Are cities obsolete? - Is it time to retire these wretched hives of scum and villainy?

[Sexy Senior Citizen]

Partly due to the fact Corona-Chan spread like wildfire in the cities, and now the urban dwellers are setting their own neighborhoods on fire- but also partly because some reasons for forming cities have largely disappeared. Cities tend to form where water is abundant (both for sustaining life and transportation), but advances in transportation have rendered this unnecessary. They provide a place where major political and corporate entities gather, but again, advances in communications technology have rendered that obsolete. They once provided safety in numbers, but again, this isn't necessary due to the evolution of warfare- cities nowadays are little more than glass-and-steel bulls-eyes for the hostile military power. Packing people like sardines in a can may seem like a great idea to save space, but since cities are incapable of producing food or the raw materials necessary for expansion on their own, they need to leech enormous amounts of resources from the surrounding land; besides, behavioral sinks are a very real threat (and one we may be seeing play out right now in the riots around America.)
So, do cities still have their advantages, and if so, what are they? Do they need to be retired, and if so, what do we do with the now-empty skyscrapers?

 

[Angry Shoes]

Just because there are protests and an overhyped virus doesn't mean that people are suddenly going to stop wanting to live near other people.

 

[Sexy Senior Citizen]

Just because there are protests and an overhyped virus doesn't mean that people are suddenly going to stop wanting to live near other people.

I don't mean everyone needs to live the Daniel Boone lifestyle. Just that, with the march of progress being as it is, do we need to have massive, overcrowded concrete jungles? Are they still necessary?

 

[Biden's Chosen]

Cities are containment threads for autists IRL.

 

[Marco Fucko]

I like cities because I prefer walking over driving. Also, there's always "somewhere else to go" in the ecosystem if things don't work out. You can get lost in a crowd, suits me just fine. And if you're persona non grata in one metro, just catch a flight to another one.

I understand why suburbanites like their environments, less crime on paper, cheaper housing for the middle class, et cetera. But at the end of the day those suburbs at least partially rely on neighboring townships or major cities for employment, and disbanding cities would merely spread that over to other suburbs, making them consequently bigger and somewhere in between the suburbs and the metro.

Don't ask me about the country. I was born into a rural area before I moved to a city with my mom when I was like 9 or 10, and it was an economically depressed shithole with embedded cartel operations. A lot of rural shills will yammer on about simplicity and purity but my area was the other side of the coin: lack of economic opportunity and either bought out or otherwise ineffective officials. Also the county was a target for greyhound hobos from cities, so a lot of hobos in addition to regularly unemployed or underemployed citizens.

 

[Cast Iron Pan]

Skyscrapers should be emptied of humans, and filled with chickens and other large fowl. Forget free-range chicken, we're all about business chicken from here on out. Why settle for an uncredentialed fly-over chicken when you can have a professional chicken with a master's in Grievance Studies or Gender and Racial Justice Interrogation (GARJI)?

 

[Pickle Dick]

moviebob would beg to differ

 

[Y2K Baby]

I can't believe something bad happened. Obviously, this is a new paradigm.

 

[keyboredsm4shthe2nd]

I don't mean everyone needs to live the Daniel Boone lifestyle. Just that, with the march of progress being as it is, do we need to have massive, overcrowded concrete jungles? Are they still necessary?

yes. those cocksuckers need to be contained to stop the spread to rural areas

 

[dreamworks face]

I like cities because it concentrates all the assholes in one place. In the US, every ten miles and two years, a shopping center containing a new whole foods, bed bath and beyond, target, buffalo wild wings, movie theater, sushi place, and asian fusion restaurant + a bunch of shitty over-priced apartments emerges from the ether, and this shit is spreading to every unpopulated area of the country as if it's being clone-stamped by a bed bath and beyond executive in his master plan to populate the entire US with crappy shopping centers.

 

[Robert James]

Cities are good for containing yuppies and hipsters and are kind of a necessary evil unless you want a hour+ commute. Also they are necessary for larger museums, zoos, aquariums to exist.

I can't believe something bad happened. Obviously, this is a new paradigm.

Holy shit, the riots really did change everything, that is the most logical response I've seen from you. I don't like this new world we need to go back.

 

[Merried Senior Comic]

Cities contain autism. I'd very much not like to have a bunch of drooling former city dwelling retards shit up my small town.

 

[ZeCommissar]

Over 50% of humanity lives in a city, with it being over 60% in the coming decades.

Tell me something; where the fuck are all those people going to go? 3.75 billion people isn't a small number

And yes cities are still important in a modern industrial society. Unless you want to revert back to pre-industrial agargian society cities will always be around....well there goes your "advances in transportation" argument.

 

[The best and greatest]

Cities exist because it is mutually beneficial for people to congregate, live, and work in a shared space. They'll stop existing when this ceases to be the case, which will be when human society is rendered obsolete by the automated end-of-history and every man becomes his own nation.

The cities are fine. The people are fucked.

 

[jorgoth]

Over 50% of humanity lives in a city, with it being over 60% in the coming decades.

