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Christopher Alexander figured this one out in A Pattern Language: https://www.patternlanguageindex.com/patterns/city-country-fingers https://www.patternlanguag
by TimorousBestie 5mo ago
Christopher Alexander figured this one out in A Pattern Language:
https://www.patternlanguageindex.com/patterns/city-country-fingers https://www.patternlanguageindex.com/patterns/city-country-f...
- bix6 5mo agoWhy didn’t we do this? Seems cool.
- HoldOnAMinute 5mo agoBecause of perverse incentives
- sophacles 5mo agoBecause it trades most of the benefits of cities for the hassle of suburban life and less efficient food production.
- TimorousBestie 5mo agoTo be fair, Alexander was writing in the seventies, long after automobiles and the suburb had killed any hope of humane urban planning in the States.
- zonkerdonker 5mo agoBig cities aren't typically in such an ideal planar geological setup as that. I'm having a hard time imagining how something like that would work in the Bay area, NYC, Seattle, Miami etc
- boc 5mo agoBecause it's like 1000x more efficient to move stuff on water vs land, so industrial cities clustered around ports and rivers since it's way easier to move stuff around.
- nradov 5mo agoBullshit. Christopher Alexander didn't know much about farming. I actually read his whole book. Most of his "patterns" are kind of quaint and twee, the sort of things that seem superficially attractive to people with no real domain knowledge. Highly overrated.
- TimorousBestie 5mo agoUtopian optimism really has fallen out of style, I suppose.
- registeredcorn 5mo agoDo you see there being a realistic alternative? I realize we can't really go backward in time, but I would prefer if the farmers that lived close to where I am sold to people who live local to me. That can happen to some degree (open yard stands), and I like to do that for some of the smaller farms, but it's really a kind of "nice to have" rather than a "The market stocks stuff that was grown a town or two over" type thing. I feel like something probably got lost when that kind of arrangement went away. There's still one or two local businesses that manage to make it into the local market for me which is neat to see, but that's more so because they are for frozen pastries and stuff, and can prepare a metric ton in advance, and the market can mark it up for being a "local specialty" type thing. I like to buy them when I can afford it. It just sucks that essentially every other thing on a shelf probably wasn't even made in the same time zone or hemisphere.
- nradov 5mo agoWhy do we need an alternative? Your preferences don't matter.
- AnimalMuppet 5mo agoWell, they matter some. They matter to registeredcorn. More widely, they matter in that farmers markets and roadside stands and such do exist. Why do they exist? Because there are enough people that want to buy from such places. I mean, it's never going to be the way that food is sold. But those preferences matter enough for niche markets to exist.
- Tade0 5mo agoYou'd have to either waste good soil by putting buildings on it, or use a lot of fertilizer.