4 ms·

The ultimate sustainable living is a commie-block in a reasonable small, walkable city with a good public transport and services mixed with residential areas. I

by ajuc 4y ago

The ultimate sustainable living is a commie-block in a reasonable small, walkable city with a good public transport and services mixed with residential areas. If you do that - it doesn't matter what the source of heating, energy etc. is, and what kind of a car (if any) you drive. Even if it's all coal and fossil-fuel powered - you are order of magnitude more sustainable than people living in suburbs with solar panels, heat pumps and Teslas simply because you waste so much less energy on building and transporting stuff to make living there possible.

danhor 4y ago
No doubt it's greener, but not by an order of magnitude. Looking at the car: A large part of emissions are produced during manufacturing, especially for electrical cars. Driving less helps, but not an order of magnitude. Same with heating. A heat pump just needs (generally speaking around) 1/3 of the energy, so you really need a large size differential to get to an order of magnitude. People living in a large city also have better access to an airport, which generally leads to more flights and more emissions (in total still less, but not great).
- ajuc 4y ago
  It's order of magnitude, easily. For example - if you live in a commie-block - you don't need and often you don't have the option to own multiple cars per family. Often you don't own a car at all. Parking space is at premium and walking/public transport solves most of your transporting needs anyway. So that's the difference between producing 1.75 cars per family vs let's say 0.75 in the city. And then driving let's say 5000 km per year vs let's say 30 000 km per year. And changing these cars every 3 years vs every 6 years. Heating is another thing. Surface area of my block is maybe 4 times the surface area of a detached house. But it houses 16 times more people. But that's nitpicking. The big thing is infrastructure. How many km of roads, cables, pipes, etc do you need per 1 detached house vs 1 flat in a commie block? How much concrete and steel do you use for that? How much energy is spent building and maintaining that infrastructure over the years? My 4-stories commie block houses 16 families in a plot that would be roughly equivalent to a plot where 1 detached house would stand in the countryside. And it's pretty low-density as far as city planning goes. You could easily make it much denser. There's a small park and a playground in that plot of land. So that's ~1/16th the infrastructure to service the same number of people compared to the countryside. And building the infrastructure is cheap compared to maintaining it for decades. The real unsustainable part of suburbia is maintaining all the extra infrastructure that low population density housing requires. If anything - 1 order of magnitude was an underestimate.
  - zbrozek 4y ago
    I didn't follow the car replacement schedule line. Why would a suburbanite replace cars every three years vs six for a block dweller? Both of those seem extremely short to me.
    - ajuc 4y ago
      If you don't use a car much you don't need to replace it as often?
  - make_me_rich 4y ago
    I‘m baffled that you in all seriousness think that it‘s a good idea to live like that. It‘s less resource consumption, ok (for now at least). What about all the downsides to humans? Constant noise. Being exposed to people all the time. Pollution (by that I mean trash on the streets)? What about the pandemic? People had serious mental health issues during that time, that lived in places like you describe, because their appartements were tiny and they weren‘t allowed to go out. I don‘t know man, to me you describe a real dystopian future. Just because it‘s a solution, doesn‘t mean it‘s the best/right solution.
    - avianlyric 4y ago
      Sounds like you’ve never lived in a block of flats before. There’s nothing dystopian about apartment blocks. For us theirs is no constant noise. The flats have excellent sounds insulation between them so you can’t hear neighbours, and height means there’s zero road noise, or noise from people outside. Our flat is substantially quieter than any detached house I’ve ever stayed in, except perhaps houses deep in the English countryside where there isn’t another human for miles. There’s also very little pollution. High density house means high density tax revenue, so the local authority is substantially better funded than any rural authority, meaning our roads are clean and free of litter and rubbish, and in excellent mechanical condition because the local authority operates an aggressive maintenance schedule. For space, we have miles of car free paths and parks, which can all be reach without crossing a main road. It’s substantially easier to walk our dog off lead here than it is in suburbia, where you’re stuck to tiny pavements and the constant fear of a speeding driver. Every time I stay in the country side I feel trapped, unable to go anywhere without getting in car. I can’t just put a coat on, go outside, and just walk somewhere pleasant, get a coffee, sit in a park, walk along the river, do some quick shopping, or grab transit to visit a friend. Instead the countryside forces me get in a car to go anywhere, something I would rather not do, and certainly not something I consider freedom.
guntherhermann 4y ago
I guess you watch Adam Something, this line is something he repeats a lot and I agree with most of it but as someone who grew up in maisonette block housing (like this https://www.flickr.com/photos/rogersg/44549465930/in/faves-cybertect/ https://www.flickr.com/photos/rogersg/44549465930/in/faves-c...), it is not nearly as nice as living in your own house (even a terraced house). You are at the mercy of your neighbours, shit neighbours, shit time. It's not a bad thing to make compromises. Yes flats are more energy efficient than detached houses, it's also a less pleasant experience unless you get lucky. living in a miserable shithole (which is what commie block housing was for me) isn't the future I want
