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This is the sort of thing I think about when the pro-urban/pro-density/anti-car people talk about their vision for the world. I live in a city now, and the lack

This is the sort of thing I think about when the pro-urban/pro-density/anti-car people talk about their vision for the world. I live in a city now, and the lack of substantial nature is suffocating to the extent that I plan to move. The idea that we should all live this way to conserve space—a resource which is only scarce in these urban places—seems excessive to put it mildly. EDIT: A lot of urban folks are rebutting my “substantial nature” complaint with references to their city’s parks, which is amusingly illustrative of our differing perspectives. I was thinking “mountains and forests”, not just green spaces scattered amid the concrete. EDIT 2: A lot of urban folks are talking like the suburbs are swallowing up the countryside. I’m sure they’ve grown, but it’s still a big world out there people. I can’t recommend a cross-country road trip enough. Y’all need to leave your cities once in a while and see the world that you have such strong opinions about! :)

tjr225 5y ago
You’re presenting a false dichotomy. There are plenty of dense places with incredible nature within just an hours drive. In the USA, Maybe not so much outside of the West Coast of the USA however. Personally, living in a city close to nature(seattle area) has been the best thing for me so far in my life; I have spent a stupid amount of money making it happen but wouldn’t trade it for anything. On the flip side it’s not for everybody, so don’t just take my word for it. On the other hand I will be riding my bike to a ferry, and then riding to a camp site on a beach on an island after work on Friday- weather permitting.
- aix1 5y ago
  Yes, this is absolutely a false dichotomy. I live in Zurich, with access to varied nature (hills, lake, river) all within a 15 minutes' walk and lots of stunning scenery easily accessible by train.
- throwaway894345 5y ago
  Yeah, I didn’t mean to frame it as a dichotomy, but it was a HN comment so I didn’t explore the full depth of nuance, and it was scoped to the US. Yes, some places are dense while still allowing some access to nature.
  - tjr225 5y ago
    No worries! I have lived in dense places on the east coast too and always felt super cramped in them as well.
- john61 5y ago
  Vienna even has a national park in the city. (Lobau Nationalpark)
- sdenton4 5y ago
  The bay area is great in this front as well. I live in the east Bay and it's an easy bike ride to redwood groves...
- Grimburger 5y ago
  > within just an hours drive Wow that's depressing, I live in a very high density area by western standards and there's 50,000 acres of pristine rainforest literally on my doorstep while the mall is 5 minutes drive away and the city centre is 15 mins. During covid even the rare and endangered gibbons would come out hang out in the street. Everytime I go back to Australia it seems like a suburban dystopia with 8 lane roads 60kms from the actual city. People commuting 2+ hours a day is the norm there.
  - throwaway2037 5y ago
    You wrote: <<there's 50,000 acres of pristine rainforest literally on my doorstep while the mall is 5 minutes drive away and the city centre is 15 mins>> Woah. Where do you live? This sounds "impossible". Singapore or Kuala Lumpur?
    - ourlordcaffeine 5y ago
      The presence of gibbons probably means somewhere in Malaysia or Singapore
- silicon2401 5y ago
  > There are plenty of dense places with incredible nature within just an hours drive. What a hilarious example of what the original commenter was saying. Apparently you think having nature an hour away is acceptable, or at least counts as being close to nature. As a very anti-urban person, I consider that nightmarish. I'm glad other people like that kind of world, and hope they all keep moving to the cities to leave the rest of the world open and spacious for the rest of us.
- aqme28 5y ago
  I live in Berlin. I can take public transit to the forest or beautiful swimmable lakes. And there are tons of parks within the city.
ahartmetz 5y ago
I live in Berlin, which contains many trees and parks. One of the nicest quarters of Berlin is Gartenstadt (garden city) Frohnau, which feels like houses in the forest - at decent density. So it doesn't have to be either city or nature. But I'm afraid that current cost structures and short-term thinking make another Gartenstadt very unlikely. Well. It may be that this kind of place only really works as a suburb. It does have a small center (shops, cafes, doctors, church etc) that people can walk to, which in turn has public transport to the actual city.
- aiyen 5y ago
  Same for the Netherlands. Urban cities integrated with nature. Large parks that can be easily biked to. It’s a great balance. It’s harder to have the best of both worlds in the United States though.
- User23 5y ago
  There’s virtually no wildernesses in Europe. Even the famous Black Forest is more of a large public garden than nature. It does still get somewhat wild up in the Alps, but you might find it hard to notice with all the manicured farms and a Gasthof on every hilltop.
- nicbou 5y ago
  Berlin has large parks in the city, and even larger ones at the edges. It doesn't only work as a suburb - people in any central Kiez are within walking distance of a park. I love that city for that. Milan felt claustrophobic without all the parks.
  - bakuninsbart 5y ago
    Due to the unique history and political situation (city state), the city also just "suddenly ends", with little suburban sprawl. That said, Germany is so densely populated overall that there are few areas of "untouched" nature that the topl level commenter seems to be craving for.
    - 5y ago
cancelkooks 5y ago
I am very pro-pedestrian / anti-car, but that’s in the context of how to actually get around town most of the time… obviously (to me) you use the car to leave town and see the wonders of our world. If people that live in cities are to be relegated to never leave, I for one am not interested.
- stephen_g 5y ago
  Yeah, cities that have good enough transit, you often don't need to own a car, and can use an on-demand rental service for this kind of thing. (You locate a nearby car in the app and then unlock it through the app when you get to it). It's usually way, way cheaper than owning a car, and handy because for example, if you need to move stuff, you can get a van, and otherwise you can get a smaller car. You don't fall into the trap of driving a big SUV empty all of the time just in case you want to move gear, and then when you have to move stuff to realise that a lot of SUVs don't actually have that much more space than a decent sized hatchback!
  - throwaway894345 5y ago
    > It's usually way, way cheaper than owning a car It’s usually cheaper than each person owning their own car, but more expensive than a household sharing a car. Of course, this varies widely from city to city and it depends on how often people rent cars or use rideshare or taxis. The nice thing is you get fast, comfortable transit all the time, but the really nice thing is how much stuff you take advantage of that you might not otherwise. For example, I’m already paying for a car, so going on big road trips is only a marginal extra cost (rather than $100/day + hassle for a car rental). Similarly, I probably wouldn’t have gotten into camping if I had to rent a car for each trip. I probably also wouldn’t visit family as often. I definitely see the appeal of not needing to own a car, but I tried it and it wasn’t for me. For my city, I’d love to see them start by cleaning up and policing existing public transit (for example) and then scale up from there.
vkou 5y ago
The suburbs don't actually present a solution to this. There is no more nature in them than there is in any other urban environment. It's all manicured lawns and endless pavement, and you can't even walk to a park, because getting anywhere requires hopping into a car. If you want to see nature, you have to live way out in the boonies, on at a minimum, two-acre lots. If everyone lived like that, we'd all have two-hour commutes on twenty-lane highways.
- ajmurmann 5y ago
  Arguably, the suburbs make this worse, since you now need to drive through even more urban sprawl to get to true nature.
- throwaway894345 5y ago
  I wasn’t advocating for suburbs. There are more options besides suburbs and urban areas—you should check them out! > If you want to see nature, you have to live way out in the boonies, on at a minimum, two-acre lots. If everyone lived like that, we'd all have two-hour commutes on twenty-lane highways. What a strange comment! Millions of people live with reasonable access to nature and most of them don’t have 2 acre lots nor do they need “twenty-lane highways”. Y’all urban folks need to venture out of your cities once in a while—it’s a biiiiggg world out there.
