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For as long as I can remember, I've actively disliked suburbs. They combine the worst aspects of urban centers and the worst aspects of the countryside. They're also offensive to nature, with their sprawl and their pollution. In short, they're bad. THREAD: 1/26
Cities are great: vibrant life, culture, lots to do, active conversations & ideas. But they're also busy, noisy, dirty, too much to do, too little respite. They accentuate that which is human, but can be weirdly dehumanizing. 2/26
Rural areas are great: calm, natural, serene, a good place to think and live and be. But they're also lonely, boring, dull. They accentuate that which is natural, but can be a disconnect from other people. 3/26
I split my time between the city and rural areas. They nourish my being in different ways. Some are fine with just one, but I need the culture as much as I need a break from it; I need nature, but I also need the ideas. 4/26
Suburbs are full of people, and yet everybody is far away. They're polluted concrete misanthropic areas that feign nature through small enclosed gardens and manicured parks. They lack both ideas and serenity; they have neither culture nor calm. 5/26
I understand why people like suburbs. They're cheaper to live in, you get more space for less money, while maitaining relative closeness to both city and wilderness. But to a large degree their popularity is a manufactured outcome from a few causes: 6/26
First, cities were allowed to become horrible. Concrete jungles are often bad places to raise children. Between pollution, insecurity, socioeconomic divergence and the erosion of conviviality, they need reformation towards livingry. 7/26
Second, land policies in most countries actively promote sprawl, either by undervaluing unbuilt land, overvaluing built land, or making recycling of used land practically impossible. Densification is 1-2 orders of magnitude more costly than expansion. 8/26
Third, the history of the propaganda effects of oil and automotive industries cannot be overlooked. To a huge degree, people live in suburbs because they've been told for a solid century that owning a car is a key aspect of the good life. 9/26
Fourth, more broadly, the extreme degree to which a manufactured culture of conspicuous consumption and the rat race has pressured people to live more expansively is a huge driver towards suburbanization. 10/26
Fifth, easily overlooked, is that in many cities, in particular where slums are common, building high rises would be economically infeasible. This is reflective of government and market failure. Slums are suburbs without intent. 11/26
I could go on, but let's just say that there is nothing accidental, natural, unavoidable or unexpected about suburbanization. But let's note that two hundred years ago, just 2% of the global population lived in urban areas; today, more than half the population does. 12/26
The global population of that time has also roughly 8-folded over the last 200 years. The UN has good data on this: https://www.un.org/development/desa/pd/themes/urbanization 13/26
In 2000, global urban (and suburban) land use was 0.6 million km² (slightly more than France), with some projections 3.6 million km² by 2100 (see https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-15788-7). That's about 80% of the surface area of the European Union. 14/26
There are no projections in that paper (Gao & O'Neill) that suggest the urban area will shrink over the next 80 years. But why not? Let's not lose track of nature here, because urban areas aren't neutral -- they compete with wilderness. 15/26
At this point I should point out that I'm a big fan of E.O. Wilson's Half Earth idea. https://www.half-earthproject.org/discover-half-earth/ - in short: unless we set aside at least half of Earth for nature then both nature and humanity will be doomed. 16/26
Quote: "When 90% of habitat is removed, the number of species that can persist sustainably will descend to about a half. [If] we protect half the global surface, the fraction of species protected will be 85%[...] At one-half and above, life on Earth enters the safe zone." 17/26
Humanity uses land for cities, for sprawl, for agriculture, and to a smaller degree for other things like pit mines and what not. We can argue that the cities are and the agriculture are necessary for our survival. But what about the sprawl? 18/26
And further, if the urban+suburban sprawl expands to the size of the EU, and agriculture is already 11% of the land area of Earth ( http://www.fao.org/3/y4252e/y4252e06.htm) and growing, we're rapidly running out of space for nature. 19/26
The total land area of Earth is 510.1 million km². If we say agriculture continues to expand as predicted ( https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0107522) we might be seeing ~110 million km² of land under human occupation by 2100. 20/26
As a steely-eyed reader you'll be thinking, "ah, but that's only 21% of Earth's surface!" And you're right. But remember that Antarctica is 14.2 million km², the world's deserts are 33% of the surface area, and mountains are 25% of the surface. 21/26
Obviously there's some overlap between use cases (see: Dubai, Atlas mountains, the Queen Maud range, etc), but the point is, we can't pretend the remaining 79% are ideal for nature either. So what to do? 22/26
The obvious answer is for humans to use less space -- stop the sprawl. How? Science fiction might show the way. Must read article by @kendrawrites: https://news.yahoo.com/wakanda-doesnt-suburbs-movies-black-141509433.html 23/26
That won't be enough. We also need active, large scale measures to reclaim deserts, reduce agricultural sprawl (worth a thread of its own), and back out of some of the bigger dumbass moves of the 20th century. But reducing sprawl has many benefits for humans *and* nature. 24/26
I've mentioned some of it above, and I won't bore you with the details of how we could be thinking about urban renewal. If you do want to deep dive, check out this amazing longread by @EricHunting: https://medium.com/@erichunting/solarpunk-post-industrial-design-and-aesthetics-1ecb350c28b6 25/26
But in short: let's switch from a suburban sprawl model where most human-occupied space has the downsides of cities and rural areas, to a Wakanda-inspired solarpunk model of sustainable cities with real nature close by. Earth needs it. Nature needs it. We need it. END.
