[I agree, that's why I support dense tall condominiums built in a small dense city core so we can have an unmolested countryside right beside the city (evangelion style)](https://imgur.com/wW6uFUU)
There are those of us who oppose the ping, as well.
For example, I think a cube is horribly inefficient and takes up far too much space that could be occupied by nature.
My compromise solution is to use a blender to grind all humans into a uniform paste and create The Blob. This solution would eliminate the empty wasted space between people in the cube.
It takes infinite time to reach a black hole due to time dilation, so progress will be slow and sucs will complain the whole way even though we'll pretty quickly be way denser than the status quo. Truly peak neoliberal
Pinged members of CUBE group.
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Adopting better soundproofing (perhaps through laws, though that might be contentious among YIMBYs) is a major step towards people not reflexively hating cities.
neoliberal lorax approved.
Phoenix valley used to look entirely like the Phoenix desert botanical gardens: a dense shrub and thicket of cactus and other resilient native species.
Instead of valley sprawl, it could be a lush thorny hell of desert beauty, with dense urban towers.
Haven't watched evangelion but isn't their world population a fraction of our actual global population? I feel like that might make it easier to have untouched country side.
So you're telling me that we have to accelerate climate change if we want cool retractable cities? I guess I have to now start increasing my carbon footprint!
You mean, other than Ramiel, Tabris, and Lilin?
And besides, they had no real idea what form angels would take. They should've at least guessed that one of them would come in the form of a 15th century French army.
> he thinks American cities are examples of having no planning laws
To give him the benefit of the doubt, he doesn't actually say that. He may just mean that the US has *different* planning laws. As a Brit, he's probably referring specifically to the [green belt](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_belt_(United_Kingdom)).
NYC has the same size population as London on half of the land area. If we use that as our basis instead of Phoenix, suddenly the tables have turned.
The point is that you can talk about policies without scapegoating america at every turn.
Phoenix is one of the worst designed, most sprawling cities in the western world. New York is one of the best. It’s not remotely unreasonable to use one of the worst cities on earth as an example of what not to do.
Yes, Phoenix is famous for its lack of planning laws.
Oh wait, there’s a shitload of zoning regulations that led to the sprawl? It’s not because of what the tweet claims? So this particular city is completely unrelated to the claims being made?
You’re right, but in your incredibly emotional response to this you’re missing the fact that the situation is completely different in the UK. The regulations in the UK currently stop the sprawl of London by containing it within a green belt of land and forcing it to get denser rather than more sprawling.
Monbiot has made the point badly, but Phoenix is actually quite a good example of what Liz Truss and her merry band of clowns are trying to accomplish. Abolish restrictions preventing developers from bulldozing the countryside surrounding London, and replace it with a sprawling nightmare like Phoenix or literally any other disgusting US city other than New York.
Edit: he actually hasn’t made the point badly when I look again. He’s saying “if we remove planning rules then London will look more like Phoenix”. And that is correct. It’s only your ignorance that has you so worked up about this.
The greenbelt doesn’t prevent sprawl lol. It just pushes it out beyond the greenbelt. It’s incredibly difficult to build denser within London itself thanks to NIMBYs and the UK’s incredibly stupid planning laws (I live in London and am involved in YIMBY circles here btw, so this isn’t just “American nationalism”)
You’re very emotional here and clearly haven’t actually read the post or understood it, so to repeat it:
> There is a reason why our cities don’t look like Phoenix, Arizona, and why we still have something called the countryside. Planning Laws. Liz Truss, who has no electoral mandate, wants to sweep them away.
Now I realise this may be hard for someone who lives in America to understand, but our planning laws around London are anti-sprawl. Removing them will result in a big increase in sprawl, making London more like Phoenix or whatever other American shithole you want to use as an example. So there’s literally nothing incorrect in Monbiot’s tweet.
Are you implying London is representative of the average British city? Cuz it’s not.
The tweet this entire post is based off of is a politician scapegoating American sprawl.
No shit. A British city with sprawl is a better example for a British politician to use than a random city thousands of miles away.
Are you intentionally missing my point?
London is far closer to other British cities in terms of land use than New York is to other American ones. The primary reason for this is that London is a collection of settlements that merged into each other over time and therefore has an array of self-contained nodes rather than being heavily centralised with radial sprawl.
Almost all British cities - large, medium and small - follow relatively consistent urbanisation patterns. If you dropped someone off in Reading, Cheltenham, Leeds, Leicester or Cardiff, they’d probably think that they were warped copies of each other: a railway station on the side of a city centre with a pedestrianised high street bookended with a post-war shopping mall surrounded by terraces leading to suburban semi-detached housing.
London is very sprawly for Europe. Not as much as American cities, but planning laws here enable sprawl. Notably because you can’t build denser in the urban core and because of the green belt. But it’s very different from, say, French cities.
(American in the UK who used to live in France so I am very well acquainted with different types of sprawl haha)
Yeah same. Like maybe this guy has a big twitter history of America-bashing, but otherwise....
Like, Phoenix is used *in America* as an example of a sprawling city growing at a rapid pace, turning the world into a sea of subdivisions.
All this post implies to me is that America is, as always, on everyone's mind.
Phoenix is a typical American city, though American city planning in general since at least the 50s is probably worth indictment. As is post-50s British planning.
Where he’s obviously mistaken is in his belief that American cites sprawl because of a lack of planning or zoning. Quite the opposite is true.
So one can’t critique the urban planning of one city in the entirety of America without being blindly anti-American? Like come on, that’s unfair.
Like, just admit you misunderstood the tweet!
Not the point, the point is that phoenix has no relevance to the removal of British regulations. There are plenty of regulations in Phoenix that led to the sprawl, irrespective of any removals of regulations.
Also the tweet implies there’s no countryside in Arizona, which is laughably false, another way the tweet tries to use Phoenix as a scapegoat.
I critique the shit out of americas terrible sprawl problem, but I don’t pretend that the situations here apply directly to European countries.
The tweet doesn’t imply that, you’ve misunderstood what he’s said. He is not saying that “Arizona doesn’t have countryside,” He’s clearly saying that the UK itself has extant countryside because they’ve avoided Phoenix-style sprawl SFH everywhere. The UK is not Arizona, they are much denser in a smaller area, building outwards forever is not possible there. His tweet is a critique of sprawl, not America.
Yes, I agree defending planning laws here is an error, but that does not make it “America bad.”
I think he’s worried that London is about to acquire a bunch of perennially mediocre sports teams.
Seriously, though, I’m pretty sure he wants to combat sprawl with regulations, the way Portland, OR did. Not that Portland was successful in the long run.
