Reddit mentions of Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier

Living out in the boonies doesn't necessarily make you less consumptive.

Read this new book about cities:

http://www.amazon.com/Triumph-City-Greatest-Invention-Healthier/dp/159420277X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1300486734&sr=8-1

For what it's worth, cities are generally safer than suburbs.

Just an exerpt:
>But guns — whether used accidentally or with intent — are much less likely to be the cause of death than another tool: cars. And people drive more, drive longer, drive faster and drive drunker in rural areas than in urban ones, where they can walk or take public transit. Motor-vehicle crashes led to 27.61 deaths per 100,000 people in most rural areas, and just 10.58 deaths per 100,000 people. Those are stark statistics, and they don’t even take into account the cardiovascular benefits that may accrue to urbanites who spend more time walking than riding in cars. It’s not for nothing that New Yorkers, who live in the densest urban area in the U.S., live about 2.2 years longer than the national average.

If you're interested in a deeper exploration of the topic, check out Triumph of the City.

I am rather a fan of Green Metropolis, and Triumph of the City. These are more written for a general audience rather than people planning to work in the field, but are still worth your time.

I should second the statement of The Atlantic Cities. That is a really great site.

I think I get what you're saying - you wish /r/urbanplanning would acknowledge the fact that we have suburbs and post more things like the Build a Better Burb design challenge for Long Island, which does still endorse many of the things that do get discussed and posted here on the subreddit, like better transit access, increasing density (the slippery slope argument against density is that we want skyscrapers...), and improving a sense of place.

I'll definitely say that there's a lot to be had from the influence of land-use policies that could be changed to encourage transformations of suburbs to European-like strong towns linked by rail with greenspace in between, as is discussed in this article. However, a lot of these ideas aren't as easily applied elsewhere in US suburbs where suburbs came in after the decline of the railroads; Long Island is unique in its mostly electrified commuter rail services and lends itself better toward the idealistic transmogrification we'd love to see across the US. Perhaps this is the space of the discussion you're looking for?

On top of that, you still do have the issue that people do live in the suburbs for one or more of the features one finds/expects to find there. Actual implementation of land use policy can be very difficult when dealing with many individual property owners, even if those policies encourage the improvement of transport access, community amenities, public spaces, etc.

I've always been intrigued by the book Retrofitting Suburbia but haven't pulled the trigger on buying the book yet - I'm still going through the Shoup bible and my signed copy of Triumph of the City.

Sure! I'm halfway Triumph of the City wrote by Edward Glaeser, an urban economist at Harvard University. Is a really insightful book which explains interesting phenomena such as suburbs, the fall of Detroit, the second rise of New York, Texan cities and the success of Shanghai, Mumbai and Rio de Janeiro.


I highly recommend it!

What do you think your life in the country would be like if there had never been any cities?

Also: http://www.amazon.com/Triumph-City-Greatest-Invention-Healthier/dp/159420277X

Also, ask if the schools in London and Toronto and Tokyo and Helsinki are like this before you assume that all city's schools are like this.

Thia is all extremely unrealistic. You are forgetting there are 6 billion of us. read this book

Energy sufficiency is simple math. Cities use way less energy. New Yorkers use about 4700 kilowatt hours versus the US average of 11,000 kilowatt hours. The UK average is even lower than New York's with an average of 4,300 kilowatt hours per year. [Source] [Source]

So assuming that the current trend of cities becoming more dense continues (which has been the trend since the 1980s) you could double the population in America while halving the energy use and end up with the exact same net energy usage.

Now you bring up a good point about cost. It is more expensive to live in a city. You are wrong about infrastructure though. Simple truth is rural areas have much more expensive and less efficient infrastructure. Rural infrastructure is used by less people and has to stretch out for more miles and requires more travel and time for maintence. Cities have expensive infrastructure but more people use it. [Ed Glaeser has a book on this subject] He's an economist at Harvard.

Also the cost of living is more expensive in cities...if you require the exact same lifestyle that Americans have come to expect during the post-war boom. If you want a home with a big green front lawn, it's going to cost a lot more in a city. City living is more expensive because the "standard" in America is inflated. Yet that's not how things have to be, and things are beginning to change fast.

