Funny thing is, making cities more green isn't even _that_ difficult. I see above conversations on living closer to nature, or mountains vs parks - but the vast majority of time spent is walking and driving in the cities. So it seems a no-brainer that before everything else, before thinking about taking a 2 hour drive to hike, or making the time for a weekly visit to the park, we should first make sure the places people actually walk through and live in every day are as green as possible.
There is no one solution, of course, since at the very least climates and budgets can be wildly different, but a good start is making sure every street has a green canopy above, starting with the largest. After that, take every space you can and put something living on it.
I've been involved in the design of a green neighborhood in my city [1][2]. We spent quite some time taking in account as much considerations for sustainability and integration with the environment. It wasn't easy, at all. The hardest part, still fully unsolved, is operating with current legislation and outdated city planning rules. Those normatives revolve around high density and cheap development. Nature takes space and efficient buildings are expensive so housing constructors will have a hard time buying into the green zone.
Efficient city planning is not easy, and requires well intended coordination on many fronts.
On the other side I'm personally convinced closeness to nature is a life saver on many aspects so renewing those policies is a battle worth having.
> The hardest part, still fully unsolved, is operating with current legislation and outdated city planning rules. Those normatives revolve around high density and cheap development. Nature takes space and efficient buildings are expensive so housing constructors will have a hard time buying into the green zone.
where i live there is constant discussion of "we need high density housing" and this is exactly what comes to mind. eventually this would end up with something like soviet style block housing, which doesn't seem so well received around the world. not to mention this style of housing is very constrictive in terms of lifestyle - maximum 2 child family with minimal space for hobbies/interests, limited sunlight, high noise pollution, etc.
this city in Estonia [0] for example, is somewhat pleasing to look at from a birds eye view and seems to check the boxes for having green space but i wonder about the range of residents' experiences.
You can do high density without block housing! Many European cities are good examples of this. Paris, for instance, has very high density because it's packed with mid-rise (~7-8 floors) buildings[1]. Another good example is the section of Manhattan between Midtown and Lower Manhattan, which is also primarily mid-rise and very dense.
Apart from that I do think it's true that block housing separated by large parks (as shown in your picture) doesn't work well; it's discussed in e.g. Jacob's _The Death and Life of Great American Cities_.
I agree re: European examples but my argument there is many of these cities developed over long time periods with stable growth in population, stable industry etc, whereas now it seems like the idea is to simply explode urban housing capacity asap, which leads to the block style or high rise glass and steel.
and of course we can't forget that many places are at an inflection point in population growth so all of this capacity could be vacant in 15-20 years.
The issue is that people want to explode housing capacity ASAP in relatively limited geographic areas within cities. If mid rise was actually broadly incentivized, it wouldn’t be that challenging to rapidly increase that stock.
Strong towns [0] advocates a more bottom up approach to development, and is a good resource for anyone interested in how to add density in a sane manner.
How do you properly forecast housing need so your development curve (and the foundational urban planning necessary) aligns with the housing demand curve while keeping said housing affordable?
The CCP seems to have been very successful with their "build an entire city and move people into it model" (seeing the cities have filled), but I'm unsure how it works in a more capitalistic model.
Even mid-rise is kind of bad. You tend to share walls with a few neighbours still and there's no opportunity for any private garden space. It's not great for pet ownership, either. I'm not convinced it's a lot better than high rise/block housing as a space to actually live in. I say this presently living in a mid-rise in the UK. Edit: I should probably add that the leasehold system in the UK makes them a particularly bad proposition if you want to actually own your home as well.
Terraced housing has kind of okay density, at least it's not a total land crime like US suburban detached housing but affords many of the freedoms associated with it.
Europe does this much better. It's not so difficult to find yourself on a quieter, greener path just on your way to work. The countryside has a network of footpaths that connect everything. Wherever I am in Europe, I can count on a quiet evening walk.
Berlin is outstanding for this. Wherever you are, it's easy to escape loud traffic and sit in a green, public space. Some have cafés and Biergarten in them.
I find returning to Canada difficult because there is no way to escape loud roads. There's no path along the fields, forests or rivers. If you want to walk in nature, you have to drive to it.
Berlin is better than most other places I've lived, but there is still so much room to improve. In my (sub-)district, pedestrians, cyclists, bars and trees share around 30% of the space on the street, while an additional 40% is parking and the last 30% is driving. The thing is, only around 35% of households here even own a car, and the vast majority of those probably just have it as a convenience. Public transport is quite good, and Berlin is super flat, so also really good for cycling.
Very slowly things are moving in the right direction, but it is a constant fight against a loud minority and old local and federal rules favoring cars above all.
I will throw Rome here, often overlooked when talking about this stuff, but Rome has the widest green area in Europe, parks, gardens, reserves, green areas in general cover more than 65% of the total surface, totaling 85,000 hectares (~850 km2).
In Berlin in comparison only 30% of the city area is green spaces and woodland, totaling ~260km2.
One of the reasons why Berlin population is 1.2 times larger than Rome, even though the surface of the city is only 70% of the Italian Capitol.
How was that calculated; populations and areas of cities are often calculated in very different ways. You have to show these things on a map and describe why you choose what area and how the population number was calculated. Just "what is a park" differs between cities, even what is a parking space is different. E.g. cars needs a lot of room around them on motorways, that areas is not always counted as "motorway" but can be counted as "green space" in some papers.
I have not seen ANY good examples of comparisions between cities, but I know these problems comes up alot when we discuss cities here on HN.
I've highlighted on the left the area that is actually Rome's territory, Google maps only highlights the area inside the "Grande raccordo anulare" [1], but the city of Rome extends much farther than that, also the area on the beach (the one called Ostia) is actually part of the city even though it is disconnected from it.
That's Rome, the city, then there's the Metropolitan City of Rome Capital [2], which is much larger and includes many smaller municipalities around it, which is in turn smaller than Rome metropolitan area [3]
I like the London practice of having a small square of park in the center among the homes. Although it seems a practice of wealthier urban areas, the parks are gated, the home owners have a key and they pay for the upkeep. I don't know how common this is. NYC Central Park is beautiful and vast, but sometimes I wonder if cities need more smaller little parks. There's a lovely lawn behind Rodin's house in Paris where people go and stretch out, tall trees on the perimeter and open space, it's very beautiful and relaxing to view.
Parks and gardens seem an afterthoughts in American urban planning. The National and state parks are gems but not accessible near the cities.
Somebody mentioned Rome downstream, one more thing I love about Rome, all the public fountain water is potable. There's something so awesome about going to the fountain and getting water that you can drink. (Native Romans, don't crush my dreams by telling me I was a dumb tourist and who knows what I drank when I took my chances with the public fountains.)
As long as you can look into it from the street you'll have some benefit at least. Walking along other people's gardens can be quite relaxing too as long as high walls are not allowed.
There’s a mix - some are walled off, some internal to housing (interior of a block), some just fenced off.
The Eaton Square viewed on Google Maps shows a variety. The main square is shoulder-high iron fencing. But many blocks have walked or internal gardens.
The problem is those private gardens don't give you a chance to take a walk in them, and they don't connect together in any way to make them friendly for birds.
I live in a mid-sized city in the States, and all of our streets are tree-lined. Our fields too, which used to just be grass for sports, are getting more and more trees planted.
And the Roman water is potable, yes, and delicious because of the limestone it filters through. Although if you drink or fill a bottle from the bottom of the sprout, instead of putting your finger underneath and letting the water spurt up from the little hole, someone will tell you that's disgusting, because that's where the dogs lick. Nevermind that the water coming out the hole is still touching that bottom portion of the pipe.
This! I love going mountain biking but commuting on a bike does not fit well with my person. And I t’s not missing bike lanes that are the problem with commuting, it is the numerous other issues a bike commute introduces to your life that are so often overseen. Cities must become walkable first again to succeed, making them bike friendly only pushes traffic problems a few years away…
5min walking through a park + 5-10 minutes in high speed, transport that is the future
1. I despise biking in non-ideal conditions (and where I live this is roughly 60% of the time)
2. From my observations as a pedestrian, driver, biker I have concluded that other bikers are bikers own worst enemy when it comes to the commute, a problem that has not improved with improved bike infrastructure
3. Bike commuting kinda never is at home anywhere, at rush hour you are not at home at the bile lane, you are way to slow for general traffic and way way too fast for the pedestrian sections and there is no solution to this, you have to cross at some point somewhere where you are the „bad guy“
4. I get sweaty when I bike and I don’t like having to shower away my commute before I start my work day (I’ve usually showered already before taking off..)
5. Running errands on the commute route is also problematic with a bike as at rush hour there is just too much going on and too little space in European cities. If we assume that everybody/majority commute by bike this just exacerbates
6. there’s more but I think the reasoning becomes clear
All in all I applaud people for doing it, I just couldn’t live with it and prefer to be a pedestrian that uses fast transport for the big sections.
And yes, I also think that mass bike commuting is a delusion, low hanging political fruit that is being pushed to pump greenwashing agendas and does only kick the problem further down the road. The future should be pedestrian first with well decentralised cities, work from anywhere Job culture and fast (ideally self driving) shared transport.
Personally I don't enjoy cyclists zipping around me on the sidewalk and cycle paths require space, so to me they sort of are.
Of course you can remove roads to create cycle paths, but there's a point at which this starts to affect public transport and services - after all it's not just cars that use the roads.
> making cities more green isn't even _that_ difficult.
On the contrary it takes quite a bit of effort to keep the nature at bay. Neglect a corner of your house and next thing you notices small ecosystem developing full with small grass, mold, insects and what not. When Indian cities were locked down for a few months all sorts of birds and animals started appearing in the neighborhood.
Where I live, the city encourages citizens to make tiny gardens against the facades off their building. If you request them, the municipality will pop out some tiles from the sidewalk and supply the soil.
The idea is that citizens themselves are then responsible for the gardening, and as you say "keeping nature at bay". The city has become prettier because of it.
> Neglect a corner of your house and next thing you notices small ecosystem developing full with small grass, mold, insects and what not. When Indian cities were locked down for a few months all sorts of birds and animals started appearing in the neighborhood.
This is part of why I love visiting Japan, so much nature scattered throughout otherwise urban areas. Lot's of other places in the world like it as well. Makes me jealous since I love in the concrete wasteland that is Phoenix.