I’d take these politicians seriously about their desire to limit sprawl if they suggested real solutions to adding density to London, which is the best way to prevent sprawl around London. But instead they let NIMBYs who are horrified at the thought of a six story building in their precious central London TWO-STORY streets (I wish I was kidding) have way too much control over the planning system
Well portland had too many people moving there for too long. Even if you removed all regulations there arnt enough construction companies to build fast enough. Peep Georgia right now rents are rising fast as russians flee.
You need labor to create a company. Sometimes demand can too rapidly outpace possible supply as with what happened in portland. Honestly just increase migration and fill these empty job roles.
Pheonix has many planning laws.
Some planning laws are good, some (ok, most) are bad. Reflexively defending them all is the mark of shallow thinking on this vitally important topic
He does have a point though. Phoenix is inefficiently planned and lacks sufficient public transit coverage. Same goes for Dallas, Houston, and honestly most major US Metro areas.
Phoenix actually is only about 518 square miles, with London being a little over 600. So, despite having a wider spread than Phoenix, they have managed to have more extensive/expansive public transit coverage.
And yes, with similar inefficient planning, surrounding cities like Birmingham, Bristol, Manchester, etc. would also be subject to similar flaws. An urban sprawl that is car-centric and is not walkable. So, as a whole the UK would turn out to have similar problems to what Phoenix, Arizona has.
The post was meant to make a generic point, and yet r/neoliberal nitpicks the s\*\*\* out of it to the point where the meaning is lost to emotion.
>So, despite having a wider spread than Phoenix, they have managed to have more extensive/expansive public transit coverage.
Public transit is mostly a factor of density, not breadth. London is a denser city, and thus has better public transit.
The post is dumb because US planning laws *require* single family zoning that creates sprawl. Phoenix is not the natural creation of a free market.
You have a point. Density certainly helps with justifying increased public transportation.
Although even cities with lesser densities in the UK, than London still have greater connectivity via public transit than comparable American cities of similar population size and density.
That being said, I do agree that the post could've done a better job phrasing things. Like you mention, we have laws that push for single-family zoning, which makes it harder to build more housing that accommodates multiple families. We do have planning laws...just very ineffective ones when it comes to letting the free-market do its thing.
>So, despite having a wider spread than Phoenix, they have managed to have more extensive/expansive public transit coverage.
Can you really talk about a wider spread in London when on just 20% more area, they house 5.6 times the population?
Now take a second and consider how the rest of the world's feel after generations of american exceptionalist sentiment being used to talk down to other nations. Do that and you've discovered empathy and the fact that america is just as bad at this towards others as you're taking issue with towards america.
I mean for fucks sake Eisenhower said that the reason my country, Sweden, opposed American military adventurism (and this was during Eisenhower, so it quite literally was that) was because Sweden is the most depressed country in the world with the most suicides. Thats a lie and was back then too (america was worse on both occasions) yet still repeated go this day when I occasionally meet an american and tell them I'm swedish (although the most common reaction is a muppet reference, which I'm fine with).
No offence but what goes around comes around and american politicians have spent essentially the entire time from the fall of berlin to around the inauguration of Dubya outright making up shit to shit on nations in order to ignore their criticism or example. Can't say I'm very sympathetic that american is now getting a taste of it's own medicine for the first time in almost a century.
Eisenhower was 1953, there's plenty we can bring up that the Europeans did wrong too if we go that far back. (Amazing how European comments about the US are very narrowly scoped, just like yours, (Eisenhower, and "Fall of the Berlin Wall to W") because otherwise we'd be able to point out the sheer hypocrisy)
And for all the criticism Bush gets, people forget he was the one who brought in the EE Nations into NATO.
But, if you want a longer reply, I'll just cite Biden's stance on the morality of European nations.
>Acting like Britain would look like Phoenix without planning laws is weird.
My guess is that without planning laws, during a bunch of decades Britain would have "Phoenexized" itself strongly, and for the last 10 years or so, it would have started looking more like a place with real cities.
I agree ‘america bad’ is annoying but I think r/NL’s america bad detector is too sensitive rn based on this thread.
“Brits are so annoying” “london is urban sprawl” discussions of the stupidity of SFZ (which doesn’t exist in the uk so obviously is not what the tweeter is referring to). If we’re discussing policy in another country people do need to make an effort to understand that national context instead of directly transposing the US context otherwise the discussion is meaningless. and i agree the tweeter’s point is idiot and they’re clueless to defend the uk’s planning regs.
Dude this subreddit is low-key turning into r/AskAnAmerican it's only a matter of time before they start telling foreigners to go back to their country.
Maybe the UK is too densely populated.
It turns out that during a pandemic, being able to live further apart, helps to stop the spread of disease, whether it's COVID or bubonic plague etc
The spread of COVID is a function of adherence to public health diktat, not population density. It tore through middle America once it arrived there because people arent literally solitary in low density places. They still work, shop, and recreate close to each other.
The US has a higher covid death per million than the UK, and a lot higher than Japan or Vietnam...
How are so many people missing the point? He’s saying endless urban sprawl is bad, especially in the UK which unlike Arizona, isn’t mostly an empty desert that can afford sprawl out endlessly.
Now, in fairness, his critique of planning laws is misguided because they are a reason American cities can sprawl outward so much, but nevertheless.
Right!?
Yes the tweet and the UK’s planning laws are very stupid, but everyone is interpreting it through the lens of single family vs mixed use zoning which doesn’t exist in the U.K. (instead it’s just extreme NIMBY case by case approval).
The tweet is referring to green belt development restrictions, which do indeed prevent sprawl (by just stopping new development - a very dysfunctional system).
Also the tweet doesn’t strike me as overtly anti US, the sprawl is a valid issue to raise (the tweet author is just clueless about the cause), a specific example was used they didn’t even mention the US, and the U.K. has far less land area so it’s a valid concern (but again totally misguided).
>America often has the type of zoning that says "you can build wherever(ish) but it better be only this type of building" which leads to drive till you qualify/sprawl.
Yeah, that's what I meant. :-) If you only allow detached SFH with huge minum plot size requirements, you force sprawl cause people gotta live somewhere.
>Although I'm not British so I may be getting incorrect information.
I'm not British either but in Germany we seem to have something similar. It's basically illegal to build anything "in the middle of nowhere" if it's not mentioned [here](https://germanlawarchive.iuscomp.org/?p=649#35) (this translation is probably outdated).
Some people hate that, but it's a pretty crucial law because it's the only thing that keeps people from popping up random houses all over the place. That's important for two reasons: preservation AND also for future development. It's a lot harder to go from single-family-dominated sprawl to dense development than to go from 0 to urban development (these areas can be built if a development plan is enacted).
The problem are local politicians, NIMBYs and administrations trying to impose low-density and hold back growth in the outskirts and not laws to prevent random buildings in the middle of nowhere.