Tell me something; where the fuck are all those people going to go? 3.75 billion people isn't a small number

Obviously they're all going to die, which is the real goal of people who say things like this. I know that because I'm one of them.

 

[Kosher Dill]

Cities exist because it is mutually beneficial for people to congregate, live, and work in a shared space. They'll stop existing when this ceases to be the case

I would point out that this is already much less the case than it used to be. If you go back to the turn of the 20th century, the case for cities was ironclad - there simply was no other place that the interchange of goods, ideas, and people from around the world could take place and build any sort of culture that extends beyond what a peasant farmer would have had 1000 years ago. The transportation and communication technology of the time just made that impossible.

An interesting book touching on this is The Discovery of France, which discusses various attempts to survey, unify, and modernize France in the 19th century. Long after the golden age of the Enlightenment in Paris, people living in the French countryside were often still practically medieval pagans who didn't even share a common language with the city dwellers.

Today of course you can buy anything you want and have it delivered anywhere, get at least a mediocre college education locally, and communicate with anyone on the planet without ever needing to go to a city. City living is now more of a lifestyle choice (or a business strategy if you're a business owner) than an absolute necessity, unless you depend specifically on something exclusive to cities, like proximity to a major international seaport.

 

[LazarusOwenhart]

I think city design is obsolete. A lot of inner city areas get designed to be storage boxes for as many humans as possible. I honestly think that private cars are a massive issue for cities, if I moved into my nearby city I'd ditch all 3 of mine, no questions asked. Modern cities need proper, integrated public transport and a design that allows a free and easy flow of pedestrians that are separated from necessary traffic by more than a few inches of curb.

 

[HumanHive]

Cities aren't obsolete. I have a roundabout reason for saying so:

Logically, cities shouldn't exist in the first place. The average human is only about to really know about 30-100 people. 30 is max for close relationship, 100 is max for fragile but tangible relationship. Anything above 100 is "oh yeah that guy" at best. At worst, total anonymity and total apathy towards anything that happens to them. So a city of 1000 and above is basically a powderkeg waiting to happen. Collapse seems inevitable, after all why stick around when shit really hits the fan, and if you look at history that's exactly what happened. Throughout the Middle East and Mesoamerica, there are signs of a cycle of urban collapse that occurred through the vast majority of mankind's history. No signs of war or disaster, people just suddenly decided to leave and left a perfectly good city behind to rot and eventually be buried by the elements. Why did this happen? Probably famine, but also probably famine caused by bad governance. It ain't easy to develop a political system above "like the mafia, but without a government to stop them".

But eventually it happened, and that's the era we are in. That's what makes a city last. They're a concentration of manpower, capital, and culture; and that makes them worth all the bullshit like being constantly surrounded by strangers who wouldn't care if you lived or died. If another cycle of urban collapse started, it'd make the fall of Rome look like a gentrification project.

 

[Watermelanin]

The average human is only about to really know about 30-100 people. 30 is max for close relationship, 100 is max for fragile but tangible relationship. Anything above 100 is "oh yeah that guy" at best. At worst, total anonymity and total apathy towards anything that happens to them. So a city of 1000 and above is basically a powderkeg waiting to happen.

I don't think that logic really follows. A functioning "close-knit" community doesn't necessarily mean "literally everybody knows literally everybody on a personal level." You can build a model in your head assuming everyone reaches that 100 person cap and the overlap is anything less than 100% and still find well over 1000 people with only a few degrees of separation from one another.
Let's say the rate of overlap is 80%, for the sake of argument. So any one of the 100 people I know will know about 20 people that I don't and vice versa. Those 20 people that I don't know but my friend does will also have 20 people they know that my friend doesn't (though I might). Following law of averages, it's reasonable to say each of these people would know about 4 people unknown to either me or my friend. If you expand on this trend to include ALL people in my social circle, then all people in theirs and so on: you can get a pretty sizeable, yet still reasonably close-knit community.

 

[HumanHive]

I don't think that logic really follows. A functioning "close-knit" community doesn't necessarily mean "literally everybody knows literally everybody on a personal level." You can build a model in your head assuming everyone reaches that 100 person cap and the overlap is anything less than 100% and still find well over 1000 people with only a few degrees of separation from one another.
Let's say the rate of overlap is 80%, for the sake of argument. So any one of the 100 people I know will know about 20 people that I don't and vice versa. Those 20 people that I don't know but my friend does will also have 20 people they know that my friend doesn't (though I might). Following law of averages, it's reasonable to say each of these people would know about 4 people unknown to either me or my friend. If you expand on this trend to include ALL people in my social circle, then all people in theirs and so on: you can get a pretty sizeable, yet still reasonably close-knit community.

We're not talking about six degrees of separation, we're talking about how cities are cold anonymous places where nobody bothers to get to know their neighbor. Can you have a close knit urban neighborhood? Sure, but it requires some degree of tribalism and a lack of mobility. But in modern times that's practically unheard of. It's why urban dwellers are considered so rude, because they don't bother making social investments in a city of ten million.

My overall point is that cities should collapse under stress, which they did historically, but not anymore.