I actually have a different experience in Arizona. The masterplan communities here are great at prioritizing community space. My neighborhood is connected by an interior park-like trail that twists and winds for 22miles. Most houses are within 2 blocks of an entrance to the trail system, and there are two separate k-12 schools attached to the trails so kiddos can ride their scooters/bikes to school in the morning.
There’s also some of the best hiking in the world around here. The camelback ridge line is awesome, a bunch of abandoned mines with surrounding settlements to go explore, etc. and it’s only 45minutes to the rim where, thanks to the jump in elevation, you start seeing more green.
Lucky! I'm happy to have my house given the real estate situation these days, but I'm definitely in a "poorer" area :) Can't get anywhere green / nature without some sort of car.
Part of the reason I am jealous of these other countries is there isn't as much of a divide between who gets the nice / and who is relegated to the commuting "concrete wasteland" as I phrased it. There's a strong sense of community / wanting everyone to have access. I'd love for our cities to start investing in the same way so everyone can reap the benefits (which I think are numerous, it has crazy dividends and life long impacts). Hard to push that here though.
Sweden is pretty similar, lots and lots of nature with urban areas scattered on it.
Stockholm, as an example, does it very well: a dense but small city-centre with lots of parks and greenery with the remaining sprawl outside the centre being scattered urban areas in the middle of the green with great public transportation connections.
Stockholm is almost cheating though, with all the water flowing through the city.
What's impressive though is that Stockholm manages to keep (most of) that water clean, and you can go swimming in the city center, without ever visiting a swimming pool!
Take a stroll around the intersection of north Randolph road and north 14th street. Randomly stumbled upon this when I was visiting Phoenix and it was a nice surprise. Overall I would say that concrete wasteland is a bit too harsh, at least the parts I walked through had a decent amount of vegetation here and there.
I was walking in Glasgow, everything felt grey, bland and depressive.
At some point I realized they have zero trees in the streets. Also means no bird sounds in the background, no green leaves adding some colors to the concrete, no blossoming in the spring.
Being in a city where every street is filled with trees I realized how big of an impact it is.
It is however not "easy", the old big trees you want, destroy your streets, branches fall in storms, sometimes even whole trees fall over.
This is similar to the feeling I get when I travel from London to Manchester.
While I know London isn't everyone's cup of tea, it has a ton of parks, trees and nature compared to many other cities, and it's usually quick to dip away from the bustle into a relatively quiet oasis. You're rarely more than a 5 minute walk away from a small park.
Sydney takes this to another level, being lots of parks and lots of suburbia (which unfortunately means more car reliance, but there is a lot of green space). Even lots of beaches and a national park!
I imagine a lot of it is “topographically forced” by the harbour / rivers intruding everywhere.
The problem with making cities green, like the problem with everything else, is terrible city design. There is quite a bit of greenery where I live and it is all anxiety inducing because it is planted near intersections and cutting off line of sight so you can't see pedestrians well or oncoming traffic. There are certain areas that have these wonderful bushes, too bad they opted for those bushes instead of sidewalks but hey, who cares about pedestrians am I right?
I guess its wonderful if you like killing people. Reducing visibility around corners is unsafe in the US, far too many people will drive the same and just take a chance that its all clear, I know of a couple people who died that way.
I’ve seen this sort of thing work in London, so my theory is that traffic calming only works if you don’t treat vehicular manslaughter as akin to petty theft or even less as we do in the US. Good luck changing that, way too many people operate a vehicle everyday for them to want to take on that liability. Also young men are going to continue to drive with a devil may care attitude. Traffic calming measures in a motorist society like the US, in my observation, ironically cause much more aggressiveness on the road, and to me are the transportation equivalent of hostile architecture.
I think there's a lot that the people that actually live there can do. When I think of American housing, it's either big dense cities, or suburbs. The suburbs are all... bland, a concrete driveway and grass. All very low maintenance. If those were to do some gardening - plant a tree, some bushes, flower perks, longer grasses, etc - you already will get a much nicer place to live.
And in the cities, people can do things like hanging baskets out of windowsills, or potted plants out the door. And of course things inside the house.
I will acknowledge though that this is from a position of privilege, we have a lively plant and flower industry in my country and hundreds of garden centers around the country.
The crazy thing is grass lawns are HIGH maintenance. It’s effectively an economic signal - “look at me, I have time and money to maintain this useless patch of grass!”
It’s much easier to plant a mix of greens - clover, grasses, etc (effectively pasture seed blend). Requires less water, less mowing, and much less fertilizer.
Living alone or in small families also means a lot of space for not a lot of people. In Berlin (which has been mentioned above as a very green city) there are also many communities of people that live together despite not being in a family or relationship. Such flatshares/apartment sharing is more ecologically sustainable because one kitchen can serve 3-4 people that would otherwise have to buy their own kitchen and appliances.
Personally, I would not mind sharing a TV (barely use one) or washing machine or garden with more people, but the way western society works in terms of building defaults is biased towards individualism not community building.
Yeah, the Soviets and central planning get a lot of deserved flak, but as someone who grew in that part of the world, I hold that they got high density urban planning right. Not the execution, of course - the endemic corruption saw to that, all those buildings need a lot of repairs and upkeep, but the plan was sound. You have small quiet commercial buildings on the ground floor and every district has basic amenities within walking distance, with large communal green spaces. Sadly we're now trying to do everything the American way, i.e. the way 80s-90s America is presented by TV. You can look at a new building and pinpoint which sitcom served as inspiration. Picture perfect buildings being plopped on the outskirts of the city with frankly absurd connections to the roads around them. Residential-only buildings being built right to the edge of the road and cannibalising all the green space. New roads cutting right across old footpaths with no way to cross them. At least there's a little bit less corruption and a bit more freedom.
We had trees on the main streets in my home city. Then they "modernized" it, widened the roads and cut the trees (even though there was still enough space for them, or at least newly planted ones!).
Now it looks pretty shit (just imo), and it's hellish in summer - no shade, hot as hell, the buildings with their new windows and white finishes are blinding. I used to love walking there, now I avoid them.
It’s tedious to take a 2 hour drive to go hiking, but it’s basically impossible for most of us to make our cities considerably greener. Obviously if it were a realistic possibility, I would be all for it, but for most of us it depends on factors well outside of our control and anyway it would be a decades-long initiative.
This is great as long as you aren’t fighting your local environment. So much green has no place in desert cities where water tables are plummeting. (Looking at you, Vegas and Phoenix)
This is the sort of thing I think about when the pro-urban/pro-density/anti-car people talk about their vision for the world. I live in a city now, and the lack of substantial nature is suffocating to the extent that I plan to move. The idea that we should all live this way to conserve space—a resource which is only scarce in these urban places—seems excessive to put it mildly.
EDIT: A lot of urban folks are rebutting my “substantial nature” complaint with references to their city’s parks, which is amusingly illustrative of our differing perspectives. I was thinking “mountains and forests”, not just green spaces scattered amid the concrete.
EDIT 2: A lot of urban folks are talking like the suburbs are swallowing up the countryside. I’m sure they’ve grown, but it’s still a big world out there people. I can’t recommend a cross-country road trip enough. Y’all need to leave your cities once in a while and see the world that you have such strong opinions about! :)
To give a different perspective, I enjoyed the parks much more living in London than I do now, living in a sprawling suburb in the Dallas metroplex. In London I could walk to the park in 5 minutes. Here I'm lucky that it's only about a 7 minute walk, but the walk to and from is much less pleasant, having to cut through alleys and paths that were clearly an afterthought, while the park itself feels much more urban/artificial than the ones in London did.
(To be fair, London has great parks)
Density can coexist with ample green space. Remember that you don't need anything like Manhattan density to make things walkable. In my book, suburbs are only a problem to the degree that their design forces driving on residents. My vision for a perfect city has plenty of parks.
When I was talking about nature, I wasn’t thinking about city parks, but rather proper forests and mountains. City parks don’t do it for me—I need to get away from the cars and crowds. But to your point, yes, there are lots of cities with great city parks for those who are content with that sort of thing.
The more you let people build up, the more ground can be left as green space. No one is against park.
Land area/space in general is not scarce. What is scarce is land area near job centers (or more broadly, near where people want to spend their time outside the home.) The more you spread people out, the more car dependent the city, necessitating more roads and parking lots.
I don’t have any problems with people building up, but I’m very skeptical that the space between tall buildings will be made into parks, and anyway a city park is not what I would consider “nature”. For folks who want density and can content themselves with urban green spaces, I wish you well on your quest to build taller and denser, just please don’t impose that on everyone! :)
Honestly I feel like you're just failing to precisely represent what you're wanting. Here's what I think you're getting at, definitely tell me if I'm off.
1) Cities, whether they're sprawling or dense, or park-laden or not, can be suffocating. It just so happens that yours atm is less park-laden. Thus, your advice for exclusively urban people, is to actually put the effort in to get into real nature; into the mountains, the isolated wilderness, the lakes, etc.. because there's a serenity like that you can't get with facsimiles like neighborhood parks
2) Space between high rises isn't used all that effectively. I think this is particularly a problem with downtown core areas moreso than downtown adjacent areas in a lot of cities.
I'm personally not anti-car outright, just anti-car as a primary means of day to day utility oriented travel and the design of urban spaces that prioritize that over others. If you walk or bike or skateboard most of the time, you develop a feeling for the space you're doing that in, and it has an affect on your life. If you're only walking through parking lots, on broken old slabs of sidewalk that nobody cares about, with no flowers or trees or cats or people around, you're going to want to avoid that. I'm a huge advocate for building your immediate surroundings so they facilitate healthy and sustainable living (the opposite of broken parking lots in a suburbab wasteland) but also for getting the fuck out of the whole city pretty often if you can. I rent a car to do this, and might buy a beater in the future to have more flexibility in that respect, but definitely get the hell out once in a while if you can.
My city is “park laden”. I live next to a 1200 acre park. City parks aren’t nature; however, and having seen the real deal there’s only so much one can do to convince one’s subconscious otherwise.
But yes, I find daily life in an urban environment (however park laden!) to be depleting. Cities are still tons of fun to visit and explore, I’m glad they exist, etc. This might be different if I could reasonably make it to some nature between work and sunset, but in most cities you won’t make it past the burbs.