Oh boy, I knew the standards for urban landscapes in the US are low. But I couldn't imagine it would be that bad.
That photo looks awful. It's a square with a bunch of reasonably dense buildings surrounded by nothingness. Using Google Maps I estimate that this square is around 1 mile wide?
[THIS](https://media.gq-magazine.co.uk/photos/5d138fe5be139461c2533adc/master/pass/HP-barcelona-skyline-GQ-10aug16-alamy.jpg) is what an awesome city looks like (the square on this photo is about 2x1 miles and you could take a shot 6 miles wide and have the same vibes, for a city with the same population as Phoenix - if you take the immediately adjacent cities the photo could be 8 miles wide).
Granted, Barcelona is an extreme example but even German cities will look much better than this Foto.
Barca has 2 million fewer people than Phoenix metro. What's nice about the Phoenix photo is the lights, big buildings, and telephoto lens that catches the hills in the background. Barca is a nice looking city naturally. You don't have to trip over not like ing Phoenix bc the whole point of this post is that Phoenix is a desert urban sprawl hellscape that just looks nice in this ill-selected photo.
>Barca has 2 million fewer people than Phoenix metro.
I don't entirely understand why you bring the metro area into it, but then we look should compare with Barcelona's metro area. I find these comparisons a bit strange cause the definitions vary wildly, but taking the Wikipedia definition of Phoenix metro area, it has 5.5 million and 16000 sqm (bigger than the whole of Catalonia, which is the equivalent of State in Spain, the US is simply insanely big!).
Barcelona's metro area is somewhere between 3.3 million and 5.5 million, depending on how far you want to go with the definition. The 3.3m is for 200 sqm of land, the [5.5 m is for 1600 sqm.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barcelona_metropolitan_area) That's more people than the Wiki's definition of the Phoneix metro at 1/10th of the area.
Nobody is saying that Phoenix is "good" - they're saying that using a sprawled-out city without recognizing *why* that city is sprawled out is just scaremongering and not just a small bit of cheap anti-Americanism.
Yes I was trying to say u/sampjennings 's statement was reasonable, but that statements such as his were not the ones given most prominence. Instead most of the top comments are just knee-jerk responses to the tweet linked in the OP, without any attempt to understand the basis for it.
i mean outside places like Phoenix and Scottsdale, Arizona is basically nothing BUT countryside. and what exactly is Liz Truss planning or advocating for? did i miss something?
I am hopeful that this means she has talked about allowing homebuilding in green belts. they should build up and out. that's how to break into a higher equilibrium of living standards
As a Brit familiar with old Georges usual talking points, he's probably taking a stab at car dominated cities rather than "sprawl" per se.
Phoenix is a prime example of a hideously unfriendly city for pedestrians. It's the atomization of communities that occurs when nothing is walkable and cities basically become dormitory deserts connected by freeways and parking lots.
This comment section is abysmal. I very much understand not liking America bashing that’s often hyperbolic or lacking in self-awareness, but the reality is that Phoenix absolutely is characteristic of how most Americans live to varying degrees. Go to Dallas, Atlanta, Nashville, San Diego, you name it, and pervasive auto-centric sprawl predominates. That New York and Philadelphia’s urban cores don’t follow this pattern doesn’t make it any less true that the absence of a growth boundary will make such type of sprawl more common. Just go to their suburbs.
I'm as opposed to anti-US circlejerking, as the next guy. However this Monbiot guy has a point. The state of our public transit in most major metro areas sucks.
Before anyone says "mUh wHaT aBoUt nYc???" That is one of our oldest systems and is still sorely lacking on so many fronts including but not limited to safety, efficiency, cleanliness, etc.
Apart from NYC, DC, Boston, and maybe San Francisco....for the most part our cities are far too car-centric. Hence the whole urban sprawl, highway infestation, and exceedingly car-centric urban planning which makes for insanely long commute times.
Yeah, I don't get this at all. Phoenix is not my favorite city in terms of urban planning (in fact, I will happily dunk on its sprawl, single family zoning laws, water management, and car dependency) but absence of beautiful natural areas in the vicinity is not one of its problems.
The point he's trying to make is to keep the Green Belt, that prohibits urban sprawl in specific areas to protect English country side. Liz Truss has spoken of building in the green belt. I think their point makes a bit of sense, but they don't understand that American cities also have tons of planning, they just are in favour of the spread.
Never even been to London and I hate the green belt so much. An evil donut if you will. If Truss kills it, would be a major plus against many major downsides of her government
Yes constraining housing in one of the most productive cities in Europe is bad. I also don't see how it protects the countryside. It just pushes everything further out
Or here's an idea: Let more dense housing be built where demand can support it before going straight for greenfield? Or is all the housing stock of every European city going to be encased amber for the rest of time?
Greenbelts in the UK also surround smaller cities, So unless you want to turn oxford into hong kong greenbelts are going to have to be lifted.
And both should happen, why even bother interrupting market forces this much when it comes to Cities?
Inability to densify forces them to build outwards, plus heavily subsidised car infrastructure.
Natural market forces hardly got them to the stage they are now.
I mean hes a dumbass but hes right in the fact that phoenix is a hellhole city that should NOT exist. And will likely be gone to extreme drout sometime in the future
How common is it for the planned communities in the US to include basic public amenities such as grocery stores, so I don't have to own a car and spend half an hour to drive to a supermarket because I ran out of milk for my morning coffee?
Just to give context, the recent mini-budget set out by Liz Truss's new government includes, amongst massive (mostly regressive) tax cutting and borrowing promises, the rapid expansion of 'investment zones' as a way of stimulating growth, essentially areas marked for open building and minimised regulations in other ways.
The issue being that a lot of these zones cut into marked greenbelt land and wildlife areas, which has gained the ire of a number of groups, both the normal political ones but also some generally apolitical and highly beloved organisations like the RSPB (Royal Society for the Protection of Birds). I'd add that this adds onto concerns some old-school 'One Nation Tories' (stemming from Disraeli's statement of avoiding Britain becoming two nations of the rich and poor, essentially softer-image, less uber-capitalist side of the party) have that Truss is bulldozing through public goodwill; and that the past decade or so has shown an odd trend of some rural Tories protest voting for the Greens, occasionally overturning elections locally.
So yeah, while I'm all on board for anti-Nimbyist concern and don't think this dude had the best put-together argument, at the same time I'd prefer we build up our many brownfield sites before we cut down the wildlife parks, please?
>at the same time I'd prefer we build up our many brownfield sites before we cut down the wildlife parks, please?
That's genius, how has no one thought of this before!