  - spencerflem 5y ago
    I don't quite get your point, are you suggesting to live near nature or to have the ability to access nature when you want to? If the second, I really don't see how taking cars out of urban centers and making nice walkable people-focused areas stops you from taking a bus out and biking the rest of the way, or even renting a car once you're out of the city part
    - throwaway894345 5y ago
      > I don't quite get your point, are you suggesting to live near nature or to have the ability to access nature when you want to? Both? I’m not really sure how these are different given that proximity is the limiting factor in access. > If the second, I really don't see how taking cars out of urban centers and making nice walkable people-focused areas stops you from taking a bus out and biking the rest of the way, or even renting a car once you're out of the city part I’m not sure what you’re arguing here. I certainly don’t have a problem with making urban areas more walkable. That said, an hour of driving after work isn’t going to get you past the suburbs in most US cities, which means you’re limited to weekend trips and if you’re spending every weekend trying to get out of the city it’s worth asking if city life is optimal for you.
NumberWangMan 5y ago
To give a different perspective, I enjoyed the parks much more living in London than I do now, living in a sprawling suburb in the Dallas metroplex. In London I could walk to the park in 5 minutes. Here I'm lucky that it's only about a 7 minute walk, but the walk to and from is much less pleasant, having to cut through alleys and paths that were clearly an afterthought, while the park itself feels much more urban/artificial than the ones in London did. (To be fair, London has great parks) Density can coexist with ample green space. Remember that you don't need anything like Manhattan density to make things walkable. In my book, suburbs are only a problem to the degree that their design forces driving on residents. My vision for a perfect city has plenty of parks.
- throwaway894345 5y ago
  When I was talking about nature, I wasn’t thinking about city parks, but rather proper forests and mountains. City parks don’t do it for me—I need to get away from the cars and crowds. But to your point, yes, there are lots of cities with great city parks for those who are content with that sort of thing.
jltsiren 5y ago
When I've lived in a dense city, there have always been large natural areas within walking distance. The ideal is something like 1/2 of the land as lots, 1/3 as parks, and 1/6 for streets and other paved areas. "Parks" includes both developed urban parks and larger forested/coastal areas with wide walking trails. The trade-off is that there is not much space for ground-level parking, and most people commuting from outside the city must use public transport.
evancox100 5y ago
The more you let people build up, the more ground can be left as green space. No one is against park. Land area/space in general is not scarce. What is scarce is land area near job centers (or more broadly, near where people want to spend their time outside the home.) The more you spread people out, the more car dependent the city, necessitating more roads and parking lots.
- throwaway894345 5y ago
  I don’t have any problems with people building up, but I’m very skeptical that the space between tall buildings will be made into parks, and anyway a city park is not what I would consider “nature”. For folks who want density and can content themselves with urban green spaces, I wish you well on your quest to build taller and denser, just please don’t impose that on everyone! :)
  - jawarner 5y ago
    Not all urban parks are created equally. I live close to a park 100s of acres in size in a city (Austin, TX).
    - throwaway894345 5y ago
      We just have different standards for “nature”. If it’s hundreds of acres of undisturbed forest and you can’t see or hear the city, then it’ll probably scratch the itch, but most large urban parks are mostly grass, gardens, sports fields, playgrounds, etc with a few acres of feel-good wetlands or prairie or bird sanctuary sprinkled around. “Acres” does not nature make.
  - brailsafe 5y ago
    Honestly I feel like you're just failing to precisely represent what you're wanting. Here's what I think you're getting at, definitely tell me if I'm off. 1) Cities, whether they're sprawling or dense, or park-laden or not, can be suffocating. It just so happens that yours atm is less park-laden. Thus, your advice for exclusively urban people, is to actually put the effort in to get into real nature; into the mountains, the isolated wilderness, the lakes, etc.. because there's a serenity like that you can't get with facsimiles like neighborhood parks 2) Space between high rises isn't used all that effectively. I think this is particularly a problem with downtown core areas moreso than downtown adjacent areas in a lot of cities. I'm personally not anti-car outright, just anti-car as a primary means of day to day utility oriented travel and the design of urban spaces that prioritize that over others. If you walk or bike or skateboard most of the time, you develop a feeling for the space you're doing that in, and it has an affect on your life. If you're only walking through parking lots, on broken old slabs of sidewalk that nobody cares about, with no flowers or trees or cats or people around, you're going to want to avoid that. I'm a huge advocate for building your immediate surroundings so they facilitate healthy and sustainable living (the opposite of broken parking lots in a suburbab wasteland) but also for getting the fuck out of the whole city pretty often if you can. I rent a car to do this, and might buy a beater in the future to have more flexibility in that respect, but definitely get the hell out once in a while if you can.
astrange 5y ago
Increasing urban density also increases the amount of nature because you aren't building suburbs on top of it. eg Silicon Valley would be one of the world's most productive fruit farming regions if we hadn't covered it in single family houses in 1950. Note there is a kind of "towers in the park" urbanism seen in China that actually is a bad balance between the two and kind of unpleasant to live in.
ehnto 5y ago
Anti-car is pro-nature not pro concrete jungle. Cars are a big part of why we have a concrete jungle and not nature intersected with density. Think of cities with substantial nature passages, botanic gardens and reserves throughout. Not just one big one but many. Suburbia isn't nature either, at least not standard suburbia. It's carbon intense lawn, concrete and asphalt. A front lawn and a big tree isn't nature. The pro-car angle seeks to expand suburbia, and destroy more and more nature. You may see more greenery but it's just grass and the odd pasture. I don't think anyone in the anti-car movement is saying, don't drive to a national park or mountain. The anti-car movement is about removing cars from the city and reducing the impact of suburbia on the greater area, which includes national parks.
- throwaway894345 5y ago
  Why do people keep framing this as a dichotomy between urban areas and suburbs? I agree that suburbs aren’t “nature”, obviously. There’s a lot more to the US than urban cores and suburbs.
  - otikik 5y ago
    I can’t claim to have visited all major cities in the US, but they do seem to match the “urban core and suburbs” pattern, compared with my experiences visiting European cities. Not Just Bikes has a video about that: https://youtu.be/CCOdQsZa15o https://youtu.be/CCOdQsZa15o
  - pharmakom 5y ago
    Because people have to live somewhere.
    - throwaway894345 5y ago
      To my point they don't have to live exclusively in suburbs or cities. Exurbs, towns, villages, acreages, boonies, entirely off-grid, etc are all options. There's a whole world out there--it's pretty mind-blowing if you've never ventured beyond suburbs before.
edmundsauto 5y ago
The three options are to build densely, or to sprawl over into nature spaces, or to have fewer children.
- throwaway894345 5y ago
  We’re already having fewer children, and anyway there’s a whole lot of space out there. You talk like Chicago and LA are nearly bordering each other.
  - alistairSH 5y ago
    Boston, NYC, Philly, Baltimore, DC, and Richmond are practically bordering each other these days.
    - throwaway894345 5y ago
      Sure, but the country is a fair bit bigger than the northern east coast. There's lots of opportunity out there.
null_object 5y ago
> when the pro-urban/pro-density/anti-car people talk about their vision for the world Beggars belief your response to an article on the psychological and health benefits of nature is… more cars? Building roads, urban sprawl, the noise and pollution from the cars themselves, the destructive invasion of all the infrastructure associated with car-use - all of it is directly destructive of the nature we’re talking about.