I should also note that I'm glad that there is a movement to make cities more walkable, but I duck out when that sentiment pours over into a sort of religious zeal against more nature-ful ways of life.
Specifically, I'd like to do more hiking and cycling, but honestly just being around it--having fresh air and room to breath is great. Also, my geriatric dog is much happier when we take trips out of the city. It's easy enough to work during the day and go for little hikes or bike rides in the evening if you don't have to drive 3 hours round trip.
Yes, urban nature/parks is not exactly the same as being in a forest, or climbing a mountain. But neither is suburban green space! And again, unlike dense urban cores, suburban sprawl requires more destruction of natural environments, not less.
What exactly is it you are advocating for/against? If you want to live in “real” nature, like in a cabin in a forest, or on a ranch in the country, then go do that. Nobody is stopping you.
Edit: Just to put a concrete point on it, it now takes approximately an hour to get out of the suburbs from urban / downtown Dallas. Nature is further away than ever.
Edit 2: Of course you will find people on Twitter or whatever who want to “ban all cars”, but this is not a serious movement or position held by the vast majority of YIMBY/urbanism people. I think most of us would like exactly what you’re talking about: the freedom to let people do what they want on the land they own, and make their own choices as to what living arrangements best for them and their customers. Currently, this option is only denied to people wanting to build up, while suburban sprawl is allowed virtually everywhere. Where I live, Austin, TX, there are parts of our downtown central business district that are zoned for SFH only! It is absurd, we wouldn’t inflict this level of economic destruction on our worst enemies.
We just have different standards for “nature”. If it’s hundreds of acres of undisturbed forest and you can’t see or hear the city, then it’ll probably scratch the itch, but most large urban parks are mostly grass, gardens, sports fields, playgrounds, etc with a few acres of feel-good wetlands or prairie or bird sanctuary sprinkled around. “Acres” does not nature make.
You’re presenting a false dichotomy. There are plenty of dense places with incredible nature within just an hours drive. In the USA, Maybe not so much outside of the West Coast of the USA however.
Personally, living in a city close to nature(seattle area) has been the best thing for me so far in my life; I have spent a stupid amount of money making it happen but wouldn’t trade it for anything. On the flip side it’s not for everybody, so don’t just take my word for it.
On the other hand I will be riding my bike to a ferry, and then riding to a camp site on a beach on an island after work on Friday- weather permitting.
Wow that's depressing, I live in a very high density area by western standards and there's 50,000 acres of pristine rainforest literally on my doorstep while the mall is 5 minutes drive away and the city centre is 15 mins. During covid even the rare and endangered gibbons would come out hang out in the street.
Everytime I go back to Australia it seems like a suburban dystopia with 8 lane roads 60kms from the actual city. People commuting 2+ hours a day is the norm there.
You wrote: <<there's 50,000 acres of pristine rainforest literally on my doorstep while the mall is 5 minutes drive away and the city centre is 15 mins>>
Woah. Where do you live? This sounds "impossible". Singapore or Kuala Lumpur?
Yes, this is absolutely a false dichotomy. I live in Zurich, with access to varied nature (hills, lake, river) all within a 15 minutes' walk and lots of stunning scenery easily accessible by train.
> There are plenty of dense places with incredible nature within just an hours drive.
What a hilarious example of what the original commenter was saying. Apparently you think having nature an hour away is acceptable, or at least counts as being close to nature. As a very anti-urban person, I consider that nightmarish. I'm glad other people like that kind of world, and hope they all keep moving to the cities to leave the rest of the world open and spacious for the rest of us.
Yeah, I didn’t mean to frame it as a dichotomy, but it was a HN comment so I didn’t explore the full depth of nuance, and it was scoped to the US. Yes, some places are dense while still allowing some access to nature.
Attitudes vary from person to person, but I don't really think being 20 minutes from nature really counts. I lived in Paris until recently and had a really rough time for a few reasons, but the biggest one is was the lack of green places to walk. Whenever I brought it up to anyone, people would say "oh, what about Bois de Boulogne or Bois de Vincennes?" Both were inaccessible by foot from where I lived due to distance and would take 30 minutes to get to by public transit. So what's the idea, then? We should budget an hour in a subway tunnel each day so we can spend some time in a park? That's no way to live; nature isn't something we should treat like a museum. It is something we should feel a part of.
For me, thankfully, there was an easy solution: I moved to one of the towns just outside of the city. Now I have ample access to lots of trees, birds, flowers, etc. If I get on my bike, which I do frequently, I can be in some really beautiful regional parks within 40 minutes or so, and the ride there ain't too bad either.
My favorite place to bike is Parc naturel régional de la Haute Vallée de Chevreuse (French people aren't into the whole brevity thing). I can't speak to hiking but I have to assume there are nice walks to be had in the area because I frequently see people with hiking gear on. You can get there from Paris on the RER B: just take it all the way south to Saint-Rémy-lès-Chevreuse. Île-de-France is, by and large, quite flat, but Chevreuse is a nice valley so you can get some really pretty scenery.
EDIT: I'll add that last fall I was biking around there with my wife and we found some most righteous porcini mushrooms growing on the side of the road. It really is nice out there.
I should also add that nearer Paris is Forêt domaniale de Meudon, which is in the direction of Versailles. Nice forested area. I can't speak to the walking/hiking but I assume it is not bad (I've only been out that way on bike).
I'm a big proponent of walkable cities too, but I diverge from these people in that I don't think it's desirable to make everyone live in a dense urban environment or else extend public transit to every corner of the US in the name of abolishing cars.
Nature is also against walkability when it puts frigging hills on my way! Also the weather is way too agressive near the equator... I can endure it with sports clothes but not before work.
Seriously: walking/cycling on Amsterdam, Lisbon or Paris when the weather is 15 °C, mostly on flat ways, is a pleasure. You arrive at the office just a little heated up, I imagine.
I find it much easier to do exercise in the cold than in the heat. In the cold it's just a matter of having the right gear and layers. In the heat, there's nothing you can do. It'll be extremely hot, you'll be sweating like crazy and get tired quicker (or at least I do).
Well... exercising in the cold makes you hotter, that makes sense. And I bet they have Canada-level of socks/parkas/etc which you can remove as you get hotter.
Anti-car is pro-nature not pro concrete jungle. Cars are a big part of why we have a concrete jungle and not nature intersected with density. Think of cities with substantial nature passages, botanic gardens and reserves throughout. Not just one big one but many.
Suburbia isn't nature either, at least not standard suburbia. It's carbon intense lawn, concrete and asphalt. A front lawn and a big tree isn't nature. The pro-car angle seeks to expand suburbia, and destroy more and more nature. You may see more greenery but it's just grass and the odd pasture.
I don't think anyone in the anti-car movement is saying, don't drive to a national park or mountain. The anti-car movement is about removing cars from the city and reducing the impact of suburbia on the greater area, which includes national parks.
Why do people keep framing this as a dichotomy between urban areas and suburbs? I agree that suburbs aren’t “nature”, obviously. There’s a lot more to the US than urban cores and suburbs.
I can’t claim to have visited all major cities in the US, but they do seem to match the “urban core and suburbs” pattern, compared with my experiences visiting European cities.
I certainly didn't frame anything as a dichotomy between suburbs and urban area. I did generalize cities as not having easy access to nature, which is strictly true even if there are exceptions that prove the rule. Generalization doesn't imply dichotomy.
Perhaps we're not gaining much from this clarification except resetting the stage, but the dichotomy I was seeing was anti-car vs pro-car, which for America I feel is synonymous with urban density vs suburbia due to the way zoning laws pretty much mandate suburbia be pro-car. The bit I was specifically rebutting was that anti-car is somehow anti-nature, which was what I felt you were implying.
My hope would be that a city planned more around human level interaction with less focus on cars would reduce urban size overall, and reduce suburban sprawl. Better integrating nature all the way from the outer burbs and in toward the city.
Having visited many of Japans incredibly dense cities, and ending up yearning for the sight of a tree, I can totally see the negatives of extreme density, and that's definitely not what I'd want from a low-car city. I also live in a fairly exceptional city in regards to nature, I have national parks outside my doorstep and can ride from suburbia into the city and from the city to the beach along reserves and greenways, not just parks but regenerated forest, so I can see the very thing I'm advocating for and I fucking love it. The bad parts of my city are always related to how car infrastructure has ruined that in some way. That's why I'm passionate about it.
> The dichotomy I was seeing was anti-car vs pro-car, which for America I feel is synonymous with urban density vs suburbia due to the way zoning laws pretty much mandate suburbia be pro-car. The bit I was specifically rebutting was that anti-car is somehow anti-nature, which was what I felt you were implying.
I'm glad we're clearing up the confusion. I certainly don't think that suburban zoning laws are the pinnacle of city planning or anything like that, and I'm optimistic that we can have walkable spaces without density. And even where there's density, I think there's a lot that can be improved.
I also think the anti-car message would go over better if there was less spite. For example, in Chicago anti-car activists want to remove Lake Shore Drive: the only major N/S thoroughfare--I90 runs NW/SE--it doesn't segregate the city, it isn't useful to commuters to/from the suburbs, and its removal will only push traffic onto the side streets making the city less pedestrian-friendly. But it spites drivers, so it's worthwhile. Instead, I wish these people would focus more on making our existing public transit more appealing: advocate for cleaner buses and train cars, advocate for the enforcement of laws and rules regarding (for example) stabbing, smoking, urinating, blasting music, panhandling, etc., advocate for punctuality. Once we have a good handle on our existing public transit infrastructure, we can then start thinking about smaller improvements--increasing capacity (especially during rush hour) so people don't have to be packed into cars like sardines, and then expand the network. Once you've made public transit attractive and practical for more people, then you can start working on deprecating car transit.
To my point they don't have to live exclusively in suburbs or cities. Exurbs, towns, villages, acreages, boonies, entirely off-grid, etc are all options. There's a whole world out there--it's pretty mind-blowing if you've never ventured beyond suburbs before.
There is of course scope for a wide variety of living situations, but aside from cities and suburbs, there is no way to accommodate a large percentage of the population. Yes, I have ventured outside of the suburbs.