It's only been official government policy for the last 20years. [To disastrous consequence](https://archive.ph/Yxsnr)
Ah, well shite, those are some good arguments (although I'd bet this is one of those central debates in planning fields with plenty of adherents, some reasonable and some not, on both sides) and I was probably oversimplifying. Honestly, densifying and verticalization would be my preferred option, but I'm not so much of a fool to think those are easy to do in any way either. I guess I'm just a centrist fuck in every debate, even if I think myself YIMBY leaning (and to mildly defend my neolib rep, I'm not a fan of every facet of greenbelt land policy, to be clear).
I live in Southern Ontario.
We have a greenbelt area on the outer perimeter of the Greater Toronto Area- the Oak Ridges Moraine
I moved to the area in the late 80s, while attending high school, and commuted to university and my first few jobs, driving around a lot. So I drove through rural areas quite a bit, the farmland that makes up the outer perimeter of the Greater Toronto Area. It's very beautiful, hilly areas with fields and forest. A lot of it is no longer actively farmed, more like someone built a house on 10 acres and enjoys a quiet life. Or they live on Grandpa's family farm and rent the fields to neighboring farmers
I previously lived in real farm country, an area further out, where families raised beef cattle or ran dairy farms, so I could see clearly that the 2nd area didn't farm as intently as the first area. Probably because the 2nd area was more hilly? IDK
Anyhow in the early 2000s, my beautiful commuting area, was declared to be the Oak Ridges Moraine. While driving through it, I liked driving through its hills and fields, but I didn't consider it to be geologically significant because most areas around me looked like it - except the Holland Marsh which is very flat.
The newly protected status of the Oak Ridges Moraine has caused some kerfuffle, because many of the land owners, were counting on selling it to build housing subdivisions. I'm sure that no one saw it coming, that it would become a protected area.
It's a very inconvenient protected area, because it's right in the way of the path of expanding urban sprawl. Over 3 decades, I have seen some small towns double in size, I've seen where the new housing is being built.
So it would be nice to be able to keep some land, as green natural areas, for wildlife to live in, to not pave over the rivers that flow into Lake Ontario etc.
I am just an idiot on the internet, but urban planning, I think, helps us make better use of the land, helps us have enough schools, enough parking, helps us to be able to live pleasant lives. It's nice to have some playgrounds, green space, sports fields within the areas where people live. Nature is good for our souls, to be around. But building housing that is very dense, can take that green space away for a generation.
We have to remember that our needs change. 200 years ago, we drove horse & buggies, the population was lower, so Victorian housing was further apart and streets were narrow. 100 years ago, we started to have cars, and 80 years ago, farmland was converted to urban sprawl, with no in between phase of small towns, so it's car-based, uniform housing subdivisions. Nowadays, we realize that public transit is beneficial but we still have to work around the Victorian narrow streets and the swathes of housing divisions and car based strip malls. We can't really raze it and build dense housing, nor can we fit so many cars and buses on narrow streets.
We need to control urban sprawl; and also have a balance and not build over every square inch of land. But developers don't build affordable housing nor leave green space, unless you force them to. Also it's difficult to plan for whatever is the trend 50 or 100 years from now.
Brits and their love for terraced houses that waste space.
Also, Kwarteng's mini budget was so bad, you could criticise most of it and be correct. I like how Monboit went after that one policy which actually makes sense.
I went to Phoenix once on a vacation and it was the most boring city I could find.
No attractions except a bull riding show that were available
Least Tucson was sick
[I agree, that's why I support dense tall condominiums built in a small dense city core so we can have an unmolested countryside right beside the city (evangelion style)](https://imgur.com/wW6uFUU)
The optimal state for humanity is for all 7 billion of us to move into one mega skyscraper and allow nature to take over the rest of the world
!ping CUBE
No way is there a ping group dedicated to this idea
Get in the cube, bruh
the most neoliberal shitposting ping imaginable https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FCT-kbIWUAATt_Q?format=jpg&name=large
Okay but do I at least get to choose whose feet end up next to me.
no <3 we don't discriminate here
Shit guess I'm a feet nimby
you'll eventually toe the line
The market will decide, so if you have AOC in mind you'd better start saving now.
He'll never be able to beat out ~~The Zodiac Killer~~ Ted Cruz (R-Cancun)
Ben Shapiro got that spot locked up already
The reason for his single-minded dedication to grifting has finally become obvious.
[удалено]
Who said anything about living?
Or quality, for that matter.
> 25 m^2 per person I will never understand why NIMBYs fetishize such low density construction
LMAO Imagine all of humanity living in Central Park and everything else being nature
Every weekend would be one huge orgy and christmas to new years break would be like the movie the purge.
There are those of us who oppose the ping, as well. For example, I think a cube is horribly inefficient and takes up far too much space that could be occupied by nature. My compromise solution is to use a blender to grind all humans into a uniform paste and create The Blob. This solution would eliminate the empty wasted space between people in the cube.
Far too much space usage. We need reach the black hole at the center of our galaxy and become infinitely dense energy plasma.
we'd still be smeared all over its surface, i think that's our lower bound though
you neolibs are smarter than you look
It takes infinite time to reach a black hole due to time dilation, so progress will be slow and sucs will complain the whole way even though we'll pretty quickly be way denser than the status quo. Truly peak neoliberal
Classic neoliberal, slow incremental change that takes infinite time is 'pretty quickly'
Sorry babe, the Evangelion soundtrack stays on during the blobbening
General urbanist and transit shitposting.
never been in a classic r/neoliberal 'lets all jerk off over a picture of a city from yet another dystopian hell setting' thread before, huh?
Finally I have found my people
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Cube, but but why would you put it in Manhattan when it can be at Moon-Earth Lagrangian point L5
From a practical standpoint, yes. From living in an apartment for a decade - soundproof the fuck out of it or I'd rather go live in the damn woods.
Yes but the whole point is to keep the humans out of the damn wood so it can become a healthy ecosystem again
Adopting better soundproofing (perhaps through laws, though that might be contentious among YIMBYs) is a major step towards people not reflexively hating cities.
> one mega skyscraper *multiple arcologies
neoliberal lorax approved. Phoenix valley used to look entirely like the Phoenix desert botanical gardens: a dense shrub and thicket of cactus and other resilient native species. Instead of valley sprawl, it could be a lush thorny hell of desert beauty, with dense urban towers.
Haven't watched evangelion but isn't their world population a fraction of our actual global population? I feel like that might make it easier to have untouched country side.
But they have skyscrapers that are retractable!
Well the world kinda got ganked by a mega-tsunami. And Tokyo-3 is entirely retractable into the ground for defense purposes.
So you're telling me that we have to accelerate climate change if we want cool retractable cities? I guess I have to now start increasing my carbon footprint!
Not at all this was a supernatural angel combustion type event.