- throwaway894345 5y ago
  > Beggars belief your response to an article on the psychological and health benefits of nature is… more cars? Of course, I didn’t say that, I only said the pro-density utopia sounds super bleak to me. Anyway, there’s still plenty of space out there and all of the urban people in this thread are talking like they’ve never seen other parts of the country before—there’s still a whole bunch of space between New York and San Fran—it’s not the endless suburbs you seem to be imagining.
Teknoman117 5y ago
I've spent the last year living at my parents' cabin in the woods. It's right next to Jackson state forest. They've got 8 acres of land full of wildlife and redwoods. Waking up and stepping out onto the deck in the morning feels like crawling out of your tent when camping. But now it's back to SF as the office is reopening. I won't miss driving 3+ hours to see friends, but I will miss the scenery.
- throwaway894345 5y ago
  That sounds beautiful!
ls15 5y ago
> A lot of urban folks are rebutting my “substantial nature” complaint with references to their city’s parks One important aspect of nature is the ability to escape people. Most city parks cannot do that.
- throwaway894345 5y ago
  I agree. That was my point, in case that’s not evident.
standardUser 5y ago
"not just green spaces scattered amid the concrete" Most major cities have at least one park that is a few hundred acres.
- throwaway894345 5y ago
  A few hundred acres of forest is very different than a few hundred acres of soccer pitches, tennis courts, playgrounds, lawns, gardens, etc with a few acres of bird sanctuary, wetland, or prairie strewn about. It’s better than concrete, but it’s not nature.
  - standardUser 5y ago
    Most towns and suburbs don't have acres of wild forest in them. That's not exactly a unique "flaw" of cities.
    - throwaway894345 5y ago
      What a bizarre constraint. Of course the forest isn’t in the town. You live in a suburb or town or (this is going to blow some minds in this thread) acreage outside of town that is at most a reasonable drive to nature. My criticism of cities is that a lot of them are hours away from anything that anyone would call nature (although this thread has made me aware that there are a shockingly large number of people who have never actually seen nature and for whom the word conjures up images of their local urban park).
      - ryukafalz 5y ago
        > My criticism of cities is that a lot of them are hours away from anything that anyone would call nature This is only because the suburbs are often sprawled in between the city and any nature that might have been nearby. It’d be a heck of a lot easier to get to from the city if you didn’t have miles and miles of low-density suburbs in each direction. Anyway, “local urban parks” is a pretty broad category. It’s not just tiny parks we’re talking about; here’s one near me: https://fow.org/visit-the-park/photo-gallery/ https://fow.org/visit-the-park/photo-gallery/
n8cpdx 5y ago
I was just in the forest this weekend. I can take a train to get there - it runs every 15 minutes or more often depending on time of day. I got nervous towards the end of the walk because I was seemingly in the middle of nowhere - no one in sight - and I was losing the light. If I take the train the other direction, I can walk up a mountain (actually a dormant volcano) and enjoy the park there. That tends to be a bit busier, but then again, humans are also animals that exist in naturally, and they tend to be less intrusive than other animals in parks. And I didn’t even mention the rivers, islands, and beaches I can get to on foot or by transit. I haven’t tried visiting the buttes yet, but I know at minimum one is accessible by bike. All of that nature is available and present in part because of an urban growth boundary that constrained the expansion of suburbs.
- throwaway894345 5y ago
  That sounds great! Where at?
  - n8cpdx 5y ago
    Portland, OR.
    - throwaway894345 5y ago
      That makes sense. As I understand it, Portland isn’t particularly dense. Someone yesterday was just likening it to suburbs and talking about the great access to nature: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31241348 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31241348 It certainly sounds appealing!
      - n8cpdx 5y ago
        It’s true, Portland isn’t nearly as dense as it should be. The result is that (hundreds of) thousands of people who would like to live here can’t afford to. But everything I shared about access to nature would be just as true if the urban core was made more dense. Replacing sfh lots with multi use buildings doesn’t affect the access to nature in any way. If anything, it would help the situation by providing more ridership and tax revenue to support transit to nature and investment in parks.
yongjik 5y ago
It feels weird to argue against suburbs while I'm living there, but... Most pro-density/pro-mass-transit people aren't arguing against rural lifestyle. They're against suburban, car-dominated lifestyle. I'll conjecture that, for many people, the potential benefit of living "close to nature" is more than negated by driving everywhere. Commuting in a subway in a mega-city easily racks up thirty minutes of brisk walking per day.
- User23 5y ago
  Unless you’re Amish or otherwise plain living, the rural lifestyle is exceedingly automobile dependent.
  - throwaway894345 5y ago
    These days a whole lot of the Amish are also automobile dependent. :)
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- throwaway894345 5y ago
  I hear a lot of them argue about how rural people waste space and how they’re sick of subsidizing rural infrastructure and we should impose policies which further incentivize people to migrate from rural to urban areas. The thrust of the issue seems to be directed at suburbs (if only because many of these folks are only marginally aware of the world beyond the suburbs), but rural life is still wholly incompatible with their car free utopian vision (although more than a few have amusingly proposed extending public transit to every rural community!).
  - imw 5y ago
    Fascinating. I've spent a fair amount of time in/around pro-livability discussions, and I've never really come across what you're describing. In my experience a solid portion of the folks advocating for more human-friendly cities are urban dwellers who spend significant time in nature and/or wilderness.
yodelshady 5y ago
> I’m sure they’ve grown, but it’s still a big world out there people. I No, it just isn't. Humans have transformed seventy per cent of the land on Earth[1]. Including the deserts. Suburbs are the second most land intensive thing we do, after farming, and for almost every other developed-world country, this problem is more acute than in the US. Get some perspective. That is a "wind turbines cause global warming" level of bad take. More succinctly, so close to a lie I no longer have the patience to differentiate them. [1] https://www.ipcc.ch/srccl/ https://www.ipcc.ch/srccl/
- deleted 5y ago
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- throwaway894345 5y ago
  The US has nearly 7 acres of land for every man, woman, and child and yet the average lot size is only .2 acres. Since the average household size is 2.5 people, that’s about 0.08 acres used per person. Moreover, that figure ignores apartment, condo, and other multi-family buildings, so the actual land usage per person is quite a lot lower. Of course, we also need farms to support people, but the US produces much more food than it needs. And yes, the population is growing, but that growth is tapering off and anyway we could manipulate our immigration policies as well. At the end of the day, the US is a vast country, but this isn’t immediately obvious to people who have lived their whole lives in a dense urban environment.
  - yodelshady 5y ago
    Did you misspell "world" as "US" ? Or are you dishonestly using non-representative figures? The US has a much smaller proportion of the developed world's men, women and children than it does the land, and those men, women and children are extremely carbon-intensive.
    - throwaway894345 5y ago
      > Did you misspell "world" as "US" ? No, at no point have I been discussing the whole world. > Or are you dishonestly using non-representative figures? No, but feel free to correct me if I made a mistake in my calculations. > The US has a much smaller proportion of the developed world's men, women and children than it does the land Yes, this is my point. The US has a lot of land per person. > and those men, women and children are extremely carbon-intensive. Yes, but that has nothing to do with this conversation.
madsbuch 5y ago
