller towns and good connectivity, people could live a lot more comfortably. One big issue with decentralization is that industries tend to congregate. However, there is no solid reason why modern offices need to be all located in the same downtown. Decentralization reduces density and discourages rent-seeking behavior by existing residents. I might be biased but I like suburbs. I think (without any data to support) they approach the optimal density for most people. Of course, some people find them bland and boring. Urban density is more efficient, no doubt, but I don't get the hate for people enjoying large backyards and the peace and quiet suburbs afford.
- lmm 10y ago
  > there is no solid reason why modern offices need to be all located in the same downtown My experience is that working in downtown is more productive - and, fundamentally, much more fun - than working in an office park or at home in the middle of nowhere. You can learn a lot from bouncing off people who work in similar-but-not-quite-the-same fields, and just having good lunch options is a huge win.
  - jschwartzi 10y ago
    Yeah, in my morning life I've developed a disgust with the modern office park and its wide open fields of asphalt. There's never anywhere to walk to to buy lunch, and they die after 6pm.
- naravara 10y ago
  >There are only a few cities, and they are way too cramped with people. The decrease in quality of life is real. And most Indians That really just means there aren't enough cities, not that everyone should cram into the ones there. The public infrastructure in India is also abysmal and inadequate to the numbers of people who live there. Tokyo is denser than Bangalore but is much more vibrant and livable (over 6k people per km compared to over 4k people per km) because of good planning, good regulations, and good transit.
lmm 10y ago
> Population dispersal should be encouraged! It dramatically increases quality of life Citation needed. My quality of life went way up when I moved to a big city: simply having many more people around means there can be a lot more things that cater for niche interests. Humans are social creatures and like having like-minded people around, and for those of us who are weird in various ways, a group of like-minded people is easier to find in a city. At the same time most people have multiple interests and want to be able to move in multiple circles - in a dispersed world I might be able to live in a programmer commune or an anime-fan commune or a goth/industrial music commune or a kink commune or a theatre commune, but I'd be unlikely to find all of them in the same place. (And that's a pretty closely-aligned set of interests as people go, I'm pretty boring). And if your solution is traveling to places of interest, remember that commuting is a huge drain on quality of life, and one that people often underestimate when choosing where to live. > Ideal world imho would one where cities and towns simply don't exist: it's individual homes or small-group-homes sprinkled around the planet, with "leisure centers" and "shopping centers" and "health centers" sprinkled uniformly between them, and large chunks of forest here + agricultural land here in-between them. Sounds pretty boring. What would anyone do in the evenings? Where would you go to work on something? Just working in one of a few office blocks clustered together and devoted to related industries, with a couple of restaurants and some bars/clubs, is a huge win - all those random meanings and social opportunities with people who are doing something similar, but not exactly the same, to what you do. But to sustain a cluster like that probably takes a city (I mean maybe you could build a programmer-startup-oriented small town, but I wouldn't want to live in it 24/7).
- vinay427 10y ago
  > Humans are social creatures and like having like-minded people around, and for those of us who are weird in various ways, a group of like-minded people is easier to find in a city. Out of curiosity, how did you go about finding a group in a city presumably distant from where you grew up?
  - lmm 10y ago
    Friends of friends. Ex-colleagues (easier to make friends with if your workplace is somewhere conducive to going for drinks after). Meetup and other Internet things. Going to a gig/theatre/... and starting conversations. Once you have one or two friends it becomes much easier to make more, because you go to social gatherings where you can talk to people and find more people you have something in common with and stay in touch with those, and when you do that in the big city most of the time they also live in the same city.

by nnq 10y ago

adrianN 10y ago

That's all fine and dandy as long as you don't have a butt-in-chair job. I live in a city because I don't want to spend 20% of my waking life stuck in traffic. Once we figured all the post-scarcity stuff out, we might live like the Solarians, but for now it's just not practical.