How did we get from "I want to move out of my city and be closer to nature" to "good luck finding a place that can accommodate a large percentage of the population"?
My experience actually living in suburbs is that when you’re not in your house, you’re driving: either on a highway or a stroad. Now I will admit that driving on a highway with pristine nature on both sides is pretty nice (love 280) but most of the time when you go places you’re in 4-6 lane road strip mall land, which is a much worse environment than either a proper urban neighborhood or proper nature.
If I could have a house truly situated in nature, I might like that, but that’s not what happens. You get a house situated in a suburban sprawl, and that sprawl is the day to day environment, and it is mostly artificial but in the worst ways: all the human art and ingenuity is directed towards the best interests of the cars instead of the people.
Suburbs are just one of many alternatives to dense urban life--it's not a dichotomy (that's a popular misconception in this thread). Moreover, there's no law that suburbs have to be a desert of unwalkable strip malls and stroads--indeed, there's a lot of variety among suburbs. I completely favor improving our suburbs and cities--that's not incompatible with wanting to be closer to nature. :)
Suburbs are what actually trades off against pro-urban/pro—density though. No one builds a dense city in a rural area. They do build suburbs there, and then those suburbs face pressure to become denser.
I will push back a little on your claim that suburbs are different: postwar sprawl is a remarkably homogeneous product, the codes from jurisdiction to jurisdiction are very consistent, the home builders largely national chains, the businesses in the strip malls also largely national chains. I’m sure there are exceptions but really for such a big country with so many ostensibly different places and identities, it makes very little difference which sprawl-agglomeration you live in. “Local character” and distinctive building styles mostly belong to the historic walkable core districts. The suburbs could be anywhere.
> Suburbs are what actually trades off against pro-urban/pro—density though. No one builds a dense city in a rural area. They do build suburbs there, and then those suburbs face pressure to become denser.
I agree with this, but I don’t see what that has to do with our conversation.
> I will push back a little on your claim that suburbs are different: postwar sprawl is a remarkably homogeneous product, the codes from jurisdiction to jurisdiction are very consistent, the home builders largely national chains, the businesses in the strip malls also largely national chains. I’m sure there are exceptions but really for such a big country with so many ostensibly different places and identities, it makes very little difference which sprawl-agglomeration you live in. “Local character” and distinctive building styles mostly belong to the historic walkable core districts. The suburbs could be anywhere.
My claim wasn’t that suburbs are diverse, but rather that there are exceptions which suffice to prove that suburbs can be done differently. If we can rethink our cities then why can’t we also reimagine our suburbs (or at least more creatively than “make them dense and urban”)?
An old-school town is walkable/urban in the same way we would advocate for cities: grid layout, main street with buildings pulled up to the sidewalk, pedestrian life, apartments over the stores, duplexes and small apartment buildings giving way to to larger single family homes as you walk out towards the fringes, schools that children can walk to, etc. Good towns have a lot in common with good urban neighborhoods. Probably the main difference is they don't need transit since the whole thing is small enough to traverse under your own power.
Automobile era towns have the same forms as the suburban sprawls attached to cities: stroads, strip malls, parking lots, subdivisions containing homogeneous uses and interfacing at few points with fast arterial roads. They're just disembodied suburbs. The disembodiment if anything makes them worse.
I visit lot of auto-oriented towns on cross-country roadtrips. They're vile places. I wouldn't want to be there any longer than necessary to get gas, food, use the restroom, etc. Sometimes when I take a wrong turn I catch a glimpse of the pre-car main street rotting away, behind the gleaming cloverleaf-adjacent McDonalds. It's sad.
I visit urban towns on vacation, on the way to and from hiking, etc. Sometimes I look up the real estate listings. They're even more expensive than the big city, but without any kind of local industry to pay those prices. They're for second homes or retirement, I guess. Also sad.
I've spent the last year living at my parents' cabin in the woods. It's right next to Jackson state forest. They've got 8 acres of land full of wildlife and redwoods. Waking up and stepping out onto the deck in the morning feels like crawling out of your tent when camping.
But now it's back to SF as the office is reopening. I won't miss driving 3+ hours to see friends, but I will miss the scenery.
I live in Berlin, which contains many trees and parks. One of the nicest quarters of Berlin is Gartenstadt (garden city) Frohnau, which feels like houses in the forest - at decent density. So it doesn't have to be either city or nature. But I'm afraid that current cost structures and short-term thinking make another Gartenstadt very unlikely.
Well. It may be that this kind of place only really works as a suburb. It does have a small center (shops, cafes, doctors, church etc) that people can walk to, which in turn has public transport to the actual city.
There’s virtually no wildernesses in Europe. Even the famous Black Forest is more of a large public garden than nature. It does still get somewhat wild up in the Alps, but you might find it hard to notice with all the manicured farms and a Gasthof on every hilltop.
Same for the Netherlands. Urban cities integrated with nature. Large parks that can be easily biked to. It’s a great balance. It’s harder to have the best of both worlds in the United States though.
Berlin has large parks in the city, and even larger ones at the edges. It doesn't only work as a suburb - people in any central Kiez are within walking distance of a park.
I love that city for that. Milan felt claustrophobic without all the parks.
Due to the unique history and political situation (city state), the city also just "suddenly ends", with little suburban sprawl. That said, Germany is so densely populated overall that there are few areas of "untouched" nature that the topl level commenter seems to be craving for.
It feels weird to argue against suburbs while I'm living there, but...
Most pro-density/pro-mass-transit people aren't arguing against rural lifestyle. They're against suburban, car-dominated lifestyle.
I'll conjecture that, for many people, the potential benefit of living "close to nature" is more than negated by driving everywhere. Commuting in a subway in a mega-city easily racks up thirty minutes of brisk walking per day.
I hear a lot of them argue about how rural people waste space and how they’re sick of subsidizing rural infrastructure and we should impose policies which further incentivize people to migrate from rural to urban areas. The thrust of the issue seems to be directed at suburbs (if only because many of these folks are only marginally aware of the world beyond the suburbs), but rural life is still wholly incompatible with their car free utopian vision (although more than a few have amusingly proposed extending public transit to every rural community!).
Fascinating. I've spent a fair amount of time in/around pro-livability discussions, and I've never really come across what you're describing. In my experience a solid portion of the folks advocating for more human-friendly cities are urban dwellers who spend significant time in nature and/or wilderness.
I mean, it’s fine if you want to live somewhere
rural, but why should that be subsidized?
I mean, it's fine if you want to live somewhere urban, but why should that be subsidized?
I don't think we should necessarily subsidize more heavily for folks who want to live rural, but many want/need to. Of course we should subsidize schools, utilities, and other human rights for them just like we do for urban areas.
I'm also not convinced rural areas are more expensive to subsidize. Clearly many things are more expensive in rural areas, but also many things are more expensive in cities. That's a complicated equation to put it mildly.
Let me rephrase that: why should we subsidize it more than we subsidize the equivalent infrastructure in urban areas?
It costs a lot more to provide infrastructure to rural areas than urban ones. If we expect both of these to be fully paid for by our taxes, and if we expect the tax burden to be similar, that means those of us living in cities are subsidizing those living in rural ones. (And note I'm not talking about actual agricultural industries that require that much space, I'm talking about people living in rural areas just because they like it better. Everyone depends on farms, we can subsidize those.)
I'm fine with people living in rural areas if they want to, but I don't think we should expect city-dwellers to subsidize them if they do.
>I'm not talking about actual agricultural industries that require that much space, I'm talking about people living in rural areas just because they like it better. Everyone depends on farms, we can subsidize those
So what about the people who live there to provide education to the farmers' kids? What about the people who work at the local restaurants and grocery stores that serve farmers? What about the people who live there to provide trash service for the people who serve the farmers?
Where does it end and why does it end at that point?
Society [noun]: the aggregate of people living together in a more or less ordered community.
It's not like we can lay out roads and say, "this is for farm machinery only, nobody else gets to use it." So, via subsidizing agriculture, you are going to subsidize some people who choose to live out there.
I don't get how you could possibly disentangle that in any way that isn't completely unsustainable. I also don't understand why you would want to; something, something, common good.
Sure, you can’t completely disentangle those things. But providing services to far-out communities takes a disproportionate amount of resources; if we pretend that it doesn’t and make it seem just as cheap as living in urban areas, we’re just encouraging more people to move out there who don’t need to. We’ve already got a ton of crumbling infrastructure and that’s in part because we’ve built too much of it to possibly maintain and it’s catching up to us.
I’m not saying I have all the answers, but something has to give.
I'm not sure "we built too much of it" as much as we failed to anticipate or account for trends such as urbanization. Anyway, it's probably more productive and less prone to chauvinism to frame it as prioritizing high value/cost infrastructure rather than morally upright urbanites subsidizing lazy, freeloading rural people (I'm exaggerating here for effect, but that's often the tone that this framing conveys whether or not it's intended). That said, I fully support gradually decommissioning the lowest value/cost infrastructure.
Does the argument require all this bellyaching when it seems as simple as “only urban residents should pay for urban services” and “only rural residents should pay for rural services”?
Yes. Because it's just not that simple. Society requires interplay among individuals. That's the entire idea behind a society. We work together for the greatest good for the greatest number of people. We don't splinter and ignore the needs of others.
In theory, urban pays for theirs and rural pays for theirs is fine. But how do goods get between urban centers? Is it magicked there, or is it brought via rail and road that goes through rural areas?
And then what is my incentive, as a rural resident, to listen to the voices of the individuals in the urban areas when it comes to matters like state laws? Why not get rid of those, because the impact of people who have zero input into my life is wildly disproportionate because there are so many of them? They don't pay for anything out here, so why should they get to tell me who is in charge?
Again, there isn't a clean way to do this, because we are all connected, and we are acutely aware of it. I would argue that's what separates us from animals.
I assume you don't actually think our taxes should be binned into distinct "urban" and "rural" pots, but are rather advocating for moving the burden for services away from the federal level and towards the local level? If so, that sounds like a fine idea but you might have a hard time getting Democrats on board.
In general, I would like to see money and decisions moved as local as possible; however, doing so can have some obvious efficiency and collective action problems. As the other poster refers to, slicing the pie on shared/interdependent resources also is a challenge.