> pro-urban/pro-density/anti-car people I would want to meet this person. I am a huge proponent of walkable cities, and I definitely see a city that is urban, high density and with a lot of nature. Heck Copenhagen, where I live, do it quite well -- within 20 minutes from the absolute center of the city (eg. Noerreport), I can be with grassing Alpacas (https://goo.gl/maps/jcA6VFMPHC5qmYCp6 https://goo.gl/maps/jcA6VFMPHC5qmYCp6) or I can be with large herds of deer (https://goo.gl/maps/8YDPDfTPCHhTbdps5 https://goo.gl/maps/8YDPDfTPCHhTbdps5) or I can be on huge grass lands (https://goo.gl/maps/3YxztVvYeUwSJge89 https://goo.gl/maps/3YxztVvYeUwSJge89), and no, these areas would not be considered regular parks.
- swah 5y ago
  Nature is also against walkability when it puts frigging hills on my way! Also the weather is way too agressive near the equator... I can endure it with sports clothes but not before work. Seriously: walking/cycling on Amsterdam, Lisbon or Paris when the weather is 15 °C, mostly on flat ways, is a pleasure. You arrive at the office just a little heated up, I imagine.
  - neoromantique 5y ago
    That’s just excuses though, people cycle even in Norway where it’s below freezing most of the year
    - swah 5y ago
      Well... exercising in the cold makes you hotter, that makes sense. And I bet they have Canada-level of socks/parkas/etc which you can remove as you get hotter.
    - throwaway894345 5y ago
      I'm okay with being the "weak person" who doesn't enjoy cycling in below-freezing weather.
    - doix 5y ago
      I find it much easier to do exercise in the cold than in the heat. In the cold it's just a matter of having the right gear and layers. In the heat, there's nothing you can do. It'll be extremely hot, you'll be sweating like crazy and get tired quicker (or at least I do).
pharmakom 5y ago
We can better maintain mountains and forests by having dense living areas for most people. There should be good public transport links from these areas to national parks. The enemy of wilderness is not urbanists, it’s suburban sprawl.
- throwaway894345 5y ago
  Suburbs aren't typically replacing forests, they're typically replacing farms, and we have far more agricultural land than we need (we produce a huge surplus of food) that we aren't managing well in the first place. We can and should protect existing nature, expand our national parks, and incentivize the naturalization and public access of existing private lands; however, we can do this without packing everyone into dense urban cores. According to a 1993 UN Food and Agriculture Organization report, it takes about 1.25 acres of agriculture land to feed one person. That value doesn't care about whether a person lives in a city or a suburb. The median suburban American lives in a 2.5 person household on 0.2 acres of land, which means about 0.08 acres per person. I'm not sure what the average urbanite lives on, but let's say it's a quarter of that: 0.02 acres per person. So we're talking about 1.33 vs 1.27--suburbanites require only about 4% more land than urbanites. Hardly a major threat to nature compared to excessive and unsustainable agricultural practices.
  - pharmakom 5y ago
    There are a lot more factors to the equation than farming space. And what do you think was there before the farms?
    - throwaway894345 5y ago
      > There are a lot more factors to the equation than farming space Yes, but agricultural footprint is the dominating factor. > And what do you think was there before the farms? Nature, to my point. Recall that you're the one arguing that suburbs rather than agriculture is threatening nature: > The enemy of wilderness is not urbanists, it’s suburban sprawl.
Asooka 5y ago
No, we shouldn't all live this way. The argument is how to build the dense parts of cities so they're nice to live in. If you want to live in the countryside, that's great, but that's an entirely different thing.
- throwaway894345 5y ago
  Agreed. I wish more people shared your perspective! :)
scythe 5y ago
>The idea that we should all live this way to conserve space—a resource which is only scarce in these urban places—seems excessive to put it mildly. We're not only conserving space, we're conserving distance. Consider a uniformly populated city with a circular boundary (spherical cow). For a density of X, the mean distance from anyone's residence to nature is L. If that density becomes 2X, that distance is now 0.7L. A denser city directly puts its residents closer to nature — real nature, although we can't move the mountains! Your argument is a complaint about the size of cities, which is mostly orthogonal to density (Honolulu is much denser than Atlanta!).
Robotbeat 5y ago
I’m not really anti-car. I think cars bring a kind of personal freedom that is hard to replicate in other ways but are a big liability in cities and for pedestrians, so ideally cars in cities would all be shunted underground so the surface can be for people and parks. My ideal vision of the future is we mostly live in luxury in dense, beautiful cities that are walkable with good, seamless transit (think like escalator-like seamlessness). People spend weekends camping in vast, re-wilded nature reserves. Year 2100 scenario: Get rid of most suburbs and staple-crop farms eventually (vat-grown staples—think Calysta FeedKind or Solar Foods—replace the need for highly processed staples like corn or wheat or soy or factory farms). Replace with rewilded nature reserves which people get to via tunnels or electric VTOL (with special consideration to low-noise design). Pedestrians in very dense cities walk in park-like surface paths. Solarpunk-style. :) Solarpunk cities and vast nature reserves (accessible via low-impact transport, and commonly used for camping) instead of endless row crops and suburbs. :)
alistairSH 5y ago
I live in the suburbs. And I’m anti-car in as much as we can and should do more to make cars less necessary for day-to-day life. Make schools walkable. Make basic shopping walkable. Build mix-use town centers instead of strip malls with acres of parking. Doing these things frees up space for other things. That could be housing or green space. And if there’s less traffic overall, it becomes easier to get out to the mountains/forest/etc. I don’t disagree that true nature is different than groomed parks. And I like nature. But I’d rather not spend 3 hours in suburban traffic to get to the mountains that are 40 miles away.
Soapysmith 5y ago
As someone who lives in a suburb, every time I visit a city and go to a city park I always am like "is this it?" Access to nature is far greater in the suburbs and it is not even close. I would also add that nature is at its best when there is not many people, or better yet no people around you. Human dense places always strike me as very unnatural.
closeparen 5y ago
My experience actually living in suburbs is that when you’re not in your house, you’re driving: either on a highway or a stroad. Now I will admit that driving on a highway with pristine nature on both sides is pretty nice (love 280) but most of the time when you go places you’re in 4-6 lane road strip mall land, which is a much worse environment than either a proper urban neighborhood or proper nature. If I could have a house truly situated in nature, I might like that, but that’s not what happens. You get a house situated in a suburban sprawl, and that sprawl is the day to day environment, and it is mostly artificial but in the worst ways: all the human art and ingenuity is directed towards the best interests of the cars instead of the people.
- odessacubbage 5y ago
  why does always seemed to be assumed in these discussions that alternative to cities must be suburbs? you can live in a town.
  - closeparen 5y ago
    An old-school town is walkable/urban in the same way we would advocate for cities: grid layout, main street with buildings pulled up to the sidewalk, pedestrian life, apartments over the stores, duplexes and small apartment buildings giving way to to larger single family homes as you walk out towards the fringes, schools that children can walk to, etc. Good towns have a lot in common with good urban neighborhoods. Probably the main difference is they don't need transit since the whole thing is small enough to traverse under your own power. Automobile era towns have the same forms as the suburban sprawls attached to cities: stroads, strip malls, parking lots, subdivisions containing homogeneous uses and interfacing at few points with fast arterial roads. They're just disembodied suburbs. The disembodiment if anything makes them worse. I visit lot of auto-oriented towns on cross-country roadtrips. They're vile places. I wouldn't want to be there any longer than necessary to get gas, food, use the restroom, etc. Sometimes when I take a wrong turn I catch a glimpse of the pre-car main street rotting away, behind the gleaming cloverleaf-adjacent McDonalds. It's sad. I visit urban towns on vacation, on the way to and from hiking, etc. Sometimes I look up the real estate listings. They're even more expensive than the big city, but without any kind of local industry to pay those prices. They're for second homes or retirement, I guess. Also sad.

