this post was submitted on 26 Sep 2023
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NIMBYs think if they just ban density that the 8 billion people in the world who need housing will just poof and disappear.
Personally, I prefer dense, walkable, transit-oriented cities so we can preserve as much nature as possible, and so the people living in cities aren't separated from nature by a sea of suburban sprawl.
I was on business in a major US city. I mapped the distance from my hotel to the edge of the wilderness. Including traffic, it would take hours to get there. It's nuts how sprawling and wasteful many of our cities are.
One of the key lines from Strong Towns was roughly "during a time of abundance, any decision you make works out". We've been building out cities during a time of abundance and that abundance has run out. Now we get to see just how badly we did by overbuilding infrastructure and constructing everything around a hugely inefficient car only model for transportation.
That's a very good way of putting it. We've developed our cities in a fundamentally environmentally, socially, and fiscally unsustainable manner, but we were insulated from feeling the full impacts of it by being in relatively good times. But now those debts are quickly catching up with us with the climate crisis, housing crisis, widening inequality, rapidly degrading infrastructure, and quickly draining municipal budgets.
I don't want to ban cities, nor do I prefer suburbs, I just don't think they're anything close to beautiful thats all they're dirty and soulless.
The modern north american cities are. That's the point.
But cities don't have to be the way, other places in the world have rich beautiful cities with amazing urban communities.