- ajuc 4y ago
  I lived half my life in a detached house in countryside in Poland, then I moved to several big cities and lived in modern and communist-era commie-blocks. There are positives and negatives. I don't have problems with neighbors, but then I'm a pretty heavy sleeper. My wife had some problems sleeping when neighbors had a party at night, but that's still a pretty minor and rare inconvenience. On the other hand everything we might need is a 15 minutes walk or less, we barely need to drive a car. The air quality is much better in the winter, you don't need to mow the lawn or shuffle the snow. I wouldn't want to go back.
- ZeroGravitas 4y ago
  It's a simple trade-off. Like waiting for luggage in an airport. Would it be nice to take a step forward and be closer to your luggage and have a better view, yes it would. Would it be nice if everyone took a step forward. No, it would suck for everyone and be worse overall. The fact that people can still say "yeah, but if just I do it, then I'd get all the benefits, so it's a good idea" is a failure of our civilization.
  - guntherhermann 4y ago
    I do not fly, I grow food for myself and my community in an allotment, I cycle 95% of my journeys, I am a vegetarian. I believe that I make a better effort than most at reducing my impact on the world. Apparently this is just not good enough for people like you, I must also consign myself to the misery of living in cramped housing surrounded by inconsiderate arseholes.
TacticalCoder 4y ago
> The ultimate sustainable living is a commie-block in a reasonable small, walkable city with a good public transport and services mixed with residential areas. But sadly, as with most things commie, it's totally soul crushing. And fugly. If the goal is to pack as many people as possible in high-rises, where's the fun in living? What is the end goal? Pack 100 billion people in high rises? What for? I'm sorry but just thanks but no thanks. P.S: this email sent you over 2 Gbp/s fiber to the home, from a rural area, seaside, seaview , surrounded by vineyards and fields of vegetables, while there's smoke coming out of the chimney. You know: the kind of place where are actually grown and produced the stuff the city dwellers do eat and drink. No neighbors close by and yet the neighbors all know each others. What's not sustainable is places which are producing neither food nor drink nor trees.
- ajuc 4y ago
  > But sadly, as with most things commie, it's totally soul crushing. And fugly. Is it though? I grew up in the countryside, in a detached house in a middle class family. There were no kids my age nearby. My grandma (which was taking care of us after school) was overprotective and didn't let us go play outside. Which meant we sat in the living room for 3 hours waiting for our parents to go back home. There were 2 TV channels, no computer, no smartphone, no internet. I've read literally every book our village library had, including romance books. Compare that to the childhood my cousins had in a medium-sized city. They had dozens of friends in 100 meter radius. They had a playground 50 meters from their home and they spent most of their free time playing with their friends outside cause it was safe and there were things to do. My step sister was doing historical reenactment, my step brother was making RC planes in a nearby club. The only pastime people were doing outside in my village was drinking cheap wine on a bus-stop or fishing. Sorry, we had a basketball field as well. Until it was destroyed to make space for a new church parking. What I did in free time was reading books and eventually programming once I got a computer. When we all went to a middle school to the big city - they had public transport going every 30 minutes to her home. I had 1.5 hour between waking up and arriving at school which means I was waking up before 06:00. It was still dark most of the year. When I was going back it was already dark again half of the year. So no point going outside. Unless you like walking through a village where everybody sits inside and it's dark and dogs are barking at you from behind the fences. So relaxing. BTW the last bus back was around 20:30, which means no middle school parties for us. When I went to the university I started living in the big city and that's when my social life started. I could actually do things with people my age besides taking classes. I returned after university for a short period. I commuted again for about half a year. I had almost no free time if you discount the commute. Wake up, it's dark, go to work, work, go back, it's dark again. Go to sleep or do sth in your house. Talk about soul-crushing. I went back to the city and bought a flat there. I changed a job a few times, moved to another city then went back. All that time I never had to commute longer than 30 minutes one way. And most of that time I commuted by walking for 20 minutes through a park. Now I work remotely, so I guess I could do that from the countryside. But still, I prefer living in a block cause it's much less dumb maintenance work. I haven't had to shuffle coal for over a decade. Or snow. Or to rake leaves. Instead I walk about 7 km per day for the last 2 years to keep in shape and listen to audiobooks and podcasts. And BTW this is how the ugly soul-crushing commie-blocks look like: https://d-art.ppstatic.pl/kadry/k/r/23/f5/5ed8b60e6c25b_o_large.jpg https://d-art.ppstatic.pl/kadry/k/r/23/f5/5ed8b60e6c25b_o_la... https://www.lut.esn.pl/sites/default/files/filaretow-wawoz08.jpg https://www.lut.esn.pl/sites/default/files/filaretow-wawoz08... > You know: the kind of place where are actually grown and produced the stuff the city dwellers do eat and drink. That place is perfectly fine without people like us. In fact suburbanization is interfering with agriculture there.

