traingang

yes bro, thinking that suburban sprawl is bad is totally malthusian.

We hate modern american suburbs because they're antithetical to sensible public transportation and walkability. It would be ridiculous to specify every single time that we particularly mean the late 20th-21st century anti-grid subdivision layout method designed to be deliberately unwalkable, dependent on personal cars, and as prohibitive to public transit as possible for the explicit purpose of discouraging municipalities from implementing public transit into that area as a method of discriminating against the urban poor and minorities.

Check out these two different options for a suburb layout with identical lot size for the house plots. There is a huge difference between a sprawling suburb with awful layouts and one that's sensibly designed. The winding goofy-ass layouts that modern suburbs take are inspired by Levittown's design, but taken several steps further. That town was designed to be segregated, and the design was laid out specifically to prevent future city planners and governments from coming along and desegregating the town, using its layout as a method to make it inconvenient to connect to public transit, in order to prevent minorities from accessing the neighbourhood that way. These areas are specifically designed to be prohibitive for a municipality to connect with an effective public transit system. No sensible municipality is going to add random stops in your 50 total mile maze full of dead ends without turnarounds in order to service the maybe a dozen total users per day. No bus passenger is going to walk 5 miles through that maze to get to your house, and you don't need the bus because you have a car. It's a method of segregating your neighbourhood based on car ownership as an extrapolation of income level, as an extrapolation of race.

We don't want to literally nuke the concept of a suburb out of existence and leave everyone there for dead, we want our neighbourhoods to be designed sensibly, instead of putting ourselves in a situation where your house is a two hour walk or a 15 minute drive away from your next-door neighbour.

That's going to mean we need to actively change the designs of our suburbs and neighbourhoods, and that means the modern conception of an american suburb has to go. It's not sensible to add potentially multiple miles of travel per single family residence to all of your transit routes, and it's not about a lack of resources. Can you imagine a utopian, connected city where buses and trams are so bogged down by bad layouts that walking in a straight line across people's lawns ends up being faster? Of course not.

If you care about materialist development of the American suburbs, have a go at reading Lewis Mumford and Kenneth Jackson. They both cover pre-car suburbs, why they developed, and their positives and exploitations. Jackson is more up to date but Mumford is more fun to read and was at one point a communist. I mean listen to this sass

In the mass movement into the suburban areas a new kind of community was produced, which caricatured both the historic city and the archetypal suburban refuge: a multitude of uniform, unidentifiable houses, lined up inflexibly, at uniform distances, on uniform roads, in a treeless communal waste, inhabited by people of the same class, the same income, the same age group, witnessing the same television performances, eating the same tasteless prefabricated foods, from the same freezers, conforming in every outward and inward respect to a common mold, manufactured in the central metropolis. Thus the ultimate effect of the suburban escape in our time is, ironically, a low-grade uniform environment from which escape is impossible.

I just think there should be a much quicker transition between urban and rural. Endless sprawl is unsustainable and development can't keep converting farmland to housing forever. A dense city surrounded by a mix of farms and natural spaces without sprawling suburbs makes a lot of sense from an ecological standpoint.

Suburbs did not really exist before the invention of the car. However structures on the periphery of cities, as camps, colonies and other settlement areas did exist. Regularly reaching into the country site. Suburbs did become a specific concept in current usage and aren't suburbs of them and both aren't good.

Marx and Engels wrote in the Manifest of the Communist party that:

9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of all the distinction between town and country by a more equable distribution of the populace over the country.

In later texts the abolishing of the distinctions became more important the "more equable distribution" took a back seat row and was rightfully critiqued.

What is it that interests you in your conception of sub urb? Do you live in one, do you project nature peace on it and community? Are you in a capitalist city and suffer from it, wishing for an utopian escape into the countryside/sub urb with the benefits of the city?

In any case I agree with your point about abolishing the need for an automobile, however that is a talking point urban planners and plenty liberals would accept with and movements like the 15 minute city (which gets critiqued form the right, right wing billionaires and car industrialists). However the way it would be done matters.

And by god stop calling for the suburbs to be razed

No lost suburb is worth a tear. People who cry about lost sub urbs don't cry about whole villages being destroyed by lignite mining.

cities like Amsterdam are just as unsustainable as[...]both are below the sea level.

That doesn't make it unsustainable. The consumption of its industries and the higher incomes play a larger role in that than the biking infrastructure. Which brings me to the point:

American infrastructure is bad but it’s not irredeemable, the assumption that we can’t provide public transportation to these places because of a lack of resources is malthusian

Suburbs are not efficient, no amount of public transports can save them. This is cause of the material conditions they create, only a radical re drafting of them (fusion of modern urban planing and "Commieblocks" or alike) could safe them. Then they wouldn't remain suburbs, though. The amount of roads in suburbs alone per person means they are a drag and rationally they are not a sustainable place to exist.

