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The conclusion is clear—American cities are built for cars, not people. I find it interesting how many posts here bemoan the lack of community in their lives w

• joe-collins 6y ago
  That's a foregone conclusion. The problem has been discussed ad nauseam. This article/book is more valuable than yet another rehash: it covers extant solutions to the problem.
  • tolbish 6y ago
    Yet many people here don't believe the problem actually exists, so it's far from forgone. The idea that a third place should be a central part of one's life is not a very common perspective, and such a place is rarely planned for. Take any thread on HN about housing and you only see housing being considered for (1) square footage or (2) how it advances one's career.
    • joe-collins 6y ago
      Fair, then. I hadn't considered the blinding effect of HN's extremely atypical demographic.
• austincheney 6y ago
  Worse, most of the people who bemoan lack of community can’t remove themselves from a ridiculously tiny screen 4 inches from their face.
  • aserafini 6y ago
    Well, that made me put my phone away (or it will do, after writing this comment)!
  • redis_mlc 6y ago
    Worse is earbud headphones. 1) I don't know how young people meet each other in real life when both men and women self-isolate with earbuds now. Unless taking your earbuds out is a signal you're interested? Maybe somebody can fill me in. 2) I knew a young IT graduate who wore earbuds at work. He had the chance to listen and discuss many topics with world-class software and IT engineers, except he couldn't hear them.
    • viraptor 6y ago
      The earbuds in are a suggestion you're not interested in conversation. Many people also are not interested in random conversation... ever. As much as I'm happy to meet people in social environments, I don't want anyone to randomly start talking to me on a street. And I'm not even "young people" anymore. Your IT graduate made their own choices - maybe they wanted to do their job and go home rather than discuss with world-class people. Or maybe they had problems with concentration or noise. Some people are introverts, or have busy life you're not a part of and never see, or just have different priorities. It's ok.
      • abdullahkhalids 6y ago
        I understand that you don't want to talk to random people on the street, but I disagree strongly with "just doing your job" mentality. If you have any sort of creative output job where you work within a team (engineering, academia, some artistic endeavors), things are different. Companies often pay for their employees to attend professional and technical development workshops or go to conferences, because part of your job is to improve your skills. Casual water cooler talks do the same thing; they improve your skills, and help initiate creative ideas that ultimately help build better things. In my own PhD, I saw supervisors demand their students attend department get together, bar hangouts at conferences, and even casually talk to other people in the dept. If I was a manager of creative types, I would absolutely rate someone who didn't "waste their time" at work lower, because if your job description is to create, you need to do reasonable things to improve your creative skills and outputs.
        • 6y ago
  • mmmeff 6y ago
    Sad to see the truth in this conversation buried so low. Whether you're in a city or a suburb, there's plenty of community to be found or made if you put the effort in. The problem is our culture is being eroded away with each minute spent using the internet. I struggle with this problem daily - as a web developer, my job is to fight for people's attention. I strive to build as good of a UX as possible and serve interesting content to users in the name of getting more clicks, more ad impressions, and more revenue. This is happening at a global scale, with ever more companies fighting over the individual's attention span to make a buck. Attention is a finite resource. If we capture 2 hours of your day, then you lose 2 hours you could have spent making friends at a local volunteer group while improving your community. I feel like we're cannibalizing society. All that being said, I think online communities are a wonderful thing, but psychologically, they lack something important. People feel lonelier than ever while having more access to new communities of like-minded people than ever before. I'm hoping VR/AR helps bridge this gap, but this in-between phase we're in is just kind of depressing.
• abellerose 6y ago
  Religion causes mental illness. So no, less church is a good thing. Affordable housing is the solution but sadly nobody has thought of a way to structure it into reality.
  • sattoshi 6y ago
    Is this the type of comment you think belongs here?
    • ThePowerOfFuet 6y ago
      Someone was once quoted as having said that mankind will not truly be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest; while I don't generally condone violence, I am of the opinion that they might indeed have been on to something.
      • rolleiflex 6y ago
        Kings and priests are machinations of man, they exist not as external adversaries, blights unto who would otherwise be naturally enlightened, but a salve to our deep, innate need for surety, protection, charms against the fear of the unknown. If it's true that mankind won't be truly free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest, mankind won't truly ever be so, because it'll invariably be the last one to die who is the king, and the one before, the priest. We might as well make peace with it.
