- Registrado
- 1 de Jul, 2017
I'd say no, simply because suburban sprawl is a pain in the ass and there are lots of very, very bad people who live in cities.
That said, the case for cities is a lot weaker than ever. Work for home is functional for many, many jobs, and that removes hundreds of thousands of people from cities. We'd be a lot better off as a society if work from home remained the standard as it did 2020-21, since traffic was noticeably far better even as recent as early 2022. It didn't become standard since business owners refused to put their ESG support into practice and actually help the environment by taking hundreds of thousands of cars off the road, plus big city real estate owners hated all those fancy office towers sitting vacant.
I'd say the point of a city is to function as an entertainment-cultural hub at this point. The city should sit mostly vacant after midnight, with the primary function being venues for sports, concerts, etc. as well as restaurants, nightclubs, etc. where people who meet online (everything from meeting your fellow shitposter to meeting a businessman you spoke with on Zoom) can meet up at. If it were up to me, I'd build some sort of functional mass transit to easily and quickly move people to and from the city alongside the highway. If we can ever get passenger drones working and affordable, they would really help too.
This would be like what cities were in many cultures. They existed to show off the power of a ruler and a place for gatherings and ceremonies. Most people lived nearby on farms or in small villages.
Everything else like industry, banking, politics, etc. can be done most anywhere else. You probably don't need a single city with more than maybe 500K people in all existence, and that's only if you're doing labor intensive shit like Foxconn does (since I based that number on how big Foxconn's industrial park is). In the far future when we have shit like true VR and even more automation, then I could definitely see the case for cities going away entirely.
That said, the case for cities is a lot weaker than ever. Work for home is functional for many, many jobs, and that removes hundreds of thousands of people from cities. We'd be a lot better off as a society if work from home remained the standard as it did 2020-21, since traffic was noticeably far better even as recent as early 2022. It didn't become standard since business owners refused to put their ESG support into practice and actually help the environment by taking hundreds of thousands of cars off the road, plus big city real estate owners hated all those fancy office towers sitting vacant.
I'd say the point of a city is to function as an entertainment-cultural hub at this point. The city should sit mostly vacant after midnight, with the primary function being venues for sports, concerts, etc. as well as restaurants, nightclubs, etc. where people who meet online (everything from meeting your fellow shitposter to meeting a businessman you spoke with on Zoom) can meet up at. If it were up to me, I'd build some sort of functional mass transit to easily and quickly move people to and from the city alongside the highway. If we can ever get passenger drones working and affordable, they would really help too.
This would be like what cities were in many cultures. They existed to show off the power of a ruler and a place for gatherings and ceremonies. Most people lived nearby on farms or in small villages.
Everything else like industry, banking, politics, etc. can be done most anywhere else. You probably don't need a single city with more than maybe 500K people in all existence, and that's only if you're doing labor intensive shit like Foxconn does (since I based that number on how big Foxconn's industrial park is). In the far future when we have shit like true VR and even more automation, then I could definitely see the case for cities going away entirely.
Neither city works because both cities (especially Tokyo) are in large part responsible for the demographic crisis each nation finds itself in. And before you say "oh China had the one-child policy", Chinese cities are even lower than surrounding provinces for birth rate. Currently the highest fertility rates in Japan are found in prefectures relatively far away from Tokyo or Osaka.
Political machines exist in rural counties too, they just inevitable affiliate to the one in the nearby city. When they don't, sometimes you see incipient machines in the form of the "good ol' boys network."