If you worry about the old poor pensioners without healthcare in suburbs that might be lost if suburbs are abolished you forget that they will be much better than now.

cityskylines approved

the most carbrained city builder isn't a good adjective for this take

this is coming from the person who said

most people should only need to leave the 50 or so kilometers around them maybe once a year.

last week. all praise the lemmy integration, block button works now

Wake up babe, new copypasta just dropped

Of course, see tram suburbs, there are several cool videos about them.

I don't know about other internet urbanism enthusiasts but even the NJB dude who made that silly tweet yesterday, they always put the focus in how to unfuck places that have been horribly designed, and none of the real solutions include "lol just bulldoze everything and build high density, EZ".

Yes, we would all love some Eco-Stalin in power, and in some extreme cases you could only use extreme measures like that, but those can't be the rule cuz they are impossible given the costs per se, the costs versus lots of other alternatives, and the immense ammount of dipshits complaining over even painting a crosswalk.

All the underfunding, dipshits whinning, and ideology [schniff] are the conditions that real engineers in decisitions-making-chairs have to work with, and a lot of good can still be done. The rest are just edgy memes, which I love tbh. I dream about Eco-Stalin while understanding how to behave off the internet and how to acchieve things ASAP IRL, even in the most difficult conditions, just let me meme in peace.

For example, a LOT could change if in every suburb of say 200 houses, one (1) house was turned into a minimarket/7-11/you get the idea, that's it.

Another one: Eliminate minimum parking requirements.

See? Two completely lolbertarian measures, but which would be a good start.

Another ridiculously cheap idea but way harder to apply: regular correctly-funded buses connecting the neighborhood with some nearby mall.

The internet really does seem to have an issue with acting like 'suburb' is synonymous with 'American-style suburb built in or after the 20th century'. I get that a lot of the discussions kinda revolve around the US because it's where a lot of people are from, but even then I think it's important to show that there are other ways of doing things that don't have to be so bad.

the assumption that we can’t provide public transportation to these places because of a lack of resources is malthusian

This feels like such a strawman. The fact of the matter is American suburbs are so low density that it's really hard to actually reasonably serve people. Like it or not, areas with low populations within a reasonable distance of possible transit routes are just not going to be as high a priority as those that that can serve more people.

cities like Amsterdam are just as unsustainable as Miami since [...] both are below the sea level

TIL that sustainability is determined by elevation

any measures meant to limit car use should target the rich before the poor

New Hexbear approved urbanism: build transit into the richest areas only

my ass is malthusian because it is rapidly outgrowing the productive forces necessary to sustain it

American infrastructure is bad but it’s not irredeemable,

imagine how much energy we'd need to repair all that concrete lol, sunk cost fallacy

stop calling for the suburbs to be razed, stop trying to be zoomer Robert Moses.

Hexbear HATES the black middle class

abolish the need to own the automobile

This has proven insufficient to keep places free of car bullshit. Take Manhattan. You don't need a car. It's still full of cars polluting and honking and occasionally crushing a person to death.

I think abolition of the private automobile, once it has a foothold, will prove an easier sell than cities where you don't need a car but can still drive one.

In car-allowed cities outside of NYC, everyone with two nickels to rub together will have a car. The people with any pull in city design will definitely keep them. As such, the bar for a functioning transit system is that it can deliver the working class to their workplaces to work a 9-5. There's no political pressure to make it comfortable, to reduce the number of transfers per commute or to run late so people without cars can enjoy nightlife outside of their immediate neighborhoods. The transit remains shitty because the people who suffer from its shittiness are poor and thus don't count. All US cities outside of NYC: you are here. Nobody outside of your city cares about your city's new bike lane because nobody's getting out of that rut by building a bike lane every 5 years.

Conversely, in a truly car-free city, the richest dickheads in town will complain loudly when the transit sucks, as it will personally inconvenience them. The transit gets better quickly because they get what they want and they'll end up with quiet, dense neighborhoods with great transit. Everyone will want to move there or mimic it in their own cities. It would be a dictatorship of the bourgeois pedestrian, which is obviously far short of where we want to be overall, but it sure beats a dictatorship of the bourgeois SUV driver.

nah my town is pretty fucking irredeemable unless you think americans are going to vote to tear down a couple churches and replace them with communism and third places that don't rant about me and my friends being tortured for eternity.

rural is fine except for the disproportionate cost of providing any kind of social service to those weirdos and the desolation. the rural suicide rate was way higher in the US before telephone infrastructure, sounds like a bad place for people to live long-term.

what happens when you abolish cars in suburbs, but then it rains?