tjr225 5y ago

You’re presenting a false dichotomy. There are plenty of dense places with incredible nature within just an hours drive. In the USA, Maybe not so much outside of the West Coast of the USA however. Personally, living in a city close to nature(seattle area) has been the best thing for me so far in my life; I have spent a stupid amount of money making it happen but wouldn’t trade it for anything. On the flip side it’s not for everybody, so don’t just take my word for it. On the other hand I will be riding my bike to a ferry, and then riding to a camp site on a beach on an island after work on Friday- weather permitting.

aix1 5y ago
Yes, this is absolutely a false dichotomy. I live in Zurich, with access to varied nature (hills, lake, river) all within a 15 minutes' walk and lots of stunning scenery easily accessible by train.
throwaway894345 5y ago
Yeah, I didn’t mean to frame it as a dichotomy, but it was a HN comment so I didn’t explore the full depth of nuance, and it was scoped to the US. Yes, some places are dense while still allowing some access to nature.
- tjr225 5y ago
  No worries! I have lived in dense places on the east coast too and always felt super cramped in them as well.
john61 5y ago
Vienna even has a national park in the city. (Lobau Nationalpark)
sdenton4 5y ago
The bay area is great in this front as well. I live in the east Bay and it's an easy bike ride to redwood groves...
Grimburger 5y ago
> within just an hours drive Wow that's depressing, I live in a very high density area by western standards and there's 50,000 acres of pristine rainforest literally on my doorstep while the mall is 5 minutes drive away and the city centre is 15 mins. During covid even the rare and endangered gibbons would come out hang out in the street. Everytime I go back to Australia it seems like a suburban dystopia with 8 lane roads 60kms from the actual city. People commuting 2+ hours a day is the norm there.
- throwaway2037 5y ago
  You wrote: <<there's 50,000 acres of pristine rainforest literally on my doorstep while the mall is 5 minutes drive away and the city centre is 15 mins>> Woah. Where do you live? This sounds "impossible". Singapore or Kuala Lumpur?
  - ourlordcaffeine 5y ago
    The presence of gibbons probably means somewhere in Malaysia or Singapore
silicon2401 5y ago
> There are plenty of dense places with incredible nature within just an hours drive. What a hilarious example of what the original commenter was saying. Apparently you think having nature an hour away is acceptable, or at least counts as being close to nature. As a very anti-urban person, I consider that nightmarish. I'm glad other people like that kind of world, and hope they all keep moving to the cities to leave the rest of the world open and spacious for the rest of us.
aqme28 5y ago
I live in Berlin. I can take public transit to the forest or beautiful swimmable lakes. And there are tons of parks within the city.

ahartmetz 5y ago

I live in Berlin, which contains many trees and parks. One of the nicest quarters of Berlin is Gartenstadt (garden city) Frohnau, which feels like houses in the forest - at decent density. So it doesn't have to be either city or nature. But I'm afraid that current cost structures and short-term thinking make another Gartenstadt very unlikely. Well. It may be that this kind of place only really works as a suburb. It does have a small center (shops, cafes, doctors, church etc) that people can walk to, which in turn has public transport to the actual city.

aiyen 5y ago
Same for the Netherlands. Urban cities integrated with nature. Large parks that can be easily biked to. It’s a great balance. It’s harder to have the best of both worlds in the United States though.
User23 5y ago
There’s virtually no wildernesses in Europe. Even the famous Black Forest is more of a large public garden than nature. It does still get somewhat wild up in the Alps, but you might find it hard to notice with all the manicured farms and a Gasthof on every hilltop.
nicbou 5y ago
Berlin has large parks in the city, and even larger ones at the edges. It doesn't only work as a suburb - people in any central Kiez are within walking distance of a park. I love that city for that. Milan felt claustrophobic without all the parks.
- bakuninsbart 5y ago
  Due to the unique history and political situation (city state), the city also just "suddenly ends", with little suburban sprawl. That said, Germany is so densely populated overall that there are few areas of "untouched" nature that the topl level commenter seems to be craving for.
  - 5y ago

cancelkooks 5y ago

I am very pro-pedestrian / anti-car, but that’s in the context of how to actually get around town most of the time… obviously (to me) you use the car to leave town and see the wonders of our world. If people that live in cities are to be relegated to never leave, I for one am not interested.

stephen_g 5y ago
Yeah, cities that have good enough transit, you often don't need to own a car, and can use an on-demand rental service for this kind of thing. (You locate a nearby car in the app and then unlock it through the app when you get to it). It's usually way, way cheaper than owning a car, and handy because for example, if you need to move stuff, you can get a van, and otherwise you can get a smaller car. You don't fall into the trap of driving a big SUV empty all of the time just in case you want to move gear, and then when you have to move stuff to realise that a lot of SUVs don't actually have that much more space than a decent sized hatchback!
- throwaway894345 5y ago
  > It's usually way, way cheaper than owning a car It’s usually cheaper than each person owning their own car, but more expensive than a household sharing a car. Of course, this varies widely from city to city and it depends on how often people rent cars or use rideshare or taxis. The nice thing is you get fast, comfortable transit all the time, but the really nice thing is how much stuff you take advantage of that you might not otherwise. For example, I’m already paying for a car, so going on big road trips is only a marginal extra cost (rather than $100/day + hassle for a car rental). Similarly, I probably wouldn’t have gotten into camping if I had to rent a car for each trip. I probably also wouldn’t visit family as often. I definitely see the appeal of not needing to own a car, but I tried it and it wasn’t for me. For my city, I’d love to see them start by cleaning up and policing existing public transit (for example) and then scale up from there.

vkou 5y ago

The suburbs don't actually present a solution to this. There is no more nature in them than there is in any other urban environment. It's all manicured lawns and endless pavement, and you can't even walk to a park, because getting anywhere requires hopping into a car. If you want to see nature, you have to live way out in the boonies, on at a minimum, two-acre lots. If everyone lived like that, we'd all have two-hour commutes on twenty-lane highways.

ajmurmann 5y ago
Arguably, the suburbs make this worse, since you now need to drive through even more urban sprawl to get to true nature.
throwaway894345 5y ago
I wasn’t advocating for suburbs. There are more options besides suburbs and urban areas—you should check them out! > If you want to see nature, you have to live way out in the boonies, on at a minimum, two-acre lots. If everyone lived like that, we'd all have two-hour commutes on twenty-lane highways. What a strange comment! Millions of people live with reasonable access to nature and most of them don’t have 2 acre lots nor do they need “twenty-lane highways”. Y’all urban folks need to venture out of your cities once in a while—it’s a biiiiggg world out there.
- spencerflem 5y ago
  I don't quite get your point, are you suggesting to live near nature or to have the ability to access nature when you want to? If the second, I really don't see how taking cars out of urban centers and making nice walkable people-focused areas stops you from taking a bus out and biking the rest of the way, or even renting a car once you're out of the city part
  - throwaway894345 5y ago
    > I don't quite get your point, are you suggesting to live near nature or to have the ability to access nature when you want to? Both? I’m not really sure how these are different given that proximity is the limiting factor in access. > If the second, I really don't see how taking cars out of urban centers and making nice walkable people-focused areas stops you from taking a bus out and biking the rest of the way, or even renting a car once you're out of the city part I’m not sure what you’re arguing here. I certainly don’t have a problem with making urban areas more walkable. That said, an hour of driving after work isn’t going to get you past the suburbs in most US cities, which means you’re limited to weekend trips and if you’re spending every weekend trying to get out of the city it’s worth asking if city life is optimal for you.