        • ajmadesc 6y ago
          That read like poetry
      • viraptor 6y ago
        There's a difference between religion and church as an organisation with structure. As much as I grew up with catholic church all around and hope it goes down at some point, I don't mind people having the related religion. You don't need any priest to tell you what beliefs are correct or not.
• Lio 6y ago
  I like your suggestion but for many people, such as myself, church is probably not a solution. It's not that I don't think that religion provides community or a decent ethical foundation. I just don't believe in the supernatural or any belief system that requires the breaking of the Second Law of Thermodynamics without any explanation of how. Still the social aspects of religion are interesting. What does "more church" look like if you're an atheist? More participatory sports clubs maybe? Or, more things you can walk to and do regularly with the same people in general?
  • warent 6y ago
    I think you misread their comment... They're saying we should rethink housing priorities rather than look to church. EDIT: I see the confusion now, it is actually ambiguous, maybe you read it right
    • jgtrosh 6y ago
      I think it would be less ambiguous if they wrote “comes to people's mind”
    • tolbish 6y ago
      No you were right. Too late to edit my comment now, however.
  • vmception 6y ago
    I get a kick off how consciousness is simultaneously fungible, able to react to stimuli without a nervous system, and ephemeral, with no ability to quantify any of that at all Even the unorganized religions rely on this trichotomy without any explanation or coherence I would be open to any outcome, just quantify the rules and mechanisms
  • viraptor 6y ago
    There are some secular church equivalents as well. For example https://www.sundayassembly.com/ https://www.sundayassembly.com/ for people who want some celebration and community, but don't care about the religious aspects. Otherwise as you mentioned, some hobbies are my church. Local coworking is my church too.
• AmericanChopper 6y ago
  As a car owning suburbanite, I can’t shake the suspicion that people who complain about lack of community, in actuality just have a lack of social skills. I know all my neighbors, and talk to them on a daily basis. I know all the people who own or work in the local businesses that I frequently go to. I know many of the people who frequently go to the same coffee shops and bars that I frequently go to. I know all the people who work at the butcher, and at the fish market, and at the grocery store that I frequently go to, and always have a conversation about something with them when I go in. All of that feels a lot like community to me. Yet I have the very strong suspicion that if somebody who likes to bemoan a lack of community moved in down the road from me, they’d probably just keep on bemoaning it.
  • codemac 6y ago
    > the butcher, and at the fish market, and at the grocery store Those are all just commerce that you commute to, though. As someone who worked in the service industry for years, 99% of the people I met at work (the "regulars", the overly chatty parents who haven't seen an adult this month, etc) I would never consider part of my community. How many conversations do you have with members of your community that you're not buying something from?
    • AmericanChopper 6y ago
      Most of them... a majority of them would be other people who go to the same places I go. That said, most relationships in a community of people are going to be at least somewhat superficial, because nobody can maintain deep personal relationships with hundreds of people. The idea that the whole thing is just a cynical commercial racket is silly though. Building a real relationship with your community is the whole point of small local business. A lot of those relationships are genuine friendships. The owner of my local coffee shop invites my wife and I over for dinner every so often, and vice versa. I had my local butcher over a couple of weeks ago because he wanted me to teach him how to make beef rendang. Even if commerce underlies the relationship, it can still be entirely community based.
      • 6y ago
• thefounder 6y ago
  >> more church I would rather like to see more enjoyable activities such hackathons, festivals, contests etc. Church/religions are outdated and most of them(i.e the major ones) just exploit your fears.
  • jeofken 6y ago
    Fearing God is important in Christianity, but let’s think about what that means? If “God” is the label we place on the force/spirit of creation/life in this world, then “fearing God” means to respect and subject yourself to the truth about this creation rather than considering yourself above it. The most concrete example is understanding that attempting to break the laws of physics by “flying” off a cliff is unwise. Among Christians it’s also common to interpret it as recognising that going against the “will” of this force that created us (concretely natural selection as well as however the universe and life of earth came to be) will bite you in the arse, such as rejecting family (life) for vanity for example. If one instead fears judgement from fellow men in church, you should disregard the fear and forgive those who judge you - because standing above a fellow man is the sin of thinking you’re of a higher intrinsic value which also is not fearing God. It’s not expressed in precise scientific language but rather colourful, poetic, narrative, and philosophical language, because it is ideas older than Newton, but it does not require supernatural claims, not is it about fearing other people. Not trying to change your mind or person - but encourage you to continue discovering philosophy and religion
    • nyanmatt 6y ago
      You have an excellent point of view on religion. Recently I’ve come to the same conclusion that religion isn’t supposed to be supernatural mumbo-jumbo, but rather ancient science — previously known as “natural philosophy“.