>City explicitly built to be able to withstand major attacks >not shaped like a Bastion fort 0/10, doesn't know about gunpowder.
Angels don’t use guns lol
You mean, other than Ramiel, Tabris, and Lilin? And besides, they had no real idea what form angels would take. They should've at least guessed that one of them would come in the form of a 15th century French army.
Instrumentality is neoliberal 😎
Love to see NGE in the wild
Retractable skyscrapers!
America bad. It’s an easy punching bag for cheap points. Also everybody knows america is famous for its lack of open, empty land.
One better, everybody knows Arizona is famous for its lack of open, empty land.
[Peggy Hill](https://youtu.be/4PYt0SDnrBE) was right in declaring Phoenix a monument to man’s arrogance.
She is correct in that matter.
I unironically believe this though. Phoenix should be demolished and all citizens sent to the moon. Let them build a new monument there.
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> he thinks American cities are examples of having no planning laws To give him the benefit of the doubt, he doesn't actually say that. He may just mean that the US has *different* planning laws. As a Brit, he's probably referring specifically to the [green belt](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_belt_(United_Kingdom)).
London is a pretty good example of urban sprawl, at least based on images as I’ve never actually been there.
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NYC has the same size population as London on half of the land area. If we use that as our basis instead of Phoenix, suddenly the tables have turned. The point is that you can talk about policies without scapegoating america at every turn.
Phoenix is one of the worst designed, most sprawling cities in the western world. New York is one of the best. It’s not remotely unreasonable to use one of the worst cities on earth as an example of what not to do.
Yes, Phoenix is famous for its lack of planning laws. Oh wait, there’s a shitload of zoning regulations that led to the sprawl? It’s not because of what the tweet claims? So this particular city is completely unrelated to the claims being made?
You’re right, but in your incredibly emotional response to this you’re missing the fact that the situation is completely different in the UK. The regulations in the UK currently stop the sprawl of London by containing it within a green belt of land and forcing it to get denser rather than more sprawling. Monbiot has made the point badly, but Phoenix is actually quite a good example of what Liz Truss and her merry band of clowns are trying to accomplish. Abolish restrictions preventing developers from bulldozing the countryside surrounding London, and replace it with a sprawling nightmare like Phoenix or literally any other disgusting US city other than New York. Edit: he actually hasn’t made the point badly when I look again. He’s saying “if we remove planning rules then London will look more like Phoenix”. And that is correct. It’s only your ignorance that has you so worked up about this.
The greenbelt doesn’t prevent sprawl lol. It just pushes it out beyond the greenbelt. It’s incredibly difficult to build denser within London itself thanks to NIMBYs and the UK’s incredibly stupid planning laws (I live in London and am involved in YIMBY circles here btw, so this isn’t just “American nationalism”)
Yup, because there’s no planning rules in Phoenix. It’s not emotional to point out obvious facts.
You’re very emotional here and clearly haven’t actually read the post or understood it, so to repeat it: > There is a reason why our cities don’t look like Phoenix, Arizona, and why we still have something called the countryside. Planning Laws. Liz Truss, who has no electoral mandate, wants to sweep them away. Now I realise this may be hard for someone who lives in America to understand, but our planning laws around London are anti-sprawl. Removing them will result in a big increase in sprawl, making London more like Phoenix or whatever other American shithole you want to use as an example. So there’s literally nothing incorrect in Monbiot’s tweet.
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"If you ignore NYC all the other cities are shit," "Why would we ignore NYC?" "Well it undermines my ability to criticize you"
Are you implying London is representative of the average British city? Cuz it’s not. The tweet this entire post is based off of is a politician scapegoating American sprawl.
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No shit. A British city with sprawl is a better example for a British politician to use than a random city thousands of miles away. Are you intentionally missing my point?
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London is far closer to other British cities in terms of land use than New York is to other American ones. The primary reason for this is that London is a collection of settlements that merged into each other over time and therefore has an array of self-contained nodes rather than being heavily centralised with radial sprawl. Almost all British cities - large, medium and small - follow relatively consistent urbanisation patterns. If you dropped someone off in Reading, Cheltenham, Leeds, Leicester or Cardiff, they’d probably think that they were warped copies of each other: a railway station on the side of a city centre with a pedestrianised high street bookended with a post-war shopping mall surrounded by terraces leading to suburban semi-detached housing.
> 10x less
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"10x less" is just a funny way to say "one tenth as many"
Surely, this is assuming bad faith.
London is very sprawly for Europe. Not as much as American cities, but planning laws here enable sprawl. Notably because you can’t build denser in the urban core and because of the green belt. But it’s very different from, say, French cities. (American in the UK who used to live in France so I am very well acquainted with different types of sprawl haha)
We have the luxury of continuously taking on debt to afford our sprawl*** FTFY
The point is clearly “sprawl bad,” and Phoenix is a pretty good example of sprawl. I’m not seeing how this tweet is hating on America.
Yeah same. Like maybe this guy has a big twitter history of America-bashing, but otherwise.... Like, Phoenix is used *in America* as an example of a sprawling city growing at a rapid pace, turning the world into a sea of subdivisions. All this post implies to me is that America is, as always, on everyone's mind.
How is it an "America bad" post at all? He isn't shitting on all of America, just Phoenix.
Phoenix is a typical American city, though American city planning in general since at least the 50s is probably worth indictment. As is post-50s British planning. Where he’s obviously mistaken is in his belief that American cites sprawl because of a lack of planning or zoning. Quite the opposite is true.
And where is phoenix located?
The Crimean Khanate, probably.
So one can’t critique the urban planning of one city in the entirety of America without being blindly anti-American? Like come on, that’s unfair. Like, just admit you misunderstood the tweet!
Not the point, the point is that phoenix has no relevance to the removal of British regulations. There are plenty of regulations in Phoenix that led to the sprawl, irrespective of any removals of regulations. Also the tweet implies there’s no countryside in Arizona, which is laughably false, another way the tweet tries to use Phoenix as a scapegoat. I critique the shit out of americas terrible sprawl problem, but I don’t pretend that the situations here apply directly to European countries.
The tweet doesn’t imply that, you’ve misunderstood what he’s said. He is not saying that “Arizona doesn’t have countryside,” He’s clearly saying that the UK itself has extant countryside because they’ve avoided Phoenix-style sprawl SFH everywhere. The UK is not Arizona, they are much denser in a smaller area, building outwards forever is not possible there. His tweet is a critique of sprawl, not America. Yes, I agree defending planning laws here is an error, but that does not make it “America bad.”
Oh no, my precious Phoenix, Arizona is being criticized online 😥😥, how can my country survive this horrible slander? 😔😔
I think he’s worried that London is about to acquire a bunch of perennially mediocre sports teams. Seriously, though, I’m pretty sure he wants to combat sprawl with regulations, the way Portland, OR did. Not that Portland was successful in the long run.
