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This isn’t really a new sentiment on HN. It chiefly comes here via a loose network of right-wing influencers on Twitter who adopted the attitude from early 20th

• mschuster91 1y ago
  > You occasionally see urban skepticism coming from left-wingers (usually techno-skeptic climate doomers convinced the world ended yesterday), but in those spheres urbanism is generally viewed much more favorably. I'm one of these, but for another reason: hyper-dense urban areas are much more expensive to build (especially skyscrapers, they require massive amounts of concrete), and all sorts of other technology to work. In rural areas, you need streets and that's it (give them autonomous cars or their own electric cars to move around), in urban areas to cope with the masses you need trains (which are, again, expensive to build, just look at my home city of Munich). Additionally, we already have millions of units that stand empty in rural areas in Germany, so it doesn't make sense to build extremely expensive urban housing. And from the medical side of things, which is my original post's point, we have seen in the coronavirus pandemic just how much faster the virus swept through urban areas than it did in rural areas. Makes sense, given that viruses depend on high contact frequency and density. And with Japan and its hikikomori, caused partially by young Japanese having not much place of their own to live in, we see the extreme end of the psychological effects of too dense living.
  • piva00 1y ago
    > I'm one of these, but for another reason: hyper-dense urban areas are much more expensive to build (especially skyscrapers, they require massive amounts of concrete), and all sorts of other technology to work. In rural areas, you need streets and that's it (give them autonomous cars or their own electric cars to move around), in urban areas to cope with the masses you need trains (which are, again, expensive to build, just look at my home city of Munich). Additionally, we already have millions of units that stand empty in rural areas in Germany, so it doesn't make sense to build extremely expensive urban housing. It's much more expensive to build and maintain a vast network of roads, sewage, water, power lines across a huge area servicing fewer people. You don't need skyscrapers to build a denser city, you live in Germany so you are aware of that. Trains are expensive to build but the costs get spread out over a massive amount of people, it's economies of scale at play, which you do not get if you don't build dense enough places, you might have 10-50k people paying for each 500 metres of rail construction, the same for sewers, electricity, water, rubbish disposal, so on and so forth. That won't ever be possible if everyone lived in similar densities as rural areas, it's simply not economically possible for society to provide all the necessary modern infrastructure to people spread out.
    • mschuster91 1y ago
      > It's much more expensive to build and maintain a vast network of roads, sewage, water, power lines across a huge area servicing fewer people. You don't need skyscrapers to build a denser city, you live in Germany so you are aware of that. We already have built all that infrastructure over the last millennia. We have roads everywhere, we have water and power everywhere, and 99.99% are attached to a sewer mains. That's the fucking point. We have more than enough housing, it's just the basic infrastructure like 5G and fiber internet that drives people away from the rural areas, caused by politicians thinking "we don't need 5G on every cow pasture" (yes, literally, that was an actual quote).
      • piva00 1y ago
        Do you think this infrastructure just sits there, being used all the time, without requiring constant replacement/maintenance? All the roads everywhere are only possible when maintained, you are in Germany so you are very familiar with Autobahn closures for it. The same is needed for all power lines, water lines, sewage, internet infrastructure, cellphone infrastructure, etc. they are constantly being repaired, expanded, and replaced by better technology. All of that is only possible through economies of scale, you simply cannot have all the necessary infrastructure expected from a contemporary life style in good functioning state without a large cohort of people sharing the financial burden to maintain it, the less dense it is the more expensive it is to maintain each metre of power lines, sewage, water, roads, etc. per capita. I do not understand what you aren't understanding. > it's just the basic infrastructure like 5G and fiber internet that drives people away from the rural areas, caused by politicians thinking "we don't need 5G on every cow pasture" (yes, literally, that was an actual quote). Because to do that it needs to be subsidised by someone else, the 10 people in a town without 5G coverage are not enough to support the installation, and upkeep of multiple towers to service them, 5G has quite shorter range compared to 4G/3G. Fibre needs to be rolled out, trenches dug, switching infrastructure somewhere not too far away to maintain a good SNR. The basic infrastructure can only exist if there are enough people to pay for it, if it's already difficult to subsidise this use even with the dense population centres paying for it, how exactly do you see it being paid by in your fantasy?