pif 10y ago
> I live in a city because I don't want to spend 20% of my waking life stuck in traffic. That's an effect of too many businesses being concentrated in city centre, too. Disperse jobs as well as people, and life will be better.
- lazaroclapp 10y ago
  Businesses are concentrated in city centers because that's where the people (i.e. potential employees) are. Even better, there is a robust market for both employees and employers, meaning people are not stuck in an area where only one company exists and everyone living in a 20 miles radius is not either a coworker or someone working a service industry job that gets half of its revenue from people working at your one available office employer. I don't think it would do much for ones quality of life to have to move every time one changes jobs.
  - pif 10y ago
    You presented an extreme vision. I was talking about spreading businesses around in suburbs, just like malls.
- CalRobert 10y ago
  Sprawling cities welcome you with their better quality of life. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Angeles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Angeles See also: Atlanta, Houston.
  - pif 10y ago
    I don't know enough of those cities to understand whether you meant to be sarcastic. Please, add some context.
    - CalRobert 10y ago
      \s
nnq 10y ago
I have a "butt-in-chair" job, but it's more like "butt in any chair, anywhere one Earth, as long as I can get to a few in-person meetings every week"... yeah, I need to get my privileges checked, I know.

monodeldiablo 10y ago

I think you're romanticizing rural life. Statements like "it dramatically increases quality of life" or "Urban Hells [increase] anxiety and depression" are not backed up by any studies that I'm aware of, and make a lot of unreasonable assumptions. Cities are not part of some grand conspiracy. They're an emergent phenomenon. They exist because they're more efficient at delivering all sorts of value to individual citizens. They aren't just more efficient at concentrating physical resources (a fact you casually wave off, but that's nevertheless very important), they are also more efficient at concentrating social resources. Opportunities increase proportional to the number of connections in a human network, roughly following Metcalfe's Law. So, by moving to a dense urban area, an individual increases their slate of choices and potential for social/economic mobility. And, crucially, each new citizen increases the per capita value of the network to all current citizens. So individuals have powerful incentives to move to cities, and cities have powerful incentives to attract new citizens. This is the primary reason for the continued urbanization of the globe, but there are others. I take it that you're probably not gay, disabled, poor, politically subversive, or otherwise significantly different from the average rural person. If you were, you'd have a unique appreciation for how lonely and hostile your ideal world would be to people who don't fit the norm, and how much easier it is for people to find a welcoming community in a city than in a village. I was born in a tiny farming town and live in a rural village on an island these days, but I am extremely thankful that I spent 20 years of my life in a major city, with all the opportunities and diversity that entails. Yes, cities have their downsides, but I much prefer a world in which we have a choice of living densities, instead of your "utopia" of suburban monotony.

nnq 10y ago
My opinion is that dense cities unfairly favor extroverts and minglers/hustlers. People who like deep thought or long deep conversations with few people under not much time pressure (if you've already commuted 20min to talk to someone for 1h, you're gonna listed to them for that 1h most, likely not go adhd on them after first 15min...) Also, "social homogeneity" (all people in a spatial region having the same cultural background) is really underrated - it really helps you focus when you have deep intellectual/technical work to do when you don't have to always be on alert for "what makes everyone different" or "what joke/metaphor could happen to offend anyone different enough from you"... Interaction with "special people" who actually want to be recognized as such robs you of waaaay too much brainpower that could be invested in other things. Or mabey I just miss what I never had and I know I'll not have at least in the next 10 years :) ...in my brief interactions with "suburban monotony" in developed countries (rest of the world is a different story) I've really perceived it as heaven/utopia for people loving more personal space, depth, uninterrupted focus and "free attention".