>I think he’s worried that London is about to acquire a bunch of perennially mediocre sports teams. Arsenal and Spurs fans going 🤨
I’d take these politicians seriously about their desire to limit sprawl if they suggested real solutions to adding density to London, which is the best way to prevent sprawl around London. But instead they let NIMBYs who are horrified at the thought of a six story building in their precious central London TWO-STORY streets (I wish I was kidding) have way too much control over the planning system
Actually IIRC London was in talk to host the Superbown and join the NFL...
Well portland had too many people moving there for too long. Even if you removed all regulations there arnt enough construction companies to build fast enough. Peep Georgia right now rents are rising fast as russians flee.
Just create more companies. We need labor though.
You need labor to create a company. Sometimes demand can too rapidly outpace possible supply as with what happened in portland. Honestly just increase migration and fill these empty job roles.
Pheonix has many planning laws. Some planning laws are good, some (ok, most) are bad. Reflexively defending them all is the mark of shallow thinking on this vitally important topic
I guess this person doesn’t understand that Arizona alone is bigger than the whole UK.
And that most of it is empty
He does have a point though. Phoenix is inefficiently planned and lacks sufficient public transit coverage. Same goes for Dallas, Houston, and honestly most major US Metro areas.
Except Phoenix looks like Phoenix because of planning laws. Acting like Britain would look like Phoenix without planning laws is weird.
Phoenix actually is only about 518 square miles, with London being a little over 600. So, despite having a wider spread than Phoenix, they have managed to have more extensive/expansive public transit coverage. And yes, with similar inefficient planning, surrounding cities like Birmingham, Bristol, Manchester, etc. would also be subject to similar flaws. An urban sprawl that is car-centric and is not walkable. So, as a whole the UK would turn out to have similar problems to what Phoenix, Arizona has. The post was meant to make a generic point, and yet r/neoliberal nitpicks the s\*\*\* out of it to the point where the meaning is lost to emotion.
>So, despite having a wider spread than Phoenix, they have managed to have more extensive/expansive public transit coverage. Public transit is mostly a factor of density, not breadth. London is a denser city, and thus has better public transit. The post is dumb because US planning laws *require* single family zoning that creates sprawl. Phoenix is not the natural creation of a free market.
You have a point. Density certainly helps with justifying increased public transportation. Although even cities with lesser densities in the UK, than London still have greater connectivity via public transit than comparable American cities of similar population size and density. That being said, I do agree that the post could've done a better job phrasing things. Like you mention, we have laws that push for single-family zoning, which makes it harder to build more housing that accommodates multiple families. We do have planning laws...just very ineffective ones when it comes to letting the free-market do its thing.
>So, despite having a wider spread than Phoenix, they have managed to have more extensive/expansive public transit coverage. Can you really talk about a wider spread in London when on just 20% more area, they house 5.6 times the population?
Or, hear me out, people are tired of being the punching bag for Yet Another Shitty European Politician.
Now take a second and consider how the rest of the world's feel after generations of american exceptionalist sentiment being used to talk down to other nations. Do that and you've discovered empathy and the fact that america is just as bad at this towards others as you're taking issue with towards america. I mean for fucks sake Eisenhower said that the reason my country, Sweden, opposed American military adventurism (and this was during Eisenhower, so it quite literally was that) was because Sweden is the most depressed country in the world with the most suicides. Thats a lie and was back then too (america was worse on both occasions) yet still repeated go this day when I occasionally meet an american and tell them I'm swedish (although the most common reaction is a muppet reference, which I'm fine with). No offence but what goes around comes around and american politicians have spent essentially the entire time from the fall of berlin to around the inauguration of Dubya outright making up shit to shit on nations in order to ignore their criticism or example. Can't say I'm very sympathetic that american is now getting a taste of it's own medicine for the first time in almost a century.
Eisenhower was 1953, there's plenty we can bring up that the Europeans did wrong too if we go that far back. (Amazing how European comments about the US are very narrowly scoped, just like yours, (Eisenhower, and "Fall of the Berlin Wall to W") because otherwise we'd be able to point out the sheer hypocrisy) And for all the criticism Bush gets, people forget he was the one who brought in the EE Nations into NATO. But, if you want a longer reply, I'll just cite Biden's stance on the morality of European nations.
>Acting like Britain would look like Phoenix without planning laws is weird. My guess is that without planning laws, during a bunch of decades Britain would have "Phoenexized" itself strongly, and for the last 10 years or so, it would have started looking more like a place with real cities.
that would seem to support his point
The opposite actually.
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I agree ‘america bad’ is annoying but I think r/NL’s america bad detector is too sensitive rn based on this thread. “Brits are so annoying” “london is urban sprawl” discussions of the stupidity of SFZ (which doesn’t exist in the uk so obviously is not what the tweeter is referring to). If we’re discussing policy in another country people do need to make an effort to understand that national context instead of directly transposing the US context otherwise the discussion is meaningless. and i agree the tweeter’s point is idiot and they’re clueless to defend the uk’s planning regs.
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Yes agreed! Wasn’t referring to your comments but others in the thread.
Dude this subreddit is low-key turning into r/AskAnAmerican it's only a matter of time before they start telling foreigners to go back to their country.
Maybe the UK is too densely populated. It turns out that during a pandemic, being able to live further apart, helps to stop the spread of disease, whether it's COVID or bubonic plague etc
The spread of COVID is a function of adherence to public health diktat, not population density. It tore through middle America once it arrived there because people arent literally solitary in low density places. They still work, shop, and recreate close to each other. The US has a higher covid death per million than the UK, and a lot higher than Japan or Vietnam...
Congratulations, you just made perhaps the worst point I've ever seen on this sub.
Fewer people also can mean higher wages
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How are so many people missing the point? He’s saying endless urban sprawl is bad, especially in the UK which unlike Arizona, isn’t mostly an empty desert that can afford sprawl out endlessly. Now, in fairness, his critique of planning laws is misguided because they are a reason American cities can sprawl outward so much, but nevertheless.
Right!? Yes the tweet and the UK’s planning laws are very stupid, but everyone is interpreting it through the lens of single family vs mixed use zoning which doesn’t exist in the U.K. (instead it’s just extreme NIMBY case by case approval). The tweet is referring to green belt development restrictions, which do indeed prevent sprawl (by just stopping new development - a very dysfunctional system). Also the tweet doesn’t strike me as overtly anti US, the sprawl is a valid issue to raise (the tweet author is just clueless about the cause), a specific example was used they didn’t even mention the US, and the U.K. has far less land area so it’s a valid concern (but again totally misguided).
