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

economist.com

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

#311

Post by kiba »

embedder wrote: post #296
echelon wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Cities are subsidizing your excessive consumption and land use not the other way around. You're making value judgments about me, and they're not even factual. I happen to live in the city. I just see the value of suburbs and the incredible waste, inequality, and ineptitude of cities. Servicing suburbs isn't expensive. With wind and solar, they'll grow even cheaper. Suburbs often have their own municipal water suppl…

With wind and solar, everything grows cheaper. Single family homes are irrefutably less efficient than denser multi-family homes. https://www.epa.gov/sites/default/files/2014-03/documents/lo... I won’t disagree with your comments on noise and pollution, because those are real factors, but you are 100% moving goalposts now.

Where is pollution coming from? Cars generate lot of noise and pollution when they through city streets or on highways. Motorcycles can be especially loud if nobody bother to muffle them.

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

#312

Post by Symbiote »

throwawayboise wrote: post #297
ripe wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> If I could, I'd give up ever having to drive again in a heartbeat. Try it. I lived in Chicago years ago, where cars are expensive and inconvenient to own, at least by American standards. I would walk to the grocery store, which was about 4 blocks I guess, about a 10-15 minute walk. So your shop is limited to what you can carry back, so you have to shop every day or every other day, with the walk there, the shop, an…

Why would someone want to try that?

In Copenhagen, I can walk to several grocery stores in 5 minutes.

Although since my 15 minute cycle to work takes me directly past seven (yes, seven) grocery stores, I usually stop at one of them on the way home from work. It is essentially like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kYHTzqHIngk

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

#313

Post by orasis »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #265
tsunamifury wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ot…

Rather than they “used to build cities this way”, perhaps it just takes centuries for cities to evolve to a good form.

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

#314

Post by jefurii »

aeharding wrote: post #217
ectopod wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many European cities were also constrained by city walls. Land may have been available but it wasn't necessarily defensible.

Yup. Urban growth boundaries are very important, and aren’t new. I’d always wondered what would happen if the US had a city with an UGB and very unrestrictive zoning.

You're talking about Portland, OR.

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

#315

Post by Seb-C »

bigthymer wrote: post #246
88840-8855 wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the thing. It's a super great place when you are a tourist. I lived there and I saw the bad sides, too. To keep this amazing tidyness, order, extremely high quality of service, people go to their limits - with low pay and low perspectives. We have these "bad" jobs also here, people in those jobs are half-assing them, are rude or just quit. In Japan, at least from my experience, it's the conservative conformity…

> pedophilia was normalized for a very long time Care to explain more to a foreigner? How/when did it stop being normalized?

I often read people mentioning this ridiculous affirmation about pedophilia in Japan, but I'm still not sure where it comes from.

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

#316

Post by embedder »

thehappypm wrote: post #301
embedder wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’ve set up a bit of a straw man argument there. The person you’re replying to isn’t saying suburbanites should pay for city potholes, they’re saying suburbanites need to be able to pay for their own (suburban) potholes, and the ugly truth is that suburban infrastructure maintenance is economically unfeasible. Suburban development has only progressed as far as it has via ponzi-like borrowing schemes that are entire…

I don’t like StrongTowns personally, it just doesn’t grok with my experience that many suburbs are wonderful communities where neighbors know each other and kids play together and folks go watch high school football games. I’ve found that cities make you more anonymous. Living in a high rise in a city I knew just about zero of my neighbors, in my suburb I know all of my neighbors by name.

Yeah, I can definitely relate with you on that point.

I grew up in a mid-size suburban town where I knew many families in my neighborhood and generally felt a strong sense of community. I’ve lived in various cities over the years since, and I’ve never quite felt the same connection with my immediate neighbors. I still know and identify with many people in the area I live now, but they’re much more interspersed.

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

#317

Post by betterunix2 »

echelon wrote: post #269
addicted wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

"Suburbanites shouldn't have to pay for city subway and potholes."

Then city residents shouldn't have to pay for the roads that make car-centric suburbs possible or the various subsidies given to rural residents. Honestly, one of the benefits of civilization is that we help each other out even when it does not immediately benefit us as individuals. Rural and suburban life would not be possible without cities, and cities would not be possible without rural and suburban residents.

Cities form naturally because of industrial operations that are more efficient when they are concentrated in a single place. Remote work changes nothing about it because there are still plenty of jobs that cannot be done remotely, including many of the jobs needed to support remote work (e.g. data centers, warehouses, intermodal terminals). Suburban life depends on industries that make no sense in suburbs or whose presence will ultimately transform suburbs into cities.

If suburbs were as superior as you suggest, cities would not be growing and real estate in cities would not be as valuable as it currently is. People are choosing to live, work, and raise families in cities more than they are choosing suburbs. Remote work has not changed anything and will never change anything. COVID-19 led only to a transient spike in demand for suburban homes that is already declining as people realize that the pandemic is already in its final stage.

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

#318

Post by Tiktaalik »

theli0nheart wrote: post #151
deltaonefour wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This type of urban design is unsustainable. It is the reason why the US is number one at producing greenhouse gases.

> It is the reason why the US is number one at producing greenhouse gases. This is incorrect. China currently holds this spot. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_greenhous...

Yeah this is because the USA has offloaded making all its stuff to China. With this in mind the USA CO2 number is even worse than it first appears.

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

#319

Post by seanmcdirmid »

echelon wrote: post #269
addicted wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Why should cities be expected subsidize rural and suburban living? Those higher infrastructure costs are rural and suburban problems, no need for states to transfer tax revenue simply because cities make more money for less infrastructure costs.

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

#320

Post by mrkentutbabi »

luma wrote: post #261
mrkentutbabi wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/S088…

Because married women takes care of kids? I genuinely don’t understand this question…

I guess this just serves an example how western mindset and our mindset in Asian countries are just different. Even the questions seem weird to us.

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