> Let me rephrase that: why should we subsidize it more than we subsidize the equivalent infrastructure in urban areas?
I don’t think we should in the general case, but I also don’t think we should abruptly pull funding from one area (letting the infrastructure fall apart) just because it becomes abruptly fashionable to move out of that area in the near term (we’re talking about decades long time scales here). Seems like you should want some easing so you don’t have to rebuild from scratch if/when dynamics change.
But ultimately if you want less spending on rural infrastructure, that’s probably fine with me, but then don’t also complain when rural life is a luxury for the wealthy.
...suburban, car-dominated lifestyle.
I'll conjecture that, for many people, the potential
benefit of living "close to nature" is more than negated
by driving everywhere
It's not possible for everyone, of course, but the work-from-home rural/suburban lifestyle has a lot more plusses than minuses IMO.
It's close to nature, and my driving is very minimal. In an average month I spend maybe 3 hours in a car. Can walk in the park every day, etc.
I was just in the forest this weekend. I can take a train to get there - it runs every 15 minutes or more often depending on time of day.
I got nervous towards the end of the walk because I was seemingly in the middle of nowhere - no one in sight - and I was losing the light.
If I take the train the other direction, I can walk up a mountain (actually a dormant volcano) and enjoy the park there. That tends to be a bit busier, but then again, humans are also animals that exist in naturally, and they tend to be less intrusive than other animals in parks.
And I didn’t even mention the rivers, islands, and beaches I can get to on foot or by transit. I haven’t tried visiting the buttes yet, but I know at minimum one is accessible by bike.
All of that nature is available and present in part because of an urban growth boundary that constrained the expansion of suburbs.
That makes sense. As I understand it, Portland isn’t particularly dense. Someone yesterday was just likening it to suburbs and talking about the great access to nature: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31241348
It’s true, Portland isn’t nearly as dense as it should be. The result is that (hundreds of) thousands of people who would like to live here can’t afford to.
But everything I shared about access to nature would be just as true if the urban core was made more dense. Replacing sfh lots with multi use buildings doesn’t affect the access to nature in any way. If anything, it would help the situation by providing more ridership and tax revenue to support transit to nature and investment in parks.
> Replacing sfh lots with multi use buildings doesn’t affect the access to nature in any way.
It may if it just pushes people who prefer sfhs farther outside of the urban core, thus increasing the distance between urban core and nature. Maybe if you can pass zoning laws to prevent it, but that seems like a politically uphill battle (if there's already an existing state or national park or conservation area, it's probably not at risk of becoming a subdivision, but it will be hard to keep a patchwork of farms, acreages, and privately owned timber from being parceled off to meet the demand for single family dwellings).
>The idea that we should all live this way to conserve space—a resource which is only scarce in these urban places—seems excessive to put it mildly.
We're not only conserving space, we're conserving distance. Consider a uniformly populated city with a circular boundary (spherical cow). For a density of X, the mean distance from anyone's residence to nature is L. If that density becomes 2X, that distance is now 0.7L. A denser city directly puts its residents closer to nature — real nature, although we can't move the mountains!
Your argument is a complaint about the size of cities, which is mostly orthogonal to density (Honolulu is much denser than Atlanta!).
When I've lived in a dense city, there have always been large natural areas within walking distance. The ideal is something like 1/2 of the land as lots, 1/3 as parks, and 1/6 for streets and other paved areas. "Parks" includes both developed urban parks and larger forested/coastal areas with wide walking trails. The trade-off is that there is not much space for ground-level parking, and most people commuting from outside the city must use public transport.
The suburbs don't actually present a solution to this. There is no more nature in them than there is in any other urban environment. It's all manicured lawns and endless pavement, and you can't even walk to a park, because getting anywhere requires hopping into a car.
If you want to see nature, you have to live way out in the boonies, on at a minimum, two-acre lots. If everyone lived like that, we'd all have two-hour commutes on twenty-lane highways.
I wasn’t advocating for suburbs. There are more options besides suburbs and urban areas—you should check them out!
> If you want to see nature, you have to live way out in the boonies, on at a minimum, two-acre lots. If everyone lived like that, we'd all have two-hour commutes on twenty-lane highways.
What a strange comment! Millions of people live with reasonable access to nature and most of them don’t have 2 acre lots nor do they need “twenty-lane highways”. Y’all urban folks need to venture out of your cities once in a while—it’s a biiiiggg world out there.
I don't quite get your point, are you suggesting to live near nature or to have the ability to access nature when you want to?
If the second, I really don't see how taking cars out of urban centers and making nice walkable people-focused areas stops you from taking a bus out and biking the rest of the way, or even renting a car once you're out of the city part
> I don't quite get your point, are you suggesting to live near nature or to have the ability to access nature when you want to?
Both? I’m not really sure how these are different given that proximity is the limiting factor in access.
> If the second, I really don't see how taking cars out of urban centers and making nice walkable people-focused areas stops you from taking a bus out and biking the rest of the way, or even renting a car once you're out of the city part
I’m not sure what you’re arguing here. I certainly don’t have a problem with making urban areas more walkable. That said, an hour of driving after work isn’t going to get you past the suburbs in most US cities, which means you’re limited to weekend trips and if you’re spending every weekend trying to get out of the city it’s worth asking if city life is optimal for you.
> Both? I’m not really sure how these are different given that proximity is the limiting factor in access.
Think about what happens if everyone does this. There are about 613,000 households in my city; what does it look like if all of them were to move out of the city and go somewhere closer to nature? Well, they'd probably each take up a lot more space, and... well, that sounds a lot like suburban sprawl! And suddenly you're not quite so proximate to nature anymore.
No, I'd rather let cities build up, and build/maintain better access to nature outside the city via transit. Leave nature be, and make it easy to get to when you want to.
The US has 2.2 BN acres which is 7 acres for every man, woman, and child, and yet each person resides on maybe 0.05 acres (average lot size is .2 acres divided by average household size of 2.5 people/household is 0.08 rounding down because tens of millions don’t live in a single-family building). There is a tremendous amount of space that isn’t inhabited—much of that is used for farming, but we farm far more than we need—millions of acres could be used for housing.
Anyway, I’m not saying everyone needs to pack up and move out of cities—only that the gospel of urban density sounds dystopian to me.
Sure, there’s plenty of space out in the middle of nowhere. But can you imagine the scale of the infrastructure that would be required to turn so much of that into living space? Think streets, water, sewer, power, food distribution, etc.
Anyway, I’m not saying everyone should live in concrete jungles either. Think more like the Netherlands than New York City.
> Sure, there’s plenty of space out in the middle of nowhere. But can you imagine the scale of the infrastructure that would be required to turn so much of that into living space? Think streets, water, sewer, power, food distribution, etc.
My position is "we don't need to move everyone into cities or expand public transit infrastructure to every corner of the country". It is not "we should move everyone out of the cities and distribute them uniformly across the country".
> Anyway, I’m not saying everyone should live in concrete jungles either. Think more like the Netherlands than New York City.
The Netherlands has 10x the population density of the US, and the US probably would come to resemble NL if we didn't have the luxury of space. The US has a whole range of density, however--if you want something like NL, we certainly have it on offer, and I'm fully on board with making urban and suburban areas more people-friendly. I just disagree with people who think we all need to live urban lives.
Okay, because we haven’t actually touched on many of the reasons us pro-density folks think it’s a good thing: how do you suggest we reduce our emissions as much as we need to in the coming decades? Keeping in mind that a large proportion of emissions are from light-duty vehicles and heating/cooling buildings, both of which increase with lower densities.
In any case, I don’t think everyone needs to live an urban life, I just think suburbia should get quite a lot more urban, and both cities and suburbs should be easier to get around without a car. That’s where the vast majority of people live anyway.
> Okay, because we haven’t actually touched on many of the reasons us pro-density folks think it’s a good thing: how do you suggest we reduce our emissions as much as we need to in the coming decades? Keeping in mind that a large proportion of emissions are from light-duty vehicles and heating/cooling buildings, both of which increase with lower densities.
Massive projects to resettle people in urban areas or dramatically extend public transit networks will take many decades to break even from a carbon emissions standpoint. It's much faster (and far more politically tenable) to electrify as much transportation (e.g., EVs) and heating/cooling as possible while moving our grid to clean energy.
> In any case, I don’t think everyone needs to live an urban life, I just think suburbia should get quite a lot more urban, and both cities and suburbs should be easier to get around without a car.
I mostly agree with this, although I think we can decouple density and walkability. My grievance was with folks who want to impose an urban lifestyle on everyone.
I don't think anyone wants to force you to live an urban lifestyle. I personally wish there were places I could move that was walkable, bikeable, and without having to cross 4 lanes of loud polluting traffic.
Those places don't really exist, since most major US cities have been built to accommodate cars first. And even those are way less affordable (because people want to live in cities and theres not enough housing to cover it) forcing people who would rather live in cities to move to suburbs instead. That's what people are lamenting.
I'm sure there are some people like you're describing ("I just wish there was a walkable place for me"), but many people regularly argue that almost everyone needs to move into cities because suburban/exurban/rural sprawl is taking over the world, we're running out of space/nature, it's the only way to save our planet from climate change, infrastructure outside of cities is financially unsustainable, etc.
For what it's worth, I'm bought into walkability/bikeability/etc. I'm just tired of the density, social problems, and distance from nature associated with most US cities. I think it would be really cool to get some like-minded people together and build a little village with walkability/bikeability/nature in mind.
> It's much faster (and far more politically tenable) to electrify as much transportation (e.g., EVs) and heating/cooling as possible while moving our grid to clean energy.
Improving public transit doesn’t have to mean huge rail projects though, it can just mean running buses more frequently and giving them their own lanes to skip traffic. And we don’t have to massively resettle people, we can let (and encourage) towns to densify and build more bike/ped/transit infrastructure.
This also isn’t necessarily fast, no. But I don’t think it’s either/or; I think we need both.
> although I think we can decouple density and walkability.
I don’t think we can. The two are directly opposed to each other. The less dense a place is, the further apart everything is, which inherently makes it less walkable. Certainly you can (and should) build sidewalks anywhere if they don’t already exist, but past a low enough density nobody is going to walk anyway unless they’re forced to.