      • lotsofpulp 6y ago
        > Recently I’ve come to the same conclusion that religion isn’t supposed to be supernatural mumbo-jumbo, but rather ancient science Science calls for the use of data, and constantly modifying and updating knowledge based on data. Religion, or at least all the implementations of it that I know, are not about throwing out the old if new, conflicting data is discovered. As far as I can tell, religion is a relic from tribal days, and still serves much of the same purpose today. It can assist in societies without formed legal systems and can help foster higher trust within its members. Humans have insufficient time to evaluate all of the motivations and priorities of others, and religion provides a nice framework with all the various social events and traditions for the tribe to coalesce around. Growing up, I learned that plausible deniability is very important for humans. For the same reasons that flirting is a thing, it’s not beneficial for someone to walk around with an explicit list of people/tribes they value over others, in push comes to shove scenarios. But it is beneficial to signal it implicitly, and going along this line of thought gets into politics.
• refurb 6y ago
  "Built for cars, not people" is a bit of silly premise. It's "built for people who want cars, not people who don't want cars". I lived in Singapore for a while and there was a very strong demand for cars. This is despite a world class public transport system and very high fees/taxes on owning a car. The point is, having a car is a luxury that many people desire. Even with public transport alternatives.
  • Emma_Goldman 6y ago
    I have spent my life in Europe and when I visited Chicago a few years back I thought the extent to which the city was built around car-use was grotesque. There's little outdoor, organic urban life, and it's horribly difficult to just walk the city.
    • refurb 6y ago
      Where in Chicago? The core of Chicago is very non-car friendly.
      • kgermino 6y ago
        It really isn’t [very non-car friendly]. There are nice string of parks along the lake, but the loop area as a whole constantly sacrifices nice outdoor space in exchange for a bit more driving room. That’s starting to change but we’re still a long way away from a European style city center.
        • refurb 6y ago
          Is Europe somehow the ideal? I don’t think so. I’ve been to Europe and seen the mass of cars in the down town core and shit parking situation. I’d say chicago doing is pretty good compared to Europe. My overall point is despite good mass transit and dense housing, when people can afford it it, many people prefer cars.
          • ljm 6y ago
• burntoutfire 6y ago
  I lived in cities all my life and never lived in suburbs, but can't imagine cities being much better, as there's literally almost no community at all in cities either. People just don't do stuff with their neighbors or largely don't even talk to them. The older ones, who've been in the building for decades, at least know the names of the other older ones and maybe a little bit about them (where they work, what's their family structure etc.). Younger gen is mostly completely isolated though. At least that's my experience.
  • toyg 6y ago
    Indeed, but this is not new. There is plenty of literature about one of the main allures (and perils) of moving to the city: being free from your neighbours’ judgement and relationships. For many, this is still a desirable characteristic. Arguably, there might have been recent developments that removed even the last shreds of compulsory relationships, but we already were 90% of the way there. When it comes to relationships, cities just work on a pull model, where small towns worked on a push model.
    • deleted 6y ago
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    • etrautmann 6y ago
      Interesting idea, but most cities I’ve lived in have even closer compulsory relationships via homeowners associations. Even if you rent it’s hard to get away from your neighbors if you want that.
      • deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
      • toyg 6y ago
        I grew up in a block in Europe. The equivalent body met once a month at best, you could even delegate someone to attend for you. I don’t think that’s anywhere near the sort of web you end in when growing in a small town, particularly if your folks have been around for more than a generation.
