
Death in the city: what happens when all our cemeteries are full? - domador
http://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/jan/21/death-in-the-city-what-happens-cemeteries-full-cost-dying
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zeidrich
It's interesting though because this is not a technical problem. A cremated
body's ashes don't take up much space, and don't need to be housed in an urn.

It's entirely a cultural issue, in that we have special feelings about death
and the treatment of a body after death. But thing about culture is that it's
really flexible, but really resistant to change.

It's never going to be a problem that can't be solved. People are resilient
and eventually if cemetery space does become completely unavailable, we'll
make due. But it doesn't mean we won't be upset while we learn to cope.

It's more that it's a problem that we don't want to solve (because it would
mean changing our cultural habits) but not a problem that is hard to solve. It
just needs to get to a point where we actually need to solve it before anyone
will worry about it.

~~~
drjesusphd
I view the regulation argument against nuclear power similarly (i.e. that it's
too expensive and time-consuming to get a nuclear plant licensed). Once energy
becomes more scarce and/or the externalities of fossil fuels are priced in,
this is a problem that will solve itself when needed.

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BuildTheRobots
Highly recommend people look for photos of the French Catacombs if you want
some ideas of what to do with around 6 million skeletons. It's a very surreal
day trip o_0

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greggman
It's not like there isn't space outside the cities. Take SF for example, they
banned cemeteries in the city so there's a "city of the dead" just down the
280 freeway, Colma which is like 80% cemeteries.

Of course a cultural change so they took no space would be fine with me but
still, most cities are surrounding by vast quantities of mostly unused or
under used land.

~~~
zhemao
Something similar happened with Shanghai. A lot of deceased Shanghai residents
are buried in the nearby city of Suzhou. I visited my grandparents' graves
there once and there were these massive graveyards covering entire hillsides.

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tshadwell
If Cities: Skylines has taught me anything, I can answer this question without
reading the article.

First, dead bodies start to build up in various buildings, especially well-
trafficked buildings such as high density commercial buildings and offices.

The presence of the bodies dramatically decreases land value and happiness
resulting in an exodus from the city.

As people leave the city, demand for new development rapidly decreases, along
with revenues.

The city quickly digs itself into deep debt as it quickly becomes a ghost
town, thousands of buildings become derelict, further decreasing the land
value. Nobody wants to live here any more. Chirpy wheezes his last tweet as
the last person complains they no longer want to live in this city and leaves.

(though, in cities skylines this usually happens because you have so many
garbage trucks and hearses trying to collect the dead people & garbage that
they all get stuck)

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derefr
The usual reason people prefer burial over cremation isn't so much the
sanctity of the body, as that there is a permanent space to visit, lay
flowers, etc.

I've always been fond of the idea of funeral-home "rememberance rooms", where
urns of ashes are stored in small "shrine" spaces that can be visited instead.
Japan's _pet cemeteries_ [1] in particular take this to its natural
conclusion: grids of cubby-hole shrines creating the mortuary equivalent of a
rental-box consignment store[2].

[1] [http://japanvisitor.blogspot.ca/2012/10/jindaiji-pet-
cemeter...](http://japanvisitor.blogspot.ca/2012/10/jindaiji-pet-
cemetery.html)

[2] A.k.a. "Cube stores":
[https://www.google.ca/search?q=%E6%A0%BC%E4%BB%94%E8%88%96&t...](https://www.google.ca/search?q=%E6%A0%BC%E4%BB%94%E8%88%96&tbm=isch)

~~~
sliverstorm
Cubby-holes lose something along the way though. I have faint memory of
visiting a relative whose grave is a marker on a wall- likely a soldier- and
it comes up very lacking compared to a headstone in a field.

~~~
stevep98
How about this: When a cemetery is "full", temporarily remove all the
headstones, add 10 feet of dirt over the whole site, then replace all the
headstones in the original positions. Now you can start burying more people.
What's wrong with that? People are still buried, you don't have to dig people
up, what difference does it make if people are 6 feet under or 16 feet or 26
feet.

~~~
moheeb
San Diego did almost exactly this. There is an old cemetery there where they
removed all the headstones and buried them in a mass grave, but left the
bodies. Then they put a city park over the bodies and children play there now.
I'm serious.

