"Vertical" cities are cheaper, healthier, and more sustainable to live in than spread-out suburbs.
What makes cities miserable is _cars_, which in most cities are driven primarily by people who don't live there -- since in well designed cities, the people who live there can complete many (though not necessarily all) trips on foot, bicycle, or by public transit.
In the spread out neighborhoods the article is envisioning, anything but personal car transport becomes impossible for essentially every trip. This is bad for your health, the "nature" the author is focused on, and your wallet.
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Cities don't need to be built hundreds of stories high; two or three story apartment buildings are enough. They don't need to be built with a lack of green and nature; tree lined avenues are pleasant and don't take up much space.
Very few cities are designed to begin with, let alone designed well.
Brasília (Brazil's capital city) is one that IMO is designed, and well designed at that.
Living in Brasília (I have never lived there but I have family and have visited many times) feels a bit like living in a small village with plenty of green and living spaces, where everybody knows each other but at the same time you have everything a big city has to offer just a short-to-medium car trip away. Unfortunately it wasn't designed with public transit in mind, but traffic there is mostly kept away from living and working spaces, so noise and air pollution is kept down anyway.
That is, at least the parts that were in the original city design. It grew though, and that growth was organic and disordered like any other city.
Agreed, but for reasonable density you would probably want to go with 4-7 story apartment buildings. Which is what you will see in (most?) bigger European cities.
Living in apartments is disrespectful to humanity? Yikes. Living on the street or in slums is disrespectful to humanity. Author has some messed up priorities.
What we should, of course, be aiming for is the Goldilocks zone of density. Not too tall, not too wide, but just right.
There are diminishing returns with very tall buildings, everything becomes harder and more expensive (lifts, piping water against gravity, etc). Very tall buildings also have negative effects on the surrounding area (stealing daylight, inducing strong wind). But sprawl has its own set of negatives.
It's not all that hard to aim for something in between, something that aims for maximizing the benefits while minimizing the downsides.
Sadly many apartment buildings (of any height) seem to be designed by stingy idiots. Oppressively low ceilings, paper thin walls, no thought given to soundproofing. There is certainly room for improvement...
>Living in apartments feels disrespectful to humanity.
If you live in a good apartment, then it's fine.
Author doesn't properly touch on the subject that matters here.
Economists know what the optimal neighbourhood looks like. Optimal densities relative to culture. There's loads of these communities all around the world; very often with a strong religious theme. Jews are particularly good at forming these sorts of communities. Jehovahs, amish, etc. All really good at this.
There's nothing wrong with a city, you can build these inside a city. The more vertical you go, the easier it is to fit them in.
You can invest along this path rather successfully. One of the easier ways to beat S&P500 index funds.
What the author seems to have failed on is joining one of these communities. They live in a city on their own and obviously that's going to go poorly. Then they go to other extreme of lets move to the middle of nowhere and escape society. Which is also wrong.
You need to find your tribe that is you. That's how to get in touch with human nature.
As I recall, Paul Krugman’s 2008 Nobel Prize lecture would be a good place to start to understand why, economically at least, cities are they way they are, have the size distribution they have, and so on. For a philosophical delve into how cities and other large scale products of society emerge, you could try DeLanda.
IMO, it's because of money printing. It makes everything about capital and human bodies. It creates a ponzi scheme which drives increasing centralization. Let's face it, most people who live in cities produce little to no value for society. Mostly doing bullshit jobs. Yet thanks to government money printing, their useless labour can be monetized. Places with high concentrations of people can now command large investments, real estate prices start to inflate due to artificial scarcity of land in central areas, this increases the 'value' of real estate collateral which allows city dwellers to take out large loans against it to fund even more bs ventures and jobs to attract even more people... The government keeps printing money and handing out huge contacts to large bs companies to do useless 'intellectual' work. Using job creation as a cover for the ridiculous inefficiencies they create.
The economy is hollowed out and the competitive market dynamics are replaced with inefficient monopolies... People lose valuable skills and gain useless skills instead because bs jobs pay better than useful ones. Nobody wants to do useful jobs simply because they don't pay... At the same time the intelligent ones among them recognize the uselessness of their high paying BS jobs and this demoralizes them, makes them feel guilty about everything and makes them vulnerable to woke and other self-loathing ideologies (though of course they won't acknowledge this, even to themselves).
Most of human history is before settlement and agriculture. How is it human nature to have robot lawn mowers and a picket fence? I'd argue that multiple family houses and cities are much more suitable for a social tribe species than suburbia. Not to mention that suburbia is completely unsustainable.
What makes cities miserable is _cars_, which in most cities are driven primarily by people who don't live there -- since in well designed cities, the people who live there can complete many (though not necessarily all) trips on foot, bicycle, or by public transit.
In the spread out neighborhoods the article is envisioning, anything but personal car transport becomes impossible for essentially every trip. This is bad for your health, the "nature" the author is focused on, and your wallet.
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Cities don't need to be built hundreds of stories high; two or three story apartment buildings are enough. They don't need to be built with a lack of green and nature; tree lined avenues are pleasant and don't take up much space.
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