> Vehicle turnover is very slow, so I don’t expect this to happen as quickly as you might be thinking
The best case for getting people to uproot and move to cities in significant numbers is still measured in generations, not years or even decades. The best case for extending public transit to every suburb and exurb (never mind rural community) is probably on the same order. The worst case for EVs is a couple of decades (to 80% of cars on the road; obviously there's a long tail that diminishes).
> Improving public transit doesn’t have to mean huge rail projects though, it can just mean running buses more frequently and giving them their own lanes to skip traffic.
The only people who are likely to take buses in the suburbs (with few exceptions) or exurbs or beyond are those who can't afford cars or who lack a driver's license. An extra lane to skip traffic isn't compelling because traffic is a mild problem outside of cities (perhaps with the exception in certain city-adjacent suburbs). Frankly, the same is true of rail.
> This also isn’t necessarily fast, no. But I don’t think it’s either/or; I think we need both.
I like the idea of more public transit and walkability, but I don't think there's any legitimate case to be made that these initiatives will meaningfully reduce our carbon footprint in the necessary timescales.
> I don’t think we can. The two are directly opposed to each other. The less dense a place is, the further apart everything is, which inherently makes it less walkable.
Walkable doesn't mean you can get to every place by foot, it just means you can get to the places you need to go to by foot. Today, suburbs and exurbs have huge zones for residential and commercial such that most people have to drive to get to the commercial areas, but we could easily rezone to allow for a finer-grained patchwork of residential and commercial zones. The finer-grained patchwork means that less of any zone needs to be reserved for parking/cars (it's not just breaking one big parking lot into many smaller lots with the same total area--in a finer-grained patchwork, fewer people need to drive so the total area for parking/cars is lower) which in aggregate means more space for other things. It may never be as walkable as a dense city, but there's still tremendous opportunity for improvement.
> The best case for extending public transit to every suburb and exurb (never mind rural community) is probably on the same order. The worst case for EVs is a couple of decades (to 80% of cars on the road; obviously there's a long tail that diminishes).
Why are you using the standard of "public transit to every suburb and exurb" for transit and "80% of cars" for vehicle electrification? There's a lot of low-hanging fruit in the first-ring suburbs that we can tackle before the exurbs; those may be a lost cause for now, but a lot of people live in those inner suburbs!
And that aside, we need to at least stop the bleeding, right? If metro area growth boundaries keep expanding outward, that means more cars on the road and more energy and materials needed to make that happen. If we don't allow existing towns to build up at all, the only way for them to build is outward.
> I like the idea of more public transit and walkability, but I don't think there's any legitimate case to be made that these initiatives will meaningfully reduce our carbon footprint in the necessary timescales.
Alone they won't, just like vehicle electrification alone won't. We need to both reduce VMT and electrify, and we need both now.
> but we could easily rezone to allow for a finer-grained patchwork of residential and commercial zones. The finer-grained patchwork means that less of any zone needs to be reserved for parking/cars (it's not just breaking one big parking lot into many smaller lots with the same total area--in a finer-grained patchwork, fewer people need to drive so the total area for parking/cars is lower) which in aggregate means more space for other things.
This isn't separating walkability and density, this is higher density. This is the kind of thing we need!
> The suburbs don't actually present a solution to this. There is no more nature in them than there is in any other urban environment. It's all manicured lawns and endless pavement, and you can't even walk to a park, because getting anywhere requires hopping into a car.
That's not a suburb, at least not many of them.
In past topics I've asked for concrete examples of these suburbs where you can't walk anywhere and have not received many answer. Can you name a handful?
There is a ton of nature near my suburb, to an extent that is impossible in a city. A 5 minute bike ride gets me into the forest (not a manicured city park, actual forest) which extends for a long distance. I can ride my mountain bike all day without getting into built areas.
From my extensive experience of a few different suburbs, neighborhoods are often separated by large stretches of nature. Perhaps we have a different understanding of what a suburb is, but they absolutely contain way more nature than any city.
I’m not really anti-car. I think cars bring a kind of personal freedom that is hard to replicate in other ways but are a big liability in cities and for pedestrians, so ideally cars in cities would all be shunted underground so the surface can be for people and parks.
My ideal vision of the future is we mostly live in luxury in dense, beautiful cities that are walkable with good, seamless transit (think like escalator-like seamlessness). People spend weekends camping in vast, re-wilded nature reserves.
Year 2100 scenario: Get rid of most suburbs and staple-crop farms eventually (vat-grown staples—think Calysta FeedKind or Solar Foods—replace the need for highly processed staples like corn or wheat or soy or factory farms). Replace with rewilded nature reserves which people get to via tunnels or electric VTOL (with special consideration to low-noise design).
Pedestrians in very dense cities walk in park-like surface paths. Solarpunk-style. :) Solarpunk cities and vast nature reserves (accessible via low-impact transport, and commonly used for camping) instead of endless row crops and suburbs. :)
> when the pro-urban/pro-density/anti-car people talk about their vision for the world
Beggars belief your response to an article on the psychological and health benefits of nature is… more cars?
Building roads, urban sprawl, the noise and pollution from the cars themselves, the destructive invasion of all the infrastructure associated with car-use - all of it is directly destructive of the nature we’re talking about.
> Beggars belief your response to an article on the psychological and health benefits of nature is… more cars?
Of course, I didn’t say that, I only said the pro-density utopia sounds super bleak to me.
Anyway, there’s still plenty of space out there and all of the urban people in this thread are talking like they’ve never seen other parts of the country before—there’s still a whole bunch of space between New York and San Fran—it’s not the endless suburbs you seem to be imagining.
As someone who lives in a suburb, every time I visit a city and go to a city park I always am like "is this it?" Access to nature is far greater in the suburbs and it is not even close.
I would also add that nature is at its best when there is not many people, or better yet no people around you. Human dense places always strike me as very unnatural.
I am very pro-pedestrian / anti-car, but that’s in the context of how to actually get around town most of the time… obviously (to me) you use the car to leave town and see the wonders of our world.
If people that live in cities are to be relegated to never leave, I for one am not interested.
Yeah, cities that have good enough transit, you often don't need to own a car, and can use an on-demand rental service for this kind of thing. (You locate a nearby car in the app and then unlock it through the app when you get to it). It's usually way, way cheaper than owning a car, and handy because for example, if you need to move stuff, you can get a van, and otherwise you can get a smaller car. You don't fall into the trap of driving a big SUV empty all of the time just in case you want to move gear, and then when you have to move stuff to realise that a lot of SUVs don't actually have that much more space than a decent sized hatchback!
It’s usually cheaper than each person owning their own car, but more expensive than a household sharing a car. Of course, this varies widely from city to city and it depends on how often people rent cars or use rideshare or taxis.
The nice thing is you get fast, comfortable transit all the time, but the really nice thing is how much stuff you take advantage of that you might not otherwise. For example, I’m already paying for a car, so going on big road trips is only a marginal extra cost (rather than $100/day + hassle for a car rental). Similarly, I probably wouldn’t have gotten into camping if I had to rent a car for each trip. I probably also wouldn’t visit family as often.
I definitely see the appeal of not needing to own a car, but I tried it and it wasn’t for me. For my city, I’d love to see them start by cleaning up and policing existing public transit (for example) and then scale up from there.
I live in the suburbs. And I’m anti-car in as much as we can and should do more to make cars less necessary for day-to-day life. Make schools walkable. Make basic shopping walkable. Build mix-use town centers instead of strip malls with acres of parking.
Doing these things frees up space for other things. That could be housing or green space.
And if there’s less traffic overall, it becomes easier to get out to the mountains/forest/etc.
I don’t disagree that true nature is different than groomed parks. And I like nature. But I’d rather not spend 3 hours in suburban traffic to get to the mountains that are 40 miles away.
We can better maintain mountains and forests by having dense living areas for most people. There should be good public transport links from these areas to national parks. The enemy of wilderness is not urbanists, it’s suburban sprawl.
Suburbs aren't typically replacing forests, they're typically replacing farms, and we have far more agricultural land than we need (we produce a huge surplus of food) that we aren't managing well in the first place. We can and should protect existing nature, expand our national parks, and incentivize the naturalization and public access of existing private lands; however, we can do this without packing everyone into dense urban cores.
According to a 1993 UN Food and Agriculture Organization report, it takes about 1.25 acres of agriculture land to feed one person. That value doesn't care about whether a person lives in a city or a suburb. The median suburban American lives in a 2.5 person household on 0.2 acres of land, which means about 0.08 acres per person. I'm not sure what the average urbanite lives on, but let's say it's a quarter of that: 0.02 acres per person. So we're talking about 1.33 vs 1.27--suburbanites require only about 4% more land than urbanites. Hardly a major threat to nature compared to excessive and unsustainable agricultural practices.
> Yes, but agricultural footprint is the dominating factor.
Perhaps, but you also need to consider:
- transport to work / school / hospitals / entertainment
- food distribution
- sewage
- electricity
- emergency services coverage
- etc…
I don’t have any hard stats for you but my background reading has suggested these are significant.
> Nature, to my point. Recall that you're the one arguing that suburbs rather than agriculture is threatening nature
Yes, because we could be rewilding, creating new national parks etc. but instead are building suburbs. We can also replace existing suburbs on longer time-scales.
No, we shouldn't all live this way. The argument is how to build the dense parts of cities so they're nice to live in. If you want to live in the countryside, that's great, but that's an entirely different thing.
> I’m sure they’ve grown, but it’s still a big world out there people. I
No, it just isn't. Humans have transformed seventy per cent of the land on Earth[1]. Including the deserts. Suburbs are the second most land intensive thing we do, after farming, and for almost every other developed-world country, this problem is more acute than in the US. Get some perspective.
That is a "wind turbines cause global warming" level of bad take. More succinctly, so close to a lie I no longer have the patience to differentiate them.
The US has nearly 7 acres of land for every man, woman, and child and yet the average lot size is only .2 acres. Since the average household size is 2.5 people, that’s about 0.08 acres used per person. Moreover, that figure ignores apartment, condo, and other multi-family buildings, so the actual land usage per person is quite a lot lower. Of course, we also need farms to support people, but the US produces much more food than it needs. And yes, the population is growing, but that growth is tapering off and anyway we could manipulate our immigration policies as well. At the end of the day, the US is a vast country, but this isn’t immediately obvious to people who have lived their whole lives in a dense urban environment.