by ajuc 4y ago

danhor 4y ago

No doubt it's greener, but not by an order of magnitude. Looking at the car: A large part of emissions are produced during manufacturing, especially for electrical cars. Driving less helps, but not an order of magnitude. Same with heating. A heat pump just needs (generally speaking around) 1/3 of the energy, so you really need a large size differential to get to an order of magnitude. People living in a large city also have better access to an airport, which generally leads to more flights and more emissions (in total still less, but not great).

ajuc 4y ago
It's order of magnitude, easily. For example - if you live in a commie-block - you don't need and often you don't have the option to own multiple cars per family. Often you don't own a car at all. Parking space is at premium and walking/public transport solves most of your transporting needs anyway. So that's the difference between producing 1.75 cars per family vs let's say 0.75 in the city. And then driving let's say 5000 km per year vs let's say 30 000 km per year. And changing these cars every 3 years vs every 6 years. Heating is another thing. Surface area of my block is maybe 4 times the surface area of a detached house. But it houses 16 times more people. But that's nitpicking. The big thing is infrastructure. How many km of roads, cables, pipes, etc do you need per 1 detached house vs 1 flat in a commie block? How much concrete and steel do you use for that? How much energy is spent building and maintaining that infrastructure over the years? My 4-stories commie block houses 16 families in a plot that would be roughly equivalent to a plot where 1 detached house would stand in the countryside. And it's pretty low-density as far as city planning goes. You could easily make it much denser. There's a small park and a playground in that plot of land. So that's ~1/16th the infrastructure to service the same number of people compared to the countryside. And building the infrastructure is cheap compared to maintaining it for decades. The real unsustainable part of suburbia is maintaining all the extra infrastructure that low population density housing requires. If anything - 1 order of magnitude was an underestimate.
- zbrozek 4y ago
  I didn't follow the car replacement schedule line. Why would a suburbanite replace cars every three years vs six for a block dweller? Both of those seem extremely short to me.
  - ajuc 4y ago
    If you don't use a car much you don't need to replace it as often?
- make_me_rich 4y ago
  I‘m baffled that you in all seriousness think that it‘s a good idea to live like that. It‘s less resource consumption, ok (for now at least). What about all the downsides to humans? Constant noise. Being exposed to people all the time. Pollution (by that I mean trash on the streets)? What about the pandemic? People had serious mental health issues during that time, that lived in places like you describe, because their appartements were tiny and they weren‘t allowed to go out. I don‘t know man, to me you describe a real dystopian future. Just because it‘s a solution, doesn‘t mean it‘s the best/right solution.
  - avianlyric 4y ago
    Sounds like you’ve never lived in a block of flats before. There’s nothing dystopian about apartment blocks. For us theirs is no constant noise. The flats have excellent sounds insulation between them so you can’t hear neighbours, and height means there’s zero road noise, or noise from people outside. Our flat is substantially quieter than any detached house I’ve ever stayed in, except perhaps houses deep in the English countryside where there isn’t another human for miles. There’s also very little pollution. High density house means high density tax revenue, so the local authority is substantially better funded than any rural authority, meaning our roads are clean and free of litter and rubbish, and in excellent mechanical condition because the local authority operates an aggressive maintenance schedule. For space, we have miles of car free paths and parks, which can all be reach without crossing a main road. It’s substantially easier to walk our dog off lead here than it is in suburbia, where you’re stuck to tiny pavements and the constant fear of a speeding driver. Every time I stay in the country side I feel trapped, unable to go anywhere without getting in car. I can’t just put a coat on, go outside, and just walk somewhere pleasant, get a coffee, sit in a park, walk along the river, do some quick shopping, or grab transit to visit a friend. Instead the countryside forces me get in a car to go anywhere, something I would rather not do, and certainly not something I consider freedom.

