Comment 42973

By Pxtl (registered) - website | Posted July 08, 2010 at 15:48:35

Ryan, I think you're missing a /i

I have a much simpler outlook: think of all the greatest cities. Places you fantasized about living in your youth. New York. Montreal. Boston. London. Paris.

What do they look like? Do they look like spread out two-car garages and expressways and box malls?

No, they look dense. They pack people in like sardines and build streetwalls and stick greenery where they can but screw it if there's no place outside of the park for it. The houses (where there are houses) are three stories tall and packed shoulder-to-shoulder, and parking is not a given. At the densest, they stack people on top of people on top of people on top of people on top of parking garages on top of subways.

It sounds terrifying when it's thought of that way, but remember: these are the places you want to visit, that you want to live. LA the centre of the entertainment industry, but how many people talk about seeing LA? It's not really a place, just a bunch of suburbs.

We like these places. We worship them. We make movies, TV, and novels about them. They're the centre of our zeitgeist.

So why don't we build them? When people obviously like big city living, why do we build sprawl instead? Why do we eschew the excitement of our fellow humankind for long distances between us and choked traffic?

Why don't we build what we obviously seem to like? You can't tell me that it's cost - as mentioned in the header, economies of scale means that high-density living is cheaper. Places like NYC are positive tax bases, not tax sinks.

Comment edited by Pxtl on 2010-07-08 14:50:32

Permalink | Context

Events Calendar

Recent Articles

Article Archives

Blog Archives

Site Tools

Feeds