• msla 6y ago
  "More church" is not what's happening, unless you focus on the Evangelicals, which are actively repellent to many people. Mainline Protestantism, for example, is in decline: Mainline Protestant churches represented the "default" Christianity for generations of moderates, and by moderates I mean both moderate in religion and moderate in politics. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mainline_Protestant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mainline_Protestant These days, they're losing members to a growing irreligion, people who can find everything they need without joining any religious faith and, perhaps more importantly, can remain irreligious without suffering a serious social disability. (There are still places where the first icebreaker question is "What church do you go to?" and not having a good answer is not really an option if you wish to get along.) Therefore, expecting the old standbys to pick up the slack isn't going to work. https://religionunplugged.com/news/2019/8/30/as-nones-increase-mainline-protestantism-is-headed-for-an-age-cliff https://religionunplugged.com/news/2019/8/30/as-nones-increa... The above has some great quotes: > "People are either being intentionally and intensely religious – like really active evangelicals, or conservative Catholics, or yada yada – or they're leaving the more moderate churches that we've always seen as holding down the middle of religious life in this country," he said. "We've ended up with two trends that appear to be related. We're losing moderation in the political space in American life and we're losing moderation in the religious space, as well." > The political implications of these trends are complex, he said. But there does seem to be a Big Idea at the heart of it all: Millions of Americans, especially young adults, have decided that "religious" equals "Republican." > Burge put it this way on Twitter, describing how doctrines can affect public life: "There is no religious group in the U.S. that places itself halfway between the political parties. Instead, every religious tradition has a 'baked-in' political preference now. Nones favor Democrats. Christians (by and large) favor the GOP."
  • deleted 6y ago
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• gfxgirl 6y ago
  The stereotype is you live in the suburbs and know all your neighbors. Maybe even have block parties 2 or 3 times a year. Where as the stereotype for cities is you live in an apartment building closer to way more people than in the suburbs but know none of them. No idea how much it holds but it fits my experience.
  • emj 6y ago
    My experience is that neither of those two "groups" have parties with their neighbours. I think it might be too hard to generalize about things, the most sociable place I've lived in was Sopocachi in La Paz a high density walkable area, but I've never experienced anything like that anywhere else so it might be an outlier.
  • LeanderK 6y ago
    I live in a smaller german city and I know my neighbours. Before I lived more suburban (though 10 minutes with the train into the city) and I knew none because most were old I was a student sharing a home with other students. Some complained about us being loud after 10pm. The stereotype is meant as something positive, but I associate something negative with it. I grew up suburban and I just can't imagine ever moving back. It's so boring, dull and while there's more proximity, you are so bound to you environment. If you don't fit in the you have a problem. I didn't fit in later in school, I didn't get bullied or anything, but I just lacked people with the same interest. I found them in the city in the 10th grade, so I started to commute by train into the city every wednesday after school and on the weekends. They were weird, looked weird and interested in music, art and protecting the environment. I regularly feel asleep saturday night on the central station because I missed my train and had to wait hours. I understand the positive association but the only thing I associate with it is being locked in in an environment you have no control over because it is not by choice but by geographic proximity. I don't want parties with people on my block, I want parties with my friends. Preferably every weekend until the sun starts to rise again and I am exhausted but happy. Writing this was very interesting for me, I never really tried to reflect why I so strongly despise the idea of moving again into something suburban.
• baron_harkonnen 6y ago
  > lack of community in their lives when so many people live in isolated areas. Isolated areas, or at least small towns, tend to have much stronger communities than I've found in cities. Anytime I've lived in a city most "communities" that evolve tend to revolve around work. Live in a small town for a few years and you'll likely be part of multiple small communities interested in different things. I used to live in a pretty isolated smallish city and knew almost all of the owners of every restaurant I ate at and store I visited. I was active in a range of different communities with many different interests. If you live in some extremely isolated area, like out in rural Maine, you'll likely be at least acquaintances with literally every person in town. The grocery store clerk and the owner of the town lumber yard will know something about you, at see you as part of their community. When you go grocery shopping it's rare to see only strangers. Every apartment I've lived in in cities I've only vaguely known my neighbors, but in my first move to the suburbs I was instantly greeted by everyone around me, we exchanged numbers and had a small party. My experience is that, generally speaking, community increases with the distance from the city center. One particular exception would be a dead zone in certain mass produced suburbs (the ring of death around Denver CO. being a good example).
  • tjr225 6y ago
    > My experience is that, generally speaking, community increases with the distance from the city center. My experience has been the opposite. Moreover, in a large city, I get to choose my community as opposed to being forced into being in one due to mere proximity.
    • ivanhoe 6y ago
      > I get to choose my community This is a key, in a city you need to be proactive about it, or if not interested you can fully avoid any interaction and no one cares. In small places, you have to interact at least a little with people around you, or you'll be labeled as a weirdo. And also you're more often in need of someone helping you with something, as not everything is around the corner and readily available like in big cities.
  • aiisjustanif 6y ago
• mmmeff 6y ago
  We get it, you bike to work.