4 ms·
The decline is in served purposes not a specific design: cities in the very past was needed for various reasons, in the modern age most reasons was economy of s
by kkfx 4y ago
The decline is in served purposes not a specific design: cities in the very past was needed for various reasons, in the modern age most reasons was economy of scale, witch means: lower prices because your neighbor competitor try to lower it's prices a little bit to compete against you and so you do until the lowest possible denominator in the current state of thing, than companies specialize and split, one window maker decide it's good at cutting glass plates, the neighbor that's good at cut frames and so on.
Nowadays urban density surpass the advantage point of economy of scale while the push toward a service economy and bigger and bigger enterprises kill it completely.
The final results is simple: cities have no purposes anymore. We still need to be social, to meet other people so we still need to be together but modern cities are not good even in that terms.
That's the decline.
- marcosdumay 4y agoWell, cities are still growing, and people are still concentrating on fewer and fewer of them... So I'd say that any call for they losing their purpose is way too precipitated. I do agree we seem to be moving on that direction. But we are surely not there.
- kkfx 4y agoIf you wait to see people fleeing it's way too late to act. Just imaging how many DECADES would be needed to design and built a new "modern polis", adapted to our present and future needs, so renewables, flying logistic, much more rails for heavy packages, future flying "cars" and so far. Of course this meanwhile the climate change push people a bit northern/southern BUT the need of renewables and low energy consumption do not push MUCH at north/south, so available land prices jumping crazy, new infra need to be built but there is no global agreement nor long consolidated infra in place to follow and so on. Such change demand AT LEAST a century, so you need to start planning a century before and keep evolving at slow peace correcting anything going wrong on the road. It's not something that can be done like building a new gear in a factory.
- ghaff 4y agoThings do shift over long enough time horizons. 25 years or so ago quite a few of the cities we generally consider "elite" today were still losing population.