Did you misspell "world" as "US" ? Or are you dishonestly using non-representative figures? The US has a much smaller proportion of the developed world's men, women and children than it does the land, and those men, women and children are extremely carbon-intensive.
A few hundred acres of forest is very different than a few hundred acres of soccer pitches, tennis courts, playgrounds, lawns, gardens, etc with a few acres of bird sanctuary, wetland, or prairie strewn about. It’s better than concrete, but it’s not nature.
> Most towns and suburbs don't have acres of wild forest in them. That's not exactly a unique "flaw" of cities.
Not "in" them obviously, but suburbs can often have expanses of nature right next to them unlike dense cities.
Living in a suburb, I can walk to all the necessities of day to day life but in just a 5 minute bike ride I can be into the forest where I can ride for hours on end without seeing any sign of civilization. It is a wonderful escape from the stress of 24x7 slack and jira.
What a bizarre constraint. Of course the forest isn’t in the town. You live in a suburb or town or (this is going to blow some minds in this thread) acreage outside of town that is at most a reasonable drive to nature.
My criticism of cities is that a lot of them are hours away from anything that anyone would call nature (although this thread has made me aware that there are a shockingly large number of people who have never actually seen nature and for whom the word conjures up images of their local urban park).
> My criticism of cities is that a lot of them are hours away from anything that anyone would call nature
This is only because the suburbs are often sprawled in between the city and any nature that might have been nearby. It’d be a heck of a lot easier to get to from the city if you didn’t have miles and miles of low-density suburbs in each direction.
> This is only because the suburbs are often sprawled in between the city and any nature that might have been nearby.
Agreed, but I don’t think there’s a realistic world where you have dense urban cores immediately juxtaposed with forest, especially considering how m
any people are advocating for accelerated urbanization (moving people from suburbs and rural areas).
Sure, that park looks pretty legit. I think that’s with pretty exceptional or those photos aren’t telling the full story—my city has similar parks but behind the photographer would be rows of houses and the city would still be loud around us.
> Agreed, but I don’t think there’s a realistic world where you have dense urban cores immediately juxtaposed with forest, especially considering how m any people are advocating for accelerated urbanization (moving people from suburbs and rural areas).
At this point, maybe, because we’ve leveled any forests immediately around cities for suburban sprawl. But in the general case, if you’re starting fresh, urbanization makes it easier to leave the forest intact than if you sprawl out with low-density housing.
> Sure, that park looks pretty legit. I think that’s with pretty exceptional or those photos aren’t telling the full story—my city has similar parks but behind the photographer would be rows of houses and the city would still be loud around us.
I’ve hiked there a bunch and the photos are representative. If you’re near the edge of the park you’ll be able to hear cars as there are unfortunately large roadways nearby, but for the most part the trees tend to block out the noise.
> At this point, maybe, because we’ve leveled any forests immediately around cities for suburban sprawl.
In the general case, we've leveled forests for food production--originally Native American tribes cleared forest to help them harvest bison en masse and then the descendants of Europeans cleared forest for agriculture. Cities and suburbs eventually came to displace land that was previously used for agriculture.
But in the general case, if you’re starting fresh, urbanization makes it easier to leave the forest intact than if you sprawl out with low-density housing.
> But in the general case, if you’re starting fresh, urbanization makes it easier to leave the forest intact than if you sprawl out with low-density housing.
I mean, this is true in a contrived sense--if you plan your city from its initial settlement and create strict nature preserves then yeah, you can probably have your urban/natural juxtaposition, but that's pretty hard to achieve in a democratic context (good luck keeping this a popular priority over the decades and centuries). Your best bet is starting next to a federally-protected forest so residents of your city can't easily decide they want to expand into it. In whatever case, "starting fresh" is the least realistic option.
Most of the studies in the linked APA article have all the hallmarks of the replication crisis:
- Small sample sizes (O(100))
- Low correlation coefficients
- Everybody is predisposed to believe the conclusion (what kind of monster doesn't like nature?)
- There is zero incentive to report a negative finding
And even if some of the studies do replicate, the response variable is often either self-reported, or performance on some written test or survey: so it's not really clear what we are even measuring. What is the unit of "general connectedness" ? How about "eudaimonic well-being" ? These are not legitimate scientific concepts.
Nature is great. I find that a long walk in the woods is a good way to clear my head. But I'm not convinced that these studies add anything to my common sense intuitions about the matter. And by using weak methods to justify something we all already believe (or want to believe), we risk degrading trust in science that will be greatly needed when scientists reach a conclusion that isn't politically convenient.
Thanks for posting your paper which I will print out and read properly!
Section 3.2 and Table 1: does the 'continuous urban' category cover e.g. a fairly large park in the middle of a city? I can't see a category for 'parkland'.
As a concrete example have a look at Cannon Hill Park in Birmingham [1]. It struck me that it is possible to be surrounded by green semi-natural parkland within the inner ring of a city of 1 million.
The dataset used is the UK Land Cover Map 2000 [1]. It's at 25m resolution, and urban parkland should show up as the appropriate land cover types: grassland, deciduous forest, etc.
> If you want to know how people feel, I’m afraid self-reports are the gold standard
"How people feel" can't directly be measured scientifically, but it is a function of many things, some of which can be measured reliably (weight, blood pressure, money, etc). I'd rather have a reliable measurement of quantity that I believe contributes to well-being than a direct measurement of well-being that I think is unreliable.
This is brought into sharp relief when you consider the applications of this research. Suppose intervention A is know to promote subjective well being, whereas intervention B is known to promote healthy blood pressure levels. What would you rather spend money on?
> Some other studies have large sample sizes
This is a fair point. The 2019 Nature study also has large-n. I also like that the authors of that one write "Future studies would ideally collate as much data via non self-report measures as possible."
But as far as I can tell, all the large-n studies are observational. As other commenters have pointed out, when the treatment is so general it's really hard to control for confounding factors. The study you've linked (and the 2019 Nature study) both implemented controls, all of which look reasonable. But when we find an effect, we are still left the question: "What if we just missed a major confounder? What if the cumulative impact of small confounders for which we can't control for is responsible for the signal?"
> I'd rather have a reliable measurement of quantity that I believe contributes to well-being than a direct measurement of well-being that I think is unreliable.
Sometimes there's a difficult trade-off here, especially since (un)reliability isn't binary.
But a heavy prioritisation of reliability over direct measurement (which seems to be your position) is probably why governments have spent decades obsessing over GDP, which is a very poor wellbeing measure for all sorts of reasons.
It's not obvious to me how blood pressure affects happiness, or how you would even prove a link here without asking people how they feel. I also feel like it is important to point out that asking people how they feel is a scientific measurement, you just have to be careful on how to use that data.
Beyond that, to me "Nature has enormous emotional and cognitive benefits on people" is the same as putting a warning sign on car batteries saying "Don't drink the battery acid": This should be entirely common sense. Why would there be no cognitive benefit, when nature is the environment humans evolved in and that sustained life for millions of years?
I wonder if this title isn't a bit backwards. We are creatures that emerged from nature; being in nature is baseline to us. A better way to phrase this might be "being constantly trapped in a world made of concrete and drywall causes enormous emotional and cognitive detriments to people".
Thank you! Sheesh! Nature is the, uh, state of Nature. As you say, it's the baseline. So really: "Civilization has enormous emotional and cognitive burdens on people." is the actual situation.
Natural systems are effectively infinite fractals, most urban structures are flat and relatively featureless by comparison. Living in a city is sensory deprivation combined with overwhelming discordant stimuli (engines and sirens mostly.) And that's before you get to the incredible chemical burden of living in a city. In fact, until very recently, cities were populations sinks. People died in cities faster than they were born.
I imagine your comment was meant with a bit of humour, so don't read too much into the following! But it got me thinking about optimism and pessimism.
The HN post title (at time of writing):
> Nature has enormous emotional and cognitive benefits on people
Yours:
> Being constantly trapped in a world made of concrete and drywall causes enormous emotional and cognitive detriments to people
It's just "Things could be better" vs "Things are bad". They are pretty much the same in terms of what they say/imply about current reality.
I think the HN title is actually closer to an objective statement than yours. Yours is ornately, floridly pessimistic. I think a lot of people (esp. engineering types, including me) suffer from a recurring tacit belief that: pessimism is better than optimism for getting at objective truth. I used to argue that both leanings are equally likely to result in poor judgement, with 'realism' smack in the middle. But I now go further and believe that fostering a slightly optimistic lean is actually better than 'no lean' – not just in the sense that 'you'll have a nicer time', but in terms of maximising how often you are correct in your observations of reality, in the long term. Because zero lean is impossible to maintain all the time. Our observations almost always rely on heuristics to accommodate for incomplete data or insufficient time. So you are going to err in your objective judgements about reality sometimes. And when you err on the optimistic side in a way that matters, reality tends to tap you on the nose and correct you fairly promptly. Which can hurt a bit, especially for someone who spends most of their waking life working with complex systems that are unforgiving about tiny details being incorrect - this trains us to to think of all the ways something might go wrong, so we feel bad when we failed to predict a negative event. But for most of life outside of solving engineering problems, eg, dealing with more organic/nebulous things like 'other people' or 'long term goals' or 'relaxing', being optimistically incorrect in your judgements and then being corrected by reality is better than being pessimistically incorrect and not being corrected. When you make pessimistic errors in judgement, you don't get actively corrected as much, so your ability to make objective observations drifts further pessimistic, worsening your decision making, worsening your situation, and it cycles downward. Eventually some kind of correction comes, but usually after hitting a new low, by which point a few things have gone wrong in your life and the climb back up is difficult. A slightly optimistic lean doesn't seem to have the equivalent problem (of drifting ever more optimistic until you're problematically divorced from reality). At least for me, anyway. I think this might be because a positive state of mind tends to be more active and therefore able to run more thoughts in parallel, including thoughts that can gently correct others that have gone a bit too far, while a negative mindset is more monotone.
I totally believe in the value of being in nature. It's hard to go for a walk surrounded by trees and chirping birds and not come away happier and refreshed, in my experience.