~~~
JBReefer
That's how Cheeseman Park in Denver was created, too

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rm_-rf_slash
Death and cemeteries are different than they used to be. Cemeteries used to be
places to go on picnics, for kids to play, and so on. It's a relatively recent
phenomenon for death to be seen as something to be removed from daily life.
Perhaps due to modern medicine and disease? I'm not sure. But I am sure that
cemeteries are unsustainable unless we reincorporate them into a part of our
communities, rather than being places to avoid.

~~~
chimeracoder
> Death and cemeteries are different than they used to be. Cemeteries used to
> be places to go on picnics, for kids to play, and so on.

Yeah, parks in cities are a relatively recent phenomenon. Previously,
cemeteries filled a lot of the role that parks did.

Central Park was not the first, but it was one of the first (and most
prominent at the time) example of a park that was explicitly _not_ a cemetery.

~~~
peterwwillis
It seems that this has to do specifically with public parks. Lavish private
parks and gardens have existed for a few millennia as a respite from homes and
cities and as a way to contemplate nature. (Seeing as it took so much money to
build and maintain them, they typically were kept for their owners' pleasure
alone)

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leojg
this is mainly a cultural problem. We have to accept that if we want to be
truly sustainable we have to make every proces of our life sustainable,
including death. This mean using the death in some way(as a fertilizer, for
example)

~~~
ak39
It is indeed cultural. Take how India for example - a place where 20% of the
world's population steeped neck-deep in traditional culture is jostling for 2%
of the earth's habitable real estate - dodged this economic disaster by its
own cremation culture. Lucky culture on that.

~~~
USAnum1
I'd hypothesize a long history of relatively high population density created
the cremation culture. Humans have been so successful because we adapt.
Although the original motivation may be murky, I'd bet many arbitrary cultural
institutions are actually adaptations.

~~~
plonh
This seems clear when you compare ancient religious texts side by side with
what was known about the natural world in their respective times. Unclean
animal species, menstruation rituals, etc.

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iLoch
Incinerate your loved ones!

~~~
sithadmin
Why just incinerate them when you can boil them down into useful hydrocarbon
fuel sources?
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_depolymerization](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_depolymerization)

~~~
blueflow
awesome idea. I accumulated biomasss for several decades, i don't want to
waste it by just getting incierated.

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davidw
Cemetery places in Italy are not permanent - they get recycled and the remains
dumped into some kind of common area. I think it's supposed to happen well
after anyone who would remember the person is still around, but... still, I
don't much care for the idea.

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Someone
What happened in London was this: [http://www.orderofthegooddeath.com/enon-
chapel-londons-victo...](http://www.orderofthegooddeath.com/enon-chapel-
londons-victorian-golgotha#.Vg7EO5RXerU)

Also: [http://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/jan/22/death-city-
gri...](http://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/jan/22/death-city-grisly-
secrets-victorian-london-dead), and an attempt to solve the problem:
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Necropolis_Railway](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Necropolis_Railway)

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logfromblammo
This problem has been solved already, even for cultures that do not cremate
bodies.

The scarce cemetery space is devoted to _recent_ burials. The corpse is left
in the ground long enough for all the soft tissues to decompose. It is then
exhumed, and given a second burial in an ossuary, or for the more prestigious
deceased, a reliquary.

The mass of a dry skeleton is about 1/5 that of a wet body, and without the
connective tissues, you can stack bones more efficiently.

Or just borrow a trick from hard disk drive manufacturers and orient the
corpses vertically instead of horizontally. In other words, bury bodies in a
standing position, rather than lying down.

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drzaiusapelord
What we do in Chicago is bury people in the suburbs. The rates are better
there and there's availability. Its also less cramped and allows for larger
tombstones and such. People just need to get used to driving 30-60 minutes to
visit deceased loved ones as opposed to taking a stroll to the nearest
cemetery.

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pyrrhotech
I encountered this problem when playing Cities: Skylines. Simple solution:
build more crematories

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crymer11
When traveling to LGA from Manhattan, I'd usually pass by what is a very large
cemetery compared to what I'm used to here in the rural South; it always made
me wonder how a city the size of NYC dealt with the deceased.

~~~
Analemma_
For the interested, parent is probably referring to Calvary Cemetery [1]. I
don't think it's the largest cemetery in the US by acreage, but it's the
largest by number of burials. I've always thought it must drive economists and
real estate developers nuts that there's all this land in New York City which
is probably permanently off-limits to development.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calvary_Cemetery_(Queens,_New_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calvary_Cemetery_\(Queens,_New_York\))

~~~
mason240
365 acres = .570 mi².

NYC population density = 27,858/mi².

That's space for 15,723 (living) people.

There are approx 3M people buried there.

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linkydinkandyou
Ray Kurzweil predicts that "aging" will be solved very soon. So this problem
will go away.

[http://www.singularity.com](http://www.singularity.com)

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meatysnapper
Soylent?