NumberWangMan 5y ago

To give a different perspective, I enjoyed the parks much more living in London than I do now, living in a sprawling suburb in the Dallas metroplex. In London I could walk to the park in 5 minutes. Here I'm lucky that it's only about a 7 minute walk, but the walk to and from is much less pleasant, having to cut through alleys and paths that were clearly an afterthought, while the park itself feels much more urban/artificial than the ones in London did. (To be fair, London has great parks) Density can coexist with ample green space. Remember that you don't need anything like Manhattan density to make things walkable. In my book, suburbs are only a problem to the degree that their design forces driving on residents. My vision for a perfect city has plenty of parks.

throwaway894345 5y ago
When I was talking about nature, I wasn’t thinking about city parks, but rather proper forests and mountains. City parks don’t do it for me—I need to get away from the cars and crowds. But to your point, yes, there are lots of cities with great city parks for those who are content with that sort of thing.

jltsiren 5y ago

When I've lived in a dense city, there have always been large natural areas within walking distance. The ideal is something like 1/2 of the land as lots, 1/3 as parks, and 1/6 for streets and other paved areas. "Parks" includes both developed urban parks and larger forested/coastal areas with wide walking trails. The trade-off is that there is not much space for ground-level parking, and most people commuting from outside the city must use public transport.

evancox100 5y ago

The more you let people build up, the more ground can be left as green space. No one is against park. Land area/space in general is not scarce. What is scarce is land area near job centers (or more broadly, near where people want to spend their time outside the home.) The more you spread people out, the more car dependent the city, necessitating more roads and parking lots.

throwaway894345 5y ago
I don’t have any problems with people building up, but I’m very skeptical that the space between tall buildings will be made into parks, and anyway a city park is not what I would consider “nature”. For folks who want density and can content themselves with urban green spaces, I wish you well on your quest to build taller and denser, just please don’t impose that on everyone! :)
- jawarner 5y ago
  Not all urban parks are created equally. I live close to a park 100s of acres in size in a city (Austin, TX).
  - throwaway894345 5y ago
    We just have different standards for “nature”. If it’s hundreds of acres of undisturbed forest and you can’t see or hear the city, then it’ll probably scratch the itch, but most large urban parks are mostly grass, gardens, sports fields, playgrounds, etc with a few acres of feel-good wetlands or prairie or bird sanctuary sprinkled around. “Acres” does not nature make.
- brailsafe 5y ago
  Honestly I feel like you're just failing to precisely represent what you're wanting. Here's what I think you're getting at, definitely tell me if I'm off. 1) Cities, whether they're sprawling or dense, or park-laden or not, can be suffocating. It just so happens that yours atm is less park-laden. Thus, your advice for exclusively urban people, is to actually put the effort in to get into real nature; into the mountains, the isolated wilderness, the lakes, etc.. because there's a serenity like that you can't get with facsimiles like neighborhood parks 2) Space between high rises isn't used all that effectively. I think this is particularly a problem with downtown core areas moreso than downtown adjacent areas in a lot of cities. I'm personally not anti-car outright, just anti-car as a primary means of day to day utility oriented travel and the design of urban spaces that prioritize that over others. If you walk or bike or skateboard most of the time, you develop a feeling for the space you're doing that in, and it has an affect on your life. If you're only walking through parking lots, on broken old slabs of sidewalk that nobody cares about, with no flowers or trees or cats or people around, you're going to want to avoid that. I'm a huge advocate for building your immediate surroundings so they facilitate healthy and sustainable living (the opposite of broken parking lots in a suburbab wasteland) but also for getting the fuck out of the whole city pretty often if you can. I rent a car to do this, and might buy a beater in the future to have more flexibility in that respect, but definitely get the hell out once in a while if you can.

astrange 5y ago

Increasing urban density also increases the amount of nature because you aren't building suburbs on top of it. eg Silicon Valley would be one of the world's most productive fruit farming regions if we hadn't covered it in single family houses in 1950. Note there is a kind of "towers in the park" urbanism seen in China that actually is a bad balance between the two and kind of unpleasant to live in.

ehnto 5y ago

Anti-car is pro-nature not pro concrete jungle. Cars are a big part of why we have a concrete jungle and not nature intersected with density. Think of cities with substantial nature passages, botanic gardens and reserves throughout. Not just one big one but many. Suburbia isn't nature either, at least not standard suburbia. It's carbon intense lawn, concrete and asphalt. A front lawn and a big tree isn't nature. The pro-car angle seeks to expand suburbia, and destroy more and more nature. You may see more greenery but it's just grass and the odd pasture. I don't think anyone in the anti-car movement is saying, don't drive to a national park or mountain. The anti-car movement is about removing cars from the city and reducing the impact of suburbia on the greater area, which includes national parks.

throwaway894345 5y ago
Why do people keep framing this as a dichotomy between urban areas and suburbs? I agree that suburbs aren’t “nature”, obviously. There’s a lot more to the US than urban cores and suburbs.
- otikik 5y ago
  I can’t claim to have visited all major cities in the US, but they do seem to match the “urban core and suburbs” pattern, compared with my experiences visiting European cities. Not Just Bikes has a video about that: https://youtu.be/CCOdQsZa15o https://youtu.be/CCOdQsZa15o
- pharmakom 5y ago
  Because people have to live somewhere.
  - throwaway894345 5y ago
    To my point they don't have to live exclusively in suburbs or cities. Exurbs, towns, villages, acreages, boonies, entirely off-grid, etc are all options. There's a whole world out there--it's pretty mind-blowing if you've never ventured beyond suburbs before.

edmundsauto 5y ago

The three options are to build densely, or to sprawl over into nature spaces, or to have fewer children.

throwaway894345 5y ago
We’re already having fewer children, and anyway there’s a whole lot of space out there. You talk like Chicago and LA are nearly bordering each other.
- alistairSH 5y ago
  Boston, NYC, Philly, Baltimore, DC, and Richmond are practically bordering each other these days.
  - throwaway894345 5y ago
    Sure, but the country is a fair bit bigger than the northern east coast. There's lots of opportunity out there.

null_object 5y ago

> when the pro-urban/pro-density/anti-car people talk about their vision for the world Beggars belief your response to an article on the psychological and health benefits of nature is… more cars? Building roads, urban sprawl, the noise and pollution from the cars themselves, the destructive invasion of all the infrastructure associated with car-use - all of it is directly destructive of the nature we’re talking about.

throwaway894345 5y ago
> Beggars belief your response to an article on the psychological and health benefits of nature is… more cars? Of course, I didn’t say that, I only said the pro-density utopia sounds super bleak to me. Anyway, there’s still plenty of space out there and all of the urban people in this thread are talking like they’ve never seen other parts of the country before—there’s still a whole bunch of space between New York and San Fran—it’s not the endless suburbs you seem to be imagining.