But I'm more skeptical about this in the article:
> Need a quick break from your "work screen time" for some "fun screen time?" There's a nature fix for that: Check out the #FindThatLizard game on Twitter and Instagram. Science communicator and herpetologist Earyn McGee posts a picture of a lizard "camouflaged in its natural environment, and people have to find the lizard in the photo." You don't even have to leave your couch to play.
I can't imagine there's the same benefits to looking at nature on Instagram or Twitter.
Comments like these make it appear as if colonialism was just “forced” into an article where it shouldn’t belong. However, reading the actual segment, it seems that it’s not really that out of place at all. It’s talking about how locations for parks came to be and is also offering some references to native tribes and nature.
Do you have any data to back up this assertion? The latest list of sponsors I've found, from 2019, shows these companies in the $1,000,000+ category. Can you spot a single one that is "left leaning"? (I'm tempted to make a bad joke here about a misunderstanding around the name "Progressive Insurance".)
Wouldn't be a HN comment without a hand-waving dismissal of an incredibly nuanced and historically complex topic due to a perceived inconvenience of frequent observation.
If there was any light where your head is, you'd see your last meal.
That was jarring I have to admit. 3 of the 4 sections are injecting unrelated political or religious incantations? By the end I almost forgot what the article was supposed to be about.
Yeah, I was surprised at how in a story about the benefits and challenges of fitting nature into modern lifestyles, one of the four points was "don't forget about colonialism" and another was "try segregating into identity groups". It seems at least a little bit shoehorned in, and it's clear I'm not the only one who was at least a little turned off by it.
What is the point of being frustrated by referencing important things. For most of the world, colonialism is one of the most important things that ever happened, as it directly affected most of the humans alive.
Would you be similarly frustrated if an article on recent history references WW2?
Yes, nature feels like home. This is most obvious when you let a young child loose in nature. They are both enthralled and tranquil at the same time, it’s quite a surprise to see the first time.
It will depend a lot on where you live and what media you consume though; I don't feel it that much over where I live. At best there's some signs along the main road.
I've examined a number of phds on this topic as a relative outsider to the field and have been pretty unimpressed by the claims of env-psych on green/bluespace. The methods used to unpack confounding by class/wealth are pretty minimal and, although lip service is occasionally paid to this in discussions sections after reviewers require it, nobody in the field seems to take it seriously. The effects are an order of magnitude smaller than those of social class. The real story here is 'don't be poor' rather than 'get outdoors more'.
I’ll say from my own experience getting out in nature calms me and makes me feel better. Maybe it’s just the exercise of walking, maybe it’s seeing the trees and feeling the wind. It’s a good idea for folks to try it out and see how it makes them feel.
Aren't those substantially the same thing in modern cities? In my city the difference is clear and profound: wealthy white neighborhoods have grass and tree cover on all residential streets, and poor and minority neighborhoods are concrete and asphalt.
On any similar metric you map the city by you see the same effects. Air pollution, noise level, and heat in the summer vary hugely by neighborhood but always follow this pattern.
Nature has an allure, whether it is a window by your desk, or plants in your office.
This year I made a resolution to add more plants to my office and home, and slowly both are filling up with various ferns and mosses and other indoor plants. The relaxing effects of being able to walk over to the garden shelf and have my thoughts to myself while I inspect them is something you don't get to enjoy often.
If you find yourself staying at the desk for long periods and want to get up more, get a few plants, find an area with some light or a lamp and see what you can do. It is pretty cozy!
Any resources you can recommend to learn more about house plants / how to choose them / how to care for them? So far I have a snake plant and an orchid but want to get more.
Find a local plant nursery and see if they have any advice. The sort of plants that will work for you will depend on how much effort you're going to put in, what sort of space you have, what kind of home climate you like to keep.
Something that I have found very satisfying is to have a couple of small planters with herbs growing in them. Most don't take much effort, can survive fine by a window with decent light, and the net result is some fresh herbs once in a while.
Actually yes, there is a person named Planterina on YouTube with the most charming personality. There is a whole community for houseplants on YouTube, you'll see what I mean in the suggested videos. There is also a soft spoken young man by the name of Benjiplant, his videos always seem to pop up after I've been watching Planterina.
It rough for us mountain people who have to live in the city though. I miss the mountains and forest so much. What's even worse is my plan to retire back to the mountains is now going to be so hard because of all the outsiders inflating property prices that were already high.
It is nice to have so many conveniences and things to do available in the city (a trip to the store isn't a once a month thing because it's so far away), but the spiritual/mental benefits of living in and near nature are second to nothing for me at least.
I found a huge increase in happiness when I moved from Vegas to Denver. I am outside much more often and frequently have the windows open at home. Supposedly the presence of trees has been shown to improve mood (no citation, read the abstract on HN somewhere). Of course, there have been other life changes that have contributed but I feel this is a large reason.
This what I liked living in lower Manhattan. Whenever I felt the stress levels going up, I’d rent a citibike early in the morning (forgot what they’re called now) and cycled down to battery park through the riverside and went back up on the other side.
It’s not exactly the most nature-y thing to do, but it was so refreshing.
Same thing in Los Angeles, just climb up the canyons and enjoy the view. Amazing really.
I think the view does it for me more than nature. Being in front of some spectacular landscape gives me perspective (perhaps it’s why we call it persoective?)
I have set myself a daily dose of daylight exposure, either by going out or looking through windows. I feel my sleep has improved since I started a week ago. Although I don't want to jump to conclusions early. So maybe nature, or daylight, or good weather, or all of them - does it to me.
I write this comment while sitting in a local garden to start my day.
Skeptical about these kinds of claims, they usually are mixing up cause and effect; People who are emotionally and cognitively healthy tend to go outside more because they are healthy, i don't know how you would control for that.
well maybe if nature would stop trying to asphyxiate me, and stop sending bugs which bite me and suck my blood preferentially over others, I would visit more. as of right now, i've learned that i am persona-non-grata anywhere there is not air conditioning.
In the difference in air content between in door air and outdoor/forest air able to have cognitive and health aspects?
see e.g. potential unintended cognitive consequences of CO2 emissions: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/026988111141572...
Any documentation on the variance of percentage of C02 and oxygen ? Do polyphenols (via pollen?) have relevant effects intranasally ?
There is a study relating rise of CO2 to loss of IQ in indoor situations. The outdoor concentration of CO2 is never and won't be high enough in the future to have a significant effect, but climate change will raise the base level which will increase indoor levels - this may have the effect of making us a bit dumber.
However, I think improvements in insolation are much more significant in this respect.
Some cultures practice „forest bathing“ which would probably reap the greatest benefits (besides living in the woods, obviously).
Maybe this sounds gimmicky, but boosting immunity has a lot of downstream effects, from heart health to brain health to structural integrity and longevity. The body can put the resources it otherwise needs to do damage control into useful things like producing enzymes and correcting metabolic shortcomings.
A few minutes with window open and you are back to the outside CO2 levels, so I don't think it's just CO2 (unless you have really high levels of it, sensors are pretty cheap nowadays and can serve as a good reminder to let in some fresh air).
Not sure about pollen but trees produce chemicals that kill pathogens which attack them. Which is why it's healthy to breath forest air especially when you have a cold. Plus they are great at filtering air.
btw 'Think of time in nature as a "multivitamin" — it's best to take it every day' - I don't know how this ends up in articles like this with so much research against it (multivitamins that is), they might have as well been suggesting draining your blood everyday.
If you are talking about office environment then it's done by HVAC system and CO2 is often being monitored.
Re blood, I said every day. Losing blood can have some benefits. Just like taking multivitamin can if you have high deficiency of something it contains, although you likely need higher dosage of that thing then. But you don't want to be doing it every day. I mean, I admit I'm less confident about that statement regarding losing blood that I am regarding multivitamins, but draining blood used to be popular for.. pretty much everything and modern medicine somehow got rid of that.
What is the right amount of housing to lower rents? How many units should we destroy or prevent to make housing affordable?
Does spreading houses further apart make infrastructure per unit more or less expensive?
Are you seriously anti-housing? Are you pro-homelessness? I honestly don’t get how someone can seriously take an “anti-housing” position, which is what I assume you are when you otherize “pro housing” people.
I don't know anyone who's "anti housing". Housing is an essential need for everyone. But putting more housing into an area that is already dense is not the answer, and it never has been.
You should study induced demand. Has building more highways in LA improved traffic? No, it has only made it worse. Ever notice how every airport in the world is always under construction, and still always overcrowded? Yep, induced demand.
"Induced demand" is not inherently bad. It means that people are doing more of something because they can.
Induced demand also only occurs because demand is elastic. It is the natural result of supply increasing.
It is often considered bad in the case of cars by people who are opposed to expanding roads specifically because if reducing traffic on roads or total miles driven is the goal then induced demand will not be a good idea, but it is important to realize that induced demand from expanding roads also means that more people are able to, for example, live farther away and commute longer distances in the same time. In other words, whether induced demand is good or bad depends on whether you want people to consume more of an elastic good or not from a policy perspective, which should probably be no in the case if driving cars.
Housing is something that everyone needs, not something that people adjust consumption of based on availability. It is also something you want everyone to be consuming, so it is extremely weird to apply the idea of induced demand to it, unless you think that not everyone should have access to housing.
Induced demand doesn't say what "should" or "shouldn't" happen. It doesn't have morality, it's a pattern. It says that building more housing in an area with expensive housing won't bring housing prices down.
> Induced demand doesn't say what "should" or "shouldn't" happen. It doesn't have morality, it's a pattern. It says that building more housing in an area with expensive housing won't bring housing prices down.
Here is the definition of induced demand from wikipedia:
> Induced demand – related to latent demand and generated demand[1] – is the phenomenon that supply increases result in price declines and increased consumption.
It's the ratio of people to housing that matters. The world has plenty of ghost towns, nearly-abandoned villages, etc. with under 100 housing units...which are dirt cheap, because the people/housing unit ratio is far less than 1.
Housing like they have in Ukraine. Big hugh apartment buildings would help. (I don't know the water is suspose to come from though? Especially in the Bay Area.)
There is no one solution, of course, since at the very least climates and budgets can be wildly different, but a good start is making sure every street has a green canopy above, starting with the largest. After that, take every space you can and put something living on it.