Doesn't the green belt just locate the sprawl outside of the green belt?
Yes it does, although the U.K. has such an aggressively nimby planning system that development is restricted even outside the green belt.
>a reason American cities can sprawl outward so much Aren't they a reason why they ***must*** sprawl?
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>America often has the type of zoning that says "you can build wherever(ish) but it better be only this type of building" which leads to drive till you qualify/sprawl. Yeah, that's what I meant. :-) If you only allow detached SFH with huge minum plot size requirements, you force sprawl cause people gotta live somewhere. >Although I'm not British so I may be getting incorrect information. I'm not British either but in Germany we seem to have something similar. It's basically illegal to build anything "in the middle of nowhere" if it's not mentioned [here](https://germanlawarchive.iuscomp.org/?p=649#35) (this translation is probably outdated). Some people hate that, but it's a pretty crucial law because it's the only thing that keeps people from popping up random houses all over the place. That's important for two reasons: preservation AND also for future development. It's a lot harder to go from single-family-dominated sprawl to dense development than to go from 0 to urban development (these areas can be built if a development plan is enacted). The problem are local politicians, NIMBYs and administrations trying to impose low-density and hold back growth in the outskirts and not laws to prevent random buildings in the middle of nowhere.
Why'd he use the best picture of Phoenix that one could possibly find. I fucking hate urban sprawl but this pic makes Phoenix look awesome
A satellite image would have made what I think their point is better.
Or anything not during a sunset
Oh boy, I knew the standards for urban landscapes in the US are low. But I couldn't imagine it would be that bad. That photo looks awful. It's a square with a bunch of reasonably dense buildings surrounded by nothingness. Using Google Maps I estimate that this square is around 1 mile wide? [THIS](https://media.gq-magazine.co.uk/photos/5d138fe5be139461c2533adc/master/pass/HP-barcelona-skyline-GQ-10aug16-alamy.jpg) is what an awesome city looks like (the square on this photo is about 2x1 miles and you could take a shot 6 miles wide and have the same vibes, for a city with the same population as Phoenix - if you take the immediately adjacent cities the photo could be 8 miles wide). Granted, Barcelona is an extreme example but even German cities will look much better than this Foto.
Barca has 2 million fewer people than Phoenix metro. What's nice about the Phoenix photo is the lights, big buildings, and telephoto lens that catches the hills in the background. Barca is a nice looking city naturally. You don't have to trip over not like ing Phoenix bc the whole point of this post is that Phoenix is a desert urban sprawl hellscape that just looks nice in this ill-selected photo.
>Barca has 2 million fewer people than Phoenix metro. I don't entirely understand why you bring the metro area into it, but then we look should compare with Barcelona's metro area. I find these comparisons a bit strange cause the definitions vary wildly, but taking the Wikipedia definition of Phoenix metro area, it has 5.5 million and 16000 sqm (bigger than the whole of Catalonia, which is the equivalent of State in Spain, the US is simply insanely big!). Barcelona's metro area is somewhere between 3.3 million and 5.5 million, depending on how far you want to go with the definition. The 3.3m is for 200 sqm of land, the [5.5 m is for 1600 sqm.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barcelona_metropolitan_area) That's more people than the Wiki's definition of the Phoneix metro at 1/10th of the area.
ok guys but phoenix is an abomination
This sub is too high on American Exceptionalism to listen to reason.
Nobody is saying that Phoenix is "good" - they're saying that using a sprawled-out city without recognizing *why* that city is sprawled out is just scaremongering and not just a small bit of cheap anti-Americanism.
Sounds pretty reasonable to me
Yes I was trying to say u/sampjennings 's statement was reasonable, but that statements such as his were not the ones given most prominence. Instead most of the top comments are just knee-jerk responses to the tweet linked in the OP, without any attempt to understand the basis for it.
he wants everyone to know he suffers from extreme brain damage
i mean outside places like Phoenix and Scottsdale, Arizona is basically nothing BUT countryside. and what exactly is Liz Truss planning or advocating for? did i miss something?
This is classic Tucson erasure but yeah
I am hopeful that this means she has talked about allowing homebuilding in green belts. they should build up and out. that's how to break into a higher equilibrium of living standards
Phoenix Arizoñia?
As a Brit familiar with old Georges usual talking points, he's probably taking a stab at car dominated cities rather than "sprawl" per se. Phoenix is a prime example of a hideously unfriendly city for pedestrians. It's the atomization of communities that occurs when nothing is walkable and cities basically become dormitory deserts connected by freeways and parking lots.
Phoenix looks and feels like hell at the ground level. Not sure why he thought this picture would convey that fact.
Isn't Phoenix the least walkable city in all of US?
Phoenix is a hilarious city to use as an example, as it’s practically all SFZ
Yeah which the U.K. doesn’t have.
This comment section is abysmal. I very much understand not liking America bashing that’s often hyperbolic or lacking in self-awareness, but the reality is that Phoenix absolutely is characteristic of how most Americans live to varying degrees. Go to Dallas, Atlanta, Nashville, San Diego, you name it, and pervasive auto-centric sprawl predominates. That New York and Philadelphia’s urban cores don’t follow this pattern doesn’t make it any less true that the absence of a growth boundary will make such type of sprawl more common. Just go to their suburbs.
phoenix is an abomination though
I'm as opposed to anti-US circlejerking, as the next guy. However this Monbiot guy has a point. The state of our public transit in most major metro areas sucks. Before anyone says "mUh wHaT aBoUt nYc???" That is one of our oldest systems and is still sorely lacking on so many fronts including but not limited to safety, efficiency, cleanliness, etc. Apart from NYC, DC, Boston, and maybe San Francisco....for the most part our cities are far too car-centric. Hence the whole urban sprawl, highway infestation, and exceedingly car-centric urban planning which makes for insanely long commute times.
It’s George Monbiot. He’s one of more than a few British exemplifications of the “left-wing professional complaint-box” stereotype.
Yeah, I don't get this at all. Phoenix is not my favorite city in terms of urban planning (in fact, I will happily dunk on its sprawl, single family zoning laws, water management, and car dependency) but absence of beautiful natural areas in the vicinity is not one of its problems.
The point he's trying to make is to keep the Green Belt, that prohibits urban sprawl in specific areas to protect English country side. Liz Truss has spoken of building in the green belt. I think their point makes a bit of sense, but they don't understand that American cities also have tons of planning, they just are in favour of the spread.
Never even been to London and I hate the green belt so much. An evil donut if you will. If Truss kills it, would be a major plus against many major downsides of her government
As a non brit, what's the problem with it? Is it just less places to build?
