4 ms·

> You, as a neighbor, get nothing. Meanwhile, you have to deal with additional traffic in the neighborhood; cars parked on the street; more people (quite possib

> You, as a neighbor, get nothing. Meanwhile, you have to deal with additional traffic in the neighborhood; cars parked on the street; more people (quite possibly of a different socioeconomic strata) coming and going; construction noise; higher property taxes; usually uglier buildings; blocked views; more crowded schools; and more load on public infrastructure. there was a time in this scenario when those schools and public infrastructure didn't exist. presumably, the thing which justified their build-out was an earlier increase in density. one would therefore expect further increases in density to justify more forms of (or larger scale) public infrastructure. what scenarios would lead one to value the existing public infrastructure but not value the future public infrastructure? is it just a problem of time horizons/discounting (i.e. that the negative externalities of upscaling are immediate while the positives accrue over a longer time period)? that would seem to align with the anecdote about seniors, at least. but then i'm curious how the original community ever overcame these tradeoffs in order to achieve enough density and construct the earlier forms of public infrastructure.

nostrademons 5y ago
Appropriate infrastructure for one scale usually isn't appropriate when the population grows 4-5x. A cluster of 4 1000-pop villages will usually share an elementary school, with students bussed 10-20 miles to it. A 4000-pop light suburban town will have its own elementary school, usually one where parents will drive their kids 1-2 miles to it. A 4000-pop dense suburban development will place a 1-2 story elementary school and associated park & fields inside the middle of the neighborhood, where most students can walk to it via footpaths without crossing major roads. A 4000-pop urban neighborhood will build a 4-6 story schoolhouse on a major avenue where all the students are close by. A cluster of villages or small towns will have 2-lane roads snaking between major village centers. A dense suburban neighborhood has a road hierarchy, 6-lane boulevards with commercial strip malls, fed by 2-lane residential streets. An urban neighborhood builds mass transit. In each case, you can't really upgrade the existing infrastructure to the point where it's appropriate for the new density. You have to tear it down and build it a different way, at a cost that's usually higher and more disruptive than just building it a different way in the first place. It makes me wonder why we don't have more bands of underhoused Millenials going off into the wilderness to found new cities. That's how we got the infrastructure in the first place: land developers generally subdivided undeveloped farm/ranch/wilderness land, and sold it to people living in overcrowded tenements in the city. Or in the case of Europe/Japan/Russia/China, bombed the hell out of each other until all the infrastructure was destroyed and then built new infrastructure from scratch to house the survivors. Perhaps a tongue-in-cheek-yet-actually-practical way of looking at this might be to treat cities as disposable, with a lifetime of a few generations, and then once the people outgrow them it's time to abandon the city and build a new one.
- wallacoloo 5y ago
  > It makes me wonder why we don't have more bands of underhoused Millenials going off into the wilderness to found new cities. the young people i know come to cities in an attempt to establish themselves socially (i.e. to explore and make connections with more people like them). density (in terms of people per unit of travel time) is hugely relevant to that: leave for the wilderness and the breadth of social ties open to you substantially decreases. this seems to me among one of the central generational conflicts in cities. young people primarily prefer city life for growing their social opportunities (and so a lot of them are interested in development/upscaling to facilitate that). AFAICT most families and older people come to cities for proximity to the basic needs, and either they don't value cities for the social component, or they're established enough that what they prefer is the stability of maintaining their existing ties v.s. growing new ones (so development/upscaling just gets in the way).

nostrademons 5y ago

Appropriate infrastructure for one scale usually isn't appropriate when the population grows 4-5x. A cluster of 4 1000-pop villages will usually share an elementary school, with students bussed 10-20 miles to it. A 4000-pop light suburban town will have its own elementary school, usually one where parents will drive their kids 1-2 miles to it. A 4000-pop dense suburban development will place a 1-2 story elementary school and associated park & fields inside the middle of the neighborhood, where most students can walk to it via footpaths without crossing major roads. A 4000-pop urban neighborhood will build a 4-6 story schoolhouse on a major avenue where all the students are close by. A cluster of villages or small towns will have 2-lane roads snaking between major village centers. A dense suburban neighborhood has a road hierarchy, 6-lane boulevards with commercial strip malls, fed by 2-lane residential streets. An urban neighborhood builds mass transit. In each case, you can't really upgrade the existing infrastructure to the point where it's appropriate for the new density. You have to tear it down and build it a different way, at a cost that's usually higher and more disruptive than just building it a different way in the first place. It makes me wonder why we don't have more bands of underhoused Millenials going off into the wilderness to found new cities. That's how we got the infrastructure in the first place: land developers generally subdivided undeveloped farm/ranch/wilderness land, and sold it to people living in overcrowded tenements in the city. Or in the case of Europe/Japan/Russia/China, bombed the hell out of each other until all the infrastructure was destroyed and then built new infrastructure from scratch to house the survivors. Perhaps a tongue-in-cheek-yet-actually-practical way of looking at this might be to treat cities as disposable, with a lifetime of a few generations, and then once the people outgrow them it's time to abandon the city and build a new one.

wallacoloo 5y ago
> It makes me wonder why we don't have more bands of underhoused Millenials going off into the wilderness to found new cities. the young people i know come to cities in an attempt to establish themselves socially (i.e. to explore and make connections with more people like them). density (in terms of people per unit of travel time) is hugely relevant to that: leave for the wilderness and the breadth of social ties open to you substantially decreases. this seems to me among one of the central generational conflicts in cities. young people primarily prefer city life for growing their social opportunities (and so a lot of them are interested in development/upscaling to facilitate that). AFAICT most families and older people come to cities for proximity to the basic needs, and either they don't value cities for the social component, or they're established enough that what they prefer is the stability of maintaining their existing ties v.s. growing new ones (so development/upscaling just gets in the way).