CalRobert 10y ago

I gather you grew up in a European city. I can assure that that sprawling asphalt hellscape suburbs aren't exactly great either. However, I grew up in sprawling suburban asphalt hellscape, and now live in the core of an old European city. I still love it.

mahyarm 10y ago

Which european city did you grow up in? Some are better than others...

xtreme 10y ago

This is something I don't get about the HN crowd. I grew up in India, where overpopulation is a huge problem. However, if you look below the surface, it is not overpopulation; it is uneven distribution. There are only a few cities, and they are way too cramped with people. The decrease in quality of life is real. And most Indians do not own cars, they rely on public transit. If there were more smaller towns and good connectivity, people could live a lot more comfortably. One big issue with decentralization is that industries tend to congregate. However, there is no solid reason why modern offices need to be all located in the same downtown. Decentralization reduces density and discourages rent-seeking behavior by existing residents. I might be biased but I like suburbs. I think (without any data to support) they approach the optimal density for most people. Of course, some people find them bland and boring. Urban density is more efficient, no doubt, but I don't get the hate for people enjoying large backyards and the peace and quiet suburbs afford.

lmm 10y ago
> there is no solid reason why modern offices need to be all located in the same downtown My experience is that working in downtown is more productive - and, fundamentally, much more fun - than working in an office park or at home in the middle of nowhere. You can learn a lot from bouncing off people who work in similar-but-not-quite-the-same fields, and just having good lunch options is a huge win.
- jschwartzi 10y ago
  Yeah, in my morning life I've developed a disgust with the modern office park and its wide open fields of asphalt. There's never anywhere to walk to to buy lunch, and they die after 6pm.
naravara 10y ago
>There are only a few cities, and they are way too cramped with people. The decrease in quality of life is real. And most Indians That really just means there aren't enough cities, not that everyone should cram into the ones there. The public infrastructure in India is also abysmal and inadequate to the numbers of people who live there. Tokyo is denser than Bangalore but is much more vibrant and livable (over 6k people per km compared to over 4k people per km) because of good planning, good regulations, and good transit.

lmm 10y ago

> Population dispersal should be encouraged! It dramatically increases quality of life Citation needed. My quality of life went way up when I moved to a big city: simply having many more people around means there can be a lot more things that cater for niche interests. Humans are social creatures and like having like-minded people around, and for those of us who are weird in various ways, a group of like-minded people is easier to find in a city. At the same time most people have multiple interests and want to be able to move in multiple circles - in a dispersed world I might be able to live in a programmer commune or an anime-fan commune or a goth/industrial music commune or a kink commune or a theatre commune, but I'd be unlikely to find all of them in the same place. (And that's a pretty closely-aligned set of interests as people go, I'm pretty boring). And if your solution is traveling to places of interest, remember that commuting is a huge drain on quality of life, and one that people often underestimate when choosing where to live. > Ideal world imho would one where cities and towns simply don't exist: it's individual homes or small-group-homes sprinkled around the planet, with "leisure centers" and "shopping centers" and "health centers" sprinkled uniformly between them, and large chunks of forest here + agricultural land here in-between them. Sounds pretty boring. What would anyone do in the evenings? Where would you go to work on something? Just working in one of a few office blocks clustered together and devoted to related industries, with a couple of restaurants and some bars/clubs, is a huge win - all those random meanings and social opportunities with people who are doing something similar, but not exactly the same, to what you do. But to sustain a cluster like that probably takes a city (I mean maybe you could build a programmer-startup-oriented small town, but I wouldn't want to live in it 24/7).

vinay427 10y ago
> Humans are social creatures and like having like-minded people around, and for those of us who are weird in various ways, a group of like-minded people is easier to find in a city. Out of curiosity, how did you go about finding a group in a city presumably distant from where you grew up?
- lmm 10y ago
  Friends of friends. Ex-colleagues (easier to make friends with if your workplace is somewhere conducive to going for drinks after). Meetup and other Internet things. Going to a gig/theatre/... and starting conversations. Once you have one or two friends it becomes much easier to make more, because you go to social gatherings where you can talk to people and find more people you have something in common with and stay in touch with those, and when you do that in the big city most of the time they also live in the same city.