Teknoman117 5y ago

I've spent the last year living at my parents' cabin in the woods. It's right next to Jackson state forest. They've got 8 acres of land full of wildlife and redwoods. Waking up and stepping out onto the deck in the morning feels like crawling out of your tent when camping. But now it's back to SF as the office is reopening. I won't miss driving 3+ hours to see friends, but I will miss the scenery.

throwaway894345 5y ago
That sounds beautiful!

ls15 5y ago

> A lot of urban folks are rebutting my “substantial nature” complaint with references to their city’s parks One important aspect of nature is the ability to escape people. Most city parks cannot do that.

throwaway894345 5y ago
I agree. That was my point, in case that’s not evident.

standardUser 5y ago

"not just green spaces scattered amid the concrete" Most major cities have at least one park that is a few hundred acres.

throwaway894345 5y ago
A few hundred acres of forest is very different than a few hundred acres of soccer pitches, tennis courts, playgrounds, lawns, gardens, etc with a few acres of bird sanctuary, wetland, or prairie strewn about. It’s better than concrete, but it’s not nature.
- standardUser 5y ago
  Most towns and suburbs don't have acres of wild forest in them. That's not exactly a unique "flaw" of cities.
  - throwaway894345 5y ago
    What a bizarre constraint. Of course the forest isn’t in the town. You live in a suburb or town or (this is going to blow some minds in this thread) acreage outside of town that is at most a reasonable drive to nature. My criticism of cities is that a lot of them are hours away from anything that anyone would call nature (although this thread has made me aware that there are a shockingly large number of people who have never actually seen nature and for whom the word conjures up images of their local urban park).
    - ryukafalz 5y ago
      > My criticism of cities is that a lot of them are hours away from anything that anyone would call nature This is only because the suburbs are often sprawled in between the city and any nature that might have been nearby. It’d be a heck of a lot easier to get to from the city if you didn’t have miles and miles of low-density suburbs in each direction. Anyway, “local urban parks” is a pretty broad category. It’s not just tiny parks we’re talking about; here’s one near me: https://fow.org/visit-the-park/photo-gallery/ https://fow.org/visit-the-park/photo-gallery/

n8cpdx 5y ago

I was just in the forest this weekend. I can take a train to get there - it runs every 15 minutes or more often depending on time of day. I got nervous towards the end of the walk because I was seemingly in the middle of nowhere - no one in sight - and I was losing the light. If I take the train the other direction, I can walk up a mountain (actually a dormant volcano) and enjoy the park there. That tends to be a bit busier, but then again, humans are also animals that exist in naturally, and they tend to be less intrusive than other animals in parks. And I didn’t even mention the rivers, islands, and beaches I can get to on foot or by transit. I haven’t tried visiting the buttes yet, but I know at minimum one is accessible by bike. All of that nature is available and present in part because of an urban growth boundary that constrained the expansion of suburbs.

throwaway894345 5y ago
That sounds great! Where at?
- n8cpdx 5y ago
  Portland, OR.
  - throwaway894345 5y ago
    That makes sense. As I understand it, Portland isn’t particularly dense. Someone yesterday was just likening it to suburbs and talking about the great access to nature: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31241348 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31241348 It certainly sounds appealing!
    - n8cpdx 5y ago
      It’s true, Portland isn’t nearly as dense as it should be. The result is that (hundreds of) thousands of people who would like to live here can’t afford to. But everything I shared about access to nature would be just as true if the urban core was made more dense. Replacing sfh lots with multi use buildings doesn’t affect the access to nature in any way. If anything, it would help the situation by providing more ridership and tax revenue to support transit to nature and investment in parks.

yongjik 5y ago

It feels weird to argue against suburbs while I'm living there, but... Most pro-density/pro-mass-transit people aren't arguing against rural lifestyle. They're against suburban, car-dominated lifestyle. I'll conjecture that, for many people, the potential benefit of living "close to nature" is more than negated by driving everywhere. Commuting in a subway in a mega-city easily racks up thirty minutes of brisk walking per day.

User23 5y ago
Unless you’re Amish or otherwise plain living, the rural lifestyle is exceedingly automobile dependent.
- throwaway894345 5y ago
  These days a whole lot of the Amish are also automobile dependent. :)
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
throwaway894345 5y ago
I hear a lot of them argue about how rural people waste space and how they’re sick of subsidizing rural infrastructure and we should impose policies which further incentivize people to migrate from rural to urban areas. The thrust of the issue seems to be directed at suburbs (if only because many of these folks are only marginally aware of the world beyond the suburbs), but rural life is still wholly incompatible with their car free utopian vision (although more than a few have amusingly proposed extending public transit to every rural community!).
- imw 5y ago
  Fascinating. I've spent a fair amount of time in/around pro-livability discussions, and I've never really come across what you're describing. In my experience a solid portion of the folks advocating for more human-friendly cities are urban dwellers who spend significant time in nature and/or wilderness.

yodelshady 5y ago

> I’m sure they’ve grown, but it’s still a big world out there people. I No, it just isn't. Humans have transformed seventy per cent of the land on Earth[1]. Including the deserts. Suburbs are the second most land intensive thing we do, after farming, and for almost every other developed-world country, this problem is more acute than in the US. Get some perspective. That is a "wind turbines cause global warming" level of bad take. More succinctly, so close to a lie I no longer have the patience to differentiate them. [1] https://www.ipcc.ch/srccl/ https://www.ipcc.ch/srccl/

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
throwaway894345 5y ago
The US has nearly 7 acres of land for every man, woman, and child and yet the average lot size is only .2 acres. Since the average household size is 2.5 people, that’s about 0.08 acres used per person. Moreover, that figure ignores apartment, condo, and other multi-family buildings, so the actual land usage per person is quite a lot lower. Of course, we also need farms to support people, but the US produces much more food than it needs. And yes, the population is growing, but that growth is tapering off and anyway we could manipulate our immigration policies as well. At the end of the day, the US is a vast country, but this isn’t immediately obvious to people who have lived their whole lives in a dense urban environment.
- yodelshady 5y ago
  Did you misspell "world" as "US" ? Or are you dishonestly using non-representative figures? The US has a much smaller proportion of the developed world's men, women and children than it does the land, and those men, women and children are extremely carbon-intensive.
  - throwaway894345 5y ago
    > Did you misspell "world" as "US" ? No, at no point have I been discussing the whole world. > Or are you dishonestly using non-representative figures? No, but feel free to correct me if I made a mistake in my calculations. > The US has a much smaller proportion of the developed world's men, women and children than it does the land Yes, this is my point. The US has a lot of land per person. > and those men, women and children are extremely carbon-intensive. Yes, but that has nothing to do with this conversation.

madsbuch 5y ago

> pro-urban/pro-density/anti-car people I would want to meet this person. I am a huge proponent of walkable cities, and I definitely see a city that is urban, high density and with a lot of nature. Heck Copenhagen, where I live, do it quite well -- within 20 minutes from the absolute center of the city (eg. Noerreport), I can be with grassing Alpacas (https://goo.gl/maps/jcA6VFMPHC5qmYCp6 https://goo.gl/maps/jcA6VFMPHC5qmYCp6) or I can be with large herds of deer (https://goo.gl/maps/8YDPDfTPCHhTbdps5 https://goo.gl/maps/8YDPDfTPCHhTbdps5) or I can be on huge grass lands (https://goo.gl/maps/3YxztVvYeUwSJge89 https://goo.gl/maps/3YxztVvYeUwSJge89), and no, these areas would not be considered regular parks.