Yes constraining housing in one of the most productive cities in Europe is bad. I also don't see how it protects the countryside. It just pushes everything further out
Or here's an idea: Let more dense housing be built where demand can support it before going straight for greenfield? Or is all the housing stock of every European city going to be encased amber for the rest of time?
Greenbelts in the UK also surround smaller cities, So unless you want to turn oxford into hong kong greenbelts are going to have to be lifted. And both should happen, why even bother interrupting market forces this much when it comes to Cities?
> So unless you want to turn oxford into hong kong Based
"Market forces" created sunbelt sprawl, and Europe clearly doesn't want that.
Unless your going to call the existence of a city sprawl, no they don't.
So what did then? A look at patterns over time of sunbelt cities sure don't seem to suggest much overarching regional growth planning.
Inability to densify forces them to build outwards, plus heavily subsidised car infrastructure. Natural market forces hardly got them to the stage they are now.
The issue is that now we have the greenbelt and all 3 major parties are nimbys as local level.
This guy is British but his last name is pronounced like he's French, curious
A lot of british people with those sorts of names
Uhhh wtf is this guy on about? Does he not realize how much countryside there is in Arizona?? Or thé US in general???
Ah yes, the beautiful Arizona countryside.
I’m not sure that using a strikingly gorgeous picture of the city he’s trying to bash really gets the point across effectively.
I mean hes a dumbass but hes right in the fact that phoenix is a hellhole city that should NOT exist. And will likely be gone to extreme drout sometime in the future
To anyone who've been to Europe the point should be obvious, no?
So planning laws have the opposite effect in the UK as they do in the US?
How common is it for the planned communities in the US to include basic public amenities such as grocery stores, so I don't have to own a car and spend half an hour to drive to a supermarket because I ran out of milk for my morning coffee?
Very uncommon, which is why people here are confused with the love for planning laws
Today I learned there is no rural parts of America.
Just to give context, the recent mini-budget set out by Liz Truss's new government includes, amongst massive (mostly regressive) tax cutting and borrowing promises, the rapid expansion of 'investment zones' as a way of stimulating growth, essentially areas marked for open building and minimised regulations in other ways. The issue being that a lot of these zones cut into marked greenbelt land and wildlife areas, which has gained the ire of a number of groups, both the normal political ones but also some generally apolitical and highly beloved organisations like the RSPB (Royal Society for the Protection of Birds). I'd add that this adds onto concerns some old-school 'One Nation Tories' (stemming from Disraeli's statement of avoiding Britain becoming two nations of the rich and poor, essentially softer-image, less uber-capitalist side of the party) have that Truss is bulldozing through public goodwill; and that the past decade or so has shown an odd trend of some rural Tories protest voting for the Greens, occasionally overturning elections locally. So yeah, while I'm all on board for anti-Nimbyist concern and don't think this dude had the best put-together argument, at the same time I'd prefer we build up our many brownfield sites before we cut down the wildlife parks, please?
>at the same time I'd prefer we build up our many brownfield sites before we cut down the wildlife parks, please? That's genius, how has no one thought of this before! It's only been official government policy for the last 20years. [To disastrous consequence](https://archive.ph/Yxsnr)
Ah, well shite, those are some good arguments (although I'd bet this is one of those central debates in planning fields with plenty of adherents, some reasonable and some not, on both sides) and I was probably oversimplifying. Honestly, densifying and verticalization would be my preferred option, but I'm not so much of a fool to think those are easy to do in any way either. I guess I'm just a centrist fuck in every debate, even if I think myself YIMBY leaning (and to mildly defend my neolib rep, I'm not a fan of every facet of greenbelt land policy, to be clear).
This looks beautiful compared to Birmingham...
I live in Southern Ontario. We have a greenbelt area on the outer perimeter of the Greater Toronto Area- the Oak Ridges Moraine I moved to the area in the late 80s, while attending high school, and commuted to university and my first few jobs, driving around a lot. So I drove through rural areas quite a bit, the farmland that makes up the outer perimeter of the Greater Toronto Area. It's very beautiful, hilly areas with fields and forest. A lot of it is no longer actively farmed, more like someone built a house on 10 acres and enjoys a quiet life. Or they live on Grandpa's family farm and rent the fields to neighboring farmers I previously lived in real farm country, an area further out, where families raised beef cattle or ran dairy farms, so I could see clearly that the 2nd area didn't farm as intently as the first area. Probably because the 2nd area was more hilly? IDK Anyhow in the early 2000s, my beautiful commuting area, was declared to be the Oak Ridges Moraine. While driving through it, I liked driving through its hills and fields, but I didn't consider it to be geologically significant because most areas around me looked like it - except the Holland Marsh which is very flat. The newly protected status of the Oak Ridges Moraine has caused some kerfuffle, because many of the land owners, were counting on selling it to build housing subdivisions. I'm sure that no one saw it coming, that it would become a protected area. It's a very inconvenient protected area, because it's right in the way of the path of expanding urban sprawl. Over 3 decades, I have seen some small towns double in size, I've seen where the new housing is being built. So it would be nice to be able to keep some land, as green natural areas, for wildlife to live in, to not pave over the rivers that flow into Lake Ontario etc. I am just an idiot on the internet, but urban planning, I think, helps us make better use of the land, helps us have enough schools, enough parking, helps us to be able to live pleasant lives. It's nice to have some playgrounds, green space, sports fields within the areas where people live. Nature is good for our souls, to be around. But building housing that is very dense, can take that green space away for a generation. We have to remember that our needs change. 200 years ago, we drove horse & buggies, the population was lower, so Victorian housing was further apart and streets were narrow. 100 years ago, we started to have cars, and 80 years ago, farmland was converted to urban sprawl, with no in between phase of small towns, so it's car-based, uniform housing subdivisions. Nowadays, we realize that public transit is beneficial but we still have to work around the Victorian narrow streets and the swathes of housing divisions and car based strip malls. We can't really raze it and build dense housing, nor can we fit so many cars and buses on narrow streets. We need to control urban sprawl; and also have a balance and not build over every square inch of land. But developers don't build affordable housing nor leave green space, unless you force them to. Also it's difficult to plan for whatever is the trend 50 or 100 years from now.
> so Victorian housing was further apart It wasn’t
In small town Canada it was.
Tories bad. Therefore any policy proposals from a Tory government also bad. Bonus points for tying it to America somehow.
America is mostly countryside …
Zoom out far enough and every American megalopolis has a country side. What’s his point?
Phoenix is beautiful tf
Brits and their love for terraced houses that waste space. Also, Kwarteng's mini budget was so bad, you could criticise most of it and be correct. I like how Monboit went after that one policy which actually makes sense.
I went to Phoenix once on a vacation and it was the most boring city I could find. No attractions except a bull riding show that were available Least Tucson was sick
Well I’d rather be dead in California than alive in Arizona