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Tokyo: A big city that is also pleasant to live in

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Re: Tokyo: A big city that is also pleasant to live in

#261

Post by luma »

mrkentutbabi wrote: post #249
luma wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> maybe Japanese woman prefer to be in traditional role? Great, good for them, everything should work out. It's not the women who want to be subservient to men that I'm worried about, it's the ones who don't. Japanese society doesn't leave a lot of room for them and I don't think that's OK.

You can’t please everyone. That’s the whole point of diversity vs harmony. Besides, Japan doesn’t go around killing opeople who don’t adhere to their society. Please think about this hard as lonng, philosophically. To answer your question. Yes we have a lot of single women, doing careers instead of doing families just fine.

> Japan doesn’t go around killing opeople who don’t adhere to their society.

This is a pretty recent development in Japan's history and the world hasn't forgotten.

And for those those single women - why not also married women? How many of them are CEOs? The numbers don't look good for women in Japan when it comes to representation in the higher levels of business https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S088915832...

Re: Tokyo: A big city that is also pleasant to live in

#262

Post by tsunamifury »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #257
tsunamifury wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I go to France or England or India (city centers and countryside) people may not Love each-other but they seem to generally be ok with being together and cooperating a bit more. In America it’s a whole new level. Except for a few idyllic small towns and suburbs that are actually economically and racially exclusionary that seem to have a faux-community.

I think the point is that for a series of reasons, during the 20th century the US built a lot of infrastructure that allows a lot (not all!) people to get further away from each other than is typical in Europe (probably elsewhere too, but I have no experience other than the US & Europe). Neighbors on a street in London don't love but do tolerate each other, and deal with the implications of close proximity and shared…

I agree. If we liked each-other a bit more tho that force wouldn’t be there.

I’ll quote the American classic “elbow room” as soft proof. https://youtu.be/aHVx4nqgMPQ

Re: Tokyo: A big city that is also pleasant to live in

#263

Post by vasilipupkin »

VeninVidiaVicii wrote: post #215
cpursley wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After moving to Europe (and Eastern Europe), I can't really consider those places in the US "cities" and get an uneasy feeling that something is off when I'm back stateside.

Concur totally after living in Sevilla (Spain). US cities - with the exception of New York - are just cookie-cutter strip malls. There’s a fundamental lack of coherence that’s hard to explain.

It’s pretty easy to live in big cities in America ( Seattle, SF, Boston, Chicago, parts of LA ) without a car or without regularly using a car.

Re: Tokyo: A big city that is also pleasant to live in

#265

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

tsunamifury wrote: post #252
ben-schaaf wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If we liked living together we wouldn’t be so car centric It's entirely the other way around, car centric planning results in less community. It's much easier to be angry at the other 2t metal boxes than at your fellow human being. American cities used to be just like European cities: designed for walking, mixed use developments, small shops, public transportation everywhere. It's only after the delusion of the car…

You know I used to believe that for many years and I’ve come to the conclusion that this is just a “bike-city” circle jerk scapegoating Robert Moses in order to ignore our deeper problem: Americans don’t like each-other. We would have built better cities if we wanted carless communities. But we didn’t and still don’t. We want this. This is what we like. We are a sick people. And it isn’t Robert Moses and GMs fault, t…

This just historically inaccurate.

Older US cities have many of the same characteristics as cities in other parts of the world. Those characteristics can vary, from small single-family homes tightly packed into a walkable neighborhood to large scale apartment dwelling with city squares and boulevards nearby.

Americans used to build cities this way. Whether it was Moses or the emergence of a general dislike of each other, or a multitude of other possible reasons, we generally no longer do.

Moreover, many of those older city neighborhoods are considered extremely desirable to live in, even today, so much so that they have become very exclusive areas available only to those with plenty of income or wealth. That doesn't imply that most Americans would necessarily make that choice even if they could, but the continued elevation of housing costs in the best of these "old world" neighborhoods suggests to me that your thesis is at best incomplete and at worst just incorrect.