guntherhermann 4y ago

I guess you watch Adam Something, this line is something he repeats a lot and I agree with most of it but as someone who grew up in maisonette block housing (like this https://www.flickr.com/photos/rogersg/44549465930/in/faves-cybertect/ https://www.flickr.com/photos/rogersg/44549465930/in/faves-c...), it is not nearly as nice as living in your own house (even a terraced house). You are at the mercy of your neighbours, shit neighbours, shit time. It's not a bad thing to make compromises. Yes flats are more energy efficient than detached houses, it's also a less pleasant experience unless you get lucky. living in a miserable shithole (which is what commie block housing was for me) isn't the future I want

ajuc 4y ago
I lived half my life in a detached house in countryside in Poland, then I moved to several big cities and lived in modern and communist-era commie-blocks. There are positives and negatives. I don't have problems with neighbors, but then I'm a pretty heavy sleeper. My wife had some problems sleeping when neighbors had a party at night, but that's still a pretty minor and rare inconvenience. On the other hand everything we might need is a 15 minutes walk or less, we barely need to drive a car. The air quality is much better in the winter, you don't need to mow the lawn or shuffle the snow. I wouldn't want to go back.
ZeroGravitas 4y ago
It's a simple trade-off. Like waiting for luggage in an airport. Would it be nice to take a step forward and be closer to your luggage and have a better view, yes it would. Would it be nice if everyone took a step forward. No, it would suck for everyone and be worse overall. The fact that people can still say "yeah, but if just I do it, then I'd get all the benefits, so it's a good idea" is a failure of our civilization.
- guntherhermann 4y ago
  I do not fly, I grow food for myself and my community in an allotment, I cycle 95% of my journeys, I am a vegetarian. I believe that I make a better effort than most at reducing my impact on the world. Apparently this is just not good enough for people like you, I must also consign myself to the misery of living in cramped housing surrounded by inconsiderate arseholes.

TacticalCoder 4y ago

> The ultimate sustainable living is a commie-block in a reasonable small, walkable city with a good public transport and services mixed with residential areas. But sadly, as with most things commie, it's totally soul crushing. And fugly. If the goal is to pack as many people as possible in high-rises, where's the fun in living? What is the end goal? Pack 100 billion people in high rises? What for? I'm sorry but just thanks but no thanks. P.S: this email sent you over 2 Gbp/s fiber to the home, from a rural area, seaside, seaview , surrounded by vineyards and fields of vegetables, while there's smoke coming out of the chimney. You know: the kind of place where are actually grown and produced the stuff the city dwellers do eat and drink. No neighbors close by and yet the neighbors all know each others. What's not sustainable is places which are producing neither food nor drink nor trees.

ajuc 4y ago
> But sadly, as with most things commie, it's totally soul crushing. And fugly. Is it though? I grew up in the countryside, in a detached house in a middle class family. There were no kids my age nearby. My grandma (which was taking care of us after school) was overprotective and didn't let us go play outside. Which meant we sat in the living room for 3 hours waiting for our parents to go back home. There were 2 TV channels, no computer, no smartphone, no internet. I've read literally every book our village library had, including romance books. Compare that to the childhood my cousins had in a medium-sized city. They had dozens of friends in 100 meter radius. They had a playground 50 meters from their home and they spent most of their free time playing with their friends outside cause it was safe and there were things to do. My step sister was doing historical reenactment, my step brother was making RC planes in a nearby club. The only pastime people were doing outside in my village was drinking cheap wine on a bus-stop or fishing. Sorry, we had a basketball field as well. Until it was destroyed to make space for a new church parking. What I did in free time was reading books and eventually programming once I got a computer. When we all went to a middle school to the big city - they had public transport going every 30 minutes to her home. I had 1.5 hour between waking up and arriving at school which means I was waking up before 06:00. It was still dark most of the year. When I was going back it was already dark again half of the year. So no point going outside. Unless you like walking through a village where everybody sits inside and it's dark and dogs are barking at you from behind the fences. So relaxing. BTW the last bus back was around 20:30, which means no middle school parties for us. When I went to the university I started living in the big city and that's when my social life started. I could actually do things with people my age besides taking classes. I returned after university for a short period. I commuted again for about half a year. I had almost no free time if you discount the commute. Wake up, it's dark, go to work, work, go back, it's dark again. Go to sleep or do sth in your house. Talk about soul-crushing. I went back to the city and bought a flat there. I changed a job a few times, moved to another city then went back. All that time I never had to commute longer than 30 minutes one way. And most of that time I commuted by walking for 20 minutes through a park. Now I work remotely, so I guess I could do that from the countryside. But still, I prefer living in a block cause it's much less dumb maintenance work. I haven't had to shuffle coal for over a decade. Or snow. Or to rake leaves. Instead I walk about 7 km per day for the last 2 years to keep in shape and listen to audiobooks and podcasts. And BTW this is how the ugly soul-crushing commie-blocks look like: https://d-art.ppstatic.pl/kadry/k/r/23/f5/5ed8b60e6c25b_o_large.jpg https://d-art.ppstatic.pl/kadry/k/r/23/f5/5ed8b60e6c25b_o_la... https://www.lut.esn.pl/sites/default/files/filaretow-wawoz08.jpg https://www.lut.esn.pl/sites/default/files/filaretow-wawoz08... > You know: the kind of place where are actually grown and produced the stuff the city dwellers do eat and drink. That place is perfectly fine without people like us. In fact suburbanization is interfering with agriculture there.