swah 5y ago
Nature is also against walkability when it puts frigging hills on my way! Also the weather is way too agressive near the equator... I can endure it with sports clothes but not before work. Seriously: walking/cycling on Amsterdam, Lisbon or Paris when the weather is 15 °C, mostly on flat ways, is a pleasure. You arrive at the office just a little heated up, I imagine.
- neoromantique 5y ago
  That’s just excuses though, people cycle even in Norway where it’s below freezing most of the year
  - swah 5y ago
    Well... exercising in the cold makes you hotter, that makes sense. And I bet they have Canada-level of socks/parkas/etc which you can remove as you get hotter.
  - throwaway894345 5y ago
    I'm okay with being the "weak person" who doesn't enjoy cycling in below-freezing weather.
  - doix 5y ago
    I find it much easier to do exercise in the cold than in the heat. In the cold it's just a matter of having the right gear and layers. In the heat, there's nothing you can do. It'll be extremely hot, you'll be sweating like crazy and get tired quicker (or at least I do).

pharmakom 5y ago

We can better maintain mountains and forests by having dense living areas for most people. There should be good public transport links from these areas to national parks. The enemy of wilderness is not urbanists, it’s suburban sprawl.

throwaway894345 5y ago
Suburbs aren't typically replacing forests, they're typically replacing farms, and we have far more agricultural land than we need (we produce a huge surplus of food) that we aren't managing well in the first place. We can and should protect existing nature, expand our national parks, and incentivize the naturalization and public access of existing private lands; however, we can do this without packing everyone into dense urban cores. According to a 1993 UN Food and Agriculture Organization report, it takes about 1.25 acres of agriculture land to feed one person. That value doesn't care about whether a person lives in a city or a suburb. The median suburban American lives in a 2.5 person household on 0.2 acres of land, which means about 0.08 acres per person. I'm not sure what the average urbanite lives on, but let's say it's a quarter of that: 0.02 acres per person. So we're talking about 1.33 vs 1.27--suburbanites require only about 4% more land than urbanites. Hardly a major threat to nature compared to excessive and unsustainable agricultural practices.
- pharmakom 5y ago
  There are a lot more factors to the equation than farming space. And what do you think was there before the farms?
  - throwaway894345 5y ago
    > There are a lot more factors to the equation than farming space Yes, but agricultural footprint is the dominating factor. > And what do you think was there before the farms? Nature, to my point. Recall that you're the one arguing that suburbs rather than agriculture is threatening nature: > The enemy of wilderness is not urbanists, it’s suburban sprawl.

Asooka 5y ago

No, we shouldn't all live this way. The argument is how to build the dense parts of cities so they're nice to live in. If you want to live in the countryside, that's great, but that's an entirely different thing.

throwaway894345 5y ago
Agreed. I wish more people shared your perspective! :)

scythe 5y ago

>The idea that we should all live this way to conserve space—a resource which is only scarce in these urban places—seems excessive to put it mildly. We're not only conserving space, we're conserving distance. Consider a uniformly populated city with a circular boundary (spherical cow). For a density of X, the mean distance from anyone's residence to nature is L. If that density becomes 2X, that distance is now 0.7L. A denser city directly puts its residents closer to nature — real nature, although we can't move the mountains! Your argument is a complaint about the size of cities, which is mostly orthogonal to density (Honolulu is much denser than Atlanta!).

Robotbeat 5y ago

I’m not really anti-car. I think cars bring a kind of personal freedom that is hard to replicate in other ways but are a big liability in cities and for pedestrians, so ideally cars in cities would all be shunted underground so the surface can be for people and parks. My ideal vision of the future is we mostly live in luxury in dense, beautiful cities that are walkable with good, seamless transit (think like escalator-like seamlessness). People spend weekends camping in vast, re-wilded nature reserves. Year 2100 scenario: Get rid of most suburbs and staple-crop farms eventually (vat-grown staples—think Calysta FeedKind or Solar Foods—replace the need for highly processed staples like corn or wheat or soy or factory farms). Replace with rewilded nature reserves which people get to via tunnels or electric VTOL (with special consideration to low-noise design). Pedestrians in very dense cities walk in park-like surface paths. Solarpunk-style. :) Solarpunk cities and vast nature reserves (accessible via low-impact transport, and commonly used for camping) instead of endless row crops and suburbs. :)

alistairSH 5y ago

I live in the suburbs. And I’m anti-car in as much as we can and should do more to make cars less necessary for day-to-day life. Make schools walkable. Make basic shopping walkable. Build mix-use town centers instead of strip malls with acres of parking. Doing these things frees up space for other things. That could be housing or green space. And if there’s less traffic overall, it becomes easier to get out to the mountains/forest/etc. I don’t disagree that true nature is different than groomed parks. And I like nature. But I’d rather not spend 3 hours in suburban traffic to get to the mountains that are 40 miles away.

Soapysmith 5y ago

As someone who lives in a suburb, every time I visit a city and go to a city park I always am like "is this it?" Access to nature is far greater in the suburbs and it is not even close. I would also add that nature is at its best when there is not many people, or better yet no people around you. Human dense places always strike me as very unnatural.

closeparen 5y ago

My experience actually living in suburbs is that when you’re not in your house, you’re driving: either on a highway or a stroad. Now I will admit that driving on a highway with pristine nature on both sides is pretty nice (love 280) but most of the time when you go places you’re in 4-6 lane road strip mall land, which is a much worse environment than either a proper urban neighborhood or proper nature. If I could have a house truly situated in nature, I might like that, but that’s not what happens. You get a house situated in a suburban sprawl, and that sprawl is the day to day environment, and it is mostly artificial but in the worst ways: all the human art and ingenuity is directed towards the best interests of the cars instead of the people.

odessacubbage 5y ago
why does always seemed to be assumed in these discussions that alternative to cities must be suburbs? you can live in a town.
- closeparen 5y ago
  An old-school town is walkable/urban in the same way we would advocate for cities: grid layout, main street with buildings pulled up to the sidewalk, pedestrian life, apartments over the stores, duplexes and small apartment buildings giving way to to larger single family homes as you walk out towards the fringes, schools that children can walk to, etc. Good towns have a lot in common with good urban neighborhoods. Probably the main difference is they don't need transit since the whole thing is small enough to traverse under your own power. Automobile era towns have the same forms as the suburban sprawls attached to cities: stroads, strip malls, parking lots, subdivisions containing homogeneous uses and interfacing at few points with fast arterial roads. They're just disembodied suburbs. The disembodiment if anything makes them worse. I visit lot of auto-oriented towns on cross-country roadtrips. They're vile places. I wouldn't want to be there any longer than necessary to get gas, food, use the restroom, etc. Sometimes when I take a wrong turn I catch a glimpse of the pre-car main street rotting away, behind the gleaming cloverleaf-adjacent McDonalds. It's sad. I visit urban towns on vacation, on the way to and from hiking, etc. Sometimes I look up the real estate listings. They're even more expensive than the big city, but without any kind of local industry to pay those prices. They're for second homes or retirement, I guess. Also sad.