Re: Tokyo: A big city that is also pleasant to live in

#266

Post by leetcrew »

addicted wrote: post #199
rootsudo wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, it's a known problem. Lax law enforcement, most social services are also "downtown." While the commenter said they wont name the cities, it can be Chicago, Seattle, Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, etc. It makes it unpleasant, and if you do have to live in the middle of downtown or such, not only are you paying more - you have to for safety. Safety of a living place, safety of controlled entry, safety of a…

Not one of the cities you mention is in the top 10 cities with the highest murders per capita. https://www.roadsnacks.net/murder-capitals-of-america/ The same is probably true of other crime as well.

murder per capita is an important statistic for a city, but it can be misleading.

for one thing, it depends a lot on how city borders are drawn. for example, baltimore city usually shows up in top five lists for per capita murders, and indeed it is an unusually violent place. but unlike many (most?) american cities, baltimore county is completely separate from the enclosed city. if you calculated murders per capital for baltimore city and county as a single population, it would still be bad, but it wouldn't be in the national top five every year. a corollary to this is that murder rates can vary much more neighborhood-to-neighborhood within the same city than they do when comparing entire cities. most cities I've been to have at least one or two dangerous areas to be avoided if possible.

second point: even in "dangerous cities" upper-middle class professionals are unlikely to be victims of violent crime. they generally choose to live in safer enclaves of those cities. realistically, property crime is a greater concern for this demographic, which does not scale linearly with violent crime and is not restricted to the "bad neighborhoods" the same way. interestingly, "safe" cities like seattle and SF actually have higher rates of property crime than baltimore.

Re: Tokyo: A big city that is also pleasant to live in

#267

Post by vasilipupkin »

nine_k wrote: post #76
ekianjo wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't really have real cities in the US = there are a few exceptions but most of the time it's just a very tiny center and a lot of people living away from the center. That's not what a traditional city looks like.

Exactly. The US has very few cities proper, and a lot of huge suburbs that sometimes feature a city-like downtown (L.A., Houston), and sometimes don't (most of the Silicon Valley). The real honest dense US cities, such as NYC, Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, and a few others, were built large and dense before the advent of the car, and had entrenched public transportation system before 1930s. Those that were not as lu…

L.A consists of many fairly dense walkable neighborhoods. You can live in these neighborhoods without a car.

Re: Tokyo: A big city that is also pleasant to live in

#268

Post by tsunamifury »

Kavelach wrote: post #234
tsunamifury wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s pretty easy to understand when you realize Americans don’t like eachother. If we liked living together we wouldn’t be so car centric, it’s not like the cars built the cities for us. And we keep getting worse. Small towns I drive through now are full of angry people who seem to want to be left alone. It’s incredibly sad. We are a selfish and community-less people that enjoy the frontier and adventure more than qu…

I don't think that is true. If you look at how larger residential areas looked in the States historically, you'll these placese were very livable, since there weee no cars. The main issue in the US is that at some point the jobs of city and regional planners were hijacked by car industry lobbyists. The current state of affairs is what followed.

Far before cars, people left those cities for more space and fewer neighbors. It’s the foundation of our narrative.

Re: Tokyo: A big city that is also pleasant to live in

#269

Post by echelon »

addicted wrote: post #191
danielrpa wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does the US need to have traditional cities? I grew up in a high density city overseas and I can see the appeal of both types of city. I personally prefer low density, car centric cities (obviously we need to finish solving the emissions problem from cars, but that's separate).

Putting all preferences aside, American suburban living is fiscally unsustainable and supported by massive borrowing. That’s one major reason American infrastructure is so bad. Towns have to balance their books, and that means they cannot afford to maintain their infrastructure until the federal government, which is not legally required to balance its books, borrows a ton of money to give away for basic infrastructur…

> American suburban living is fiscally unsustainable and supported by massive borrowing.

These are city dweller opinions, and they're not going to change continued suburban and rural development.

Suburbanites shouldn't have to pay for city subway and potholes. Those are city problems.

Suburban and rural land is cheaper, the air is less polluted, and the low crime environments are ideal for raising families. If people want to live there, it's their prerogative.

You can buy a 2,000 square foot house for your family in the suburbs at a cost lower than a 700 sqft box in the city.

With remote work, it's not even clear that cities are an essential construct anymore.

Re: Tokyo: A big city that is also pleasant to live in

#270

Post by vasilipupkin »

ripe wrote: post #157
danielrpa wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does the US need to have traditional cities? I grew up in a high density city overseas and I can see the appeal of both types of city. I personally prefer low density, car centric cities (obviously we need to finish solving the emissions problem from cars, but that's separate).

Forget about the emissions issue, I just hate driving and having to depend on its supporting infrastructure (repair shops, gas stations, insurance...) for my day-to-day needs. I live in a US suburb. Can't even get a sandwich or buy milk or see someone without strapping myself into my fucking car. This is no way to live. If I could, I'd give up ever having to drive again in a heartbeat. Unfortunately, here we have few…

I live in a Chicago suburb that has everything within walking distance and access to two train lines. I can easily do everything without a car.
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