People adapt to their environment. It's natural instinct to try and take the maximum available resources into account. That's why we love the taste of fats and salts. If you're a prehistoric hunter gather 12,000 years ago, then if you can get pack on some extra pounds, you take advantage of that. Studies show that people with hybrid cars use JUST as much energy as people with normal cars. They have better mpg, they just end up driving more, because the cost of driving goes down. [Source]

So Americans haven't adopted a more energy efficient lifestyle because they haven't had to. Land is cheap, gas is cheap, resources are cheap. When people have more resources they spend with less care (if you go to Qatar where electricity is state funded by oil money people take electricity for granted in the same way you probably take clean drinking water from the tap for granted). But as those resources are restricted and become more scarce people adopt their lifestyles, and remain fairly comfortable. When people's expectations are adjusted, people can be quite happy and productive. Just check out neat things like the [Tiny House Movement] Do you really need all that space? Do you really want a front lawn you have to mow, water, and care for? Maybe you have a green thumb but even in the urban dense areas people have taken up communal gardening projects that can help satisfy those needs in the community while decreasing total land usage. Personally I'm glad I don't have to mow lawns anymore.

A quick anecdote. I was looking for an apartment with a friend recently. We were looking at some bottom rung houses due to the nature of his and my employment situation at the time. I grew up in Texas and I'm back here but I went to school in Boston and London, so coming back to Texas has been weird. My last apartment room in Boston was 6 feet by 10 feet. It was a closet. Terribly small but I didn't mind in the least. In Texas (a city more densely populated than most in Texas) we were looking at apartments that were cheaper than that room, but 10 times bigger. One house has 2 bedrooms and 3 bathrooms. WHY? Why would you need 3 bathrooms if you only have 2 people living in the house? Hell, I've lived in houses with 7 people and only 2 bathrooms and we had zero problems. If it wasn't illegal to have more people occupying such a house (a measure taken by local government to help protect landowners) then I could have easily comfortably packed 4 or 5 more people in that apartment.

>Marxists claim the exact same thing.

If Marx did claim this, he wouldn't advocate government law like he did. Your idea of Marx sounds very wrong, or maybe your idea of economic law. But that's beside the point. You are projecting some ideals on to me. I never said anything you are claiming I did. I don't know where you are getting that I think the market is a separate unified thing. The market is everyone. Therefor every individuals action shapes the market. If you keep trying to put words were there are none, than debating you is a waste of time.

Nothing I say is ideological drivel as you try to point out. Simply because 2 things are intertwined does not mean they are the same, and cannot be separated. I base my concepts on the facts at hand, history, and solid theory. You are debating with a lot of emotions here, you should look at the alternatives to these factories, and what else the market in those countries has to offer. If someone is forcing anyone to work that is a problem in itself, but for most of the cases no one is forcing any of these children or adults to work. They choose to work in one place, because another place is worst or not an option. I'm not saying 'it sucks but what can you do.' I'm saying raising standards of living takes time, it can't happen because you wish it or because of a law. Looking at the history of western working conditions, it took time there as well, and the governments had to get out of the way. It's just usually the governments that get in the way and slow things down or make them worst. Look at the freedom of industry in Honk Kong and their standard of living compared to the rest of China. Hong Kong is much better off then the rest of China is, and they have very little government, comparatively, and a lot more open market. So when I say the market will fix it, I mean if governments allow the people to do what they do, then things will get better. It's not a mystical force, it's just what people do. Most of the history of the U.S companies on average were doing things and paying better than what government laws enforced. But the law is still forcing people to do things that is against their best interests, especially on a small business scale, which really slows progress.

>Sure. If you entirely ignore the evidence in the article itself, then squint at it until your previous assumptions are justified, I'm sure you can convince yourself of anything.

That was what your article said. Also it is government building of roads that causes "urban sprawl" anyway, as pointed out in this book. by Harvard economics professor Edward L. Glaeser.

Also from your article:

>In this case, in order to boost the production of cheaper goods, governments have maintained artificially low food prices in urban areas. The strategy here is to maintain urban food prices below market levels to reduce the cost of urban labor and urban life.

So no squinting needed to see government intervention as the problem.

I'm a libertarian urbanist, and the rank and file libertarians hate the morgage interest deduction, zoning laws, urban renewal, government subsidized highways, and other sprawl creating policies.

Good book on free market urbanism:

http://www.amazon.com/The-Slaughter-Cities-Renewal-Cleansing/dp/1587317753

http://www.amazon.com/Wealth-Cities-Revitalizing-Centers-American/dp/0738201340/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1403714503&sr=1-1&keywords=wealth+of+cities

http://www.amazon.com/Zoned-Out-Regulation-Transportation-Metropolitan/dp/1933115157/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1403714530&sr=1-1&keywords=zoned+out

http://www.amazon.com/Our-Lot-Real-Estate-Came/dp/B005Q69JJQ/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1403714545&sr=1-1&keywords=our+lot

http://www.amazon.com/Snob-Zones-Fear-Prejudice-Estate/dp/0807001570/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1403714560&sr=1-1&keywords=snob+zones

http://www.amazon.com/Financial-Fiasco-Infatuation-Ownership-Afterword/dp/1937184412/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1403714575&sr=1-1&keywords=financial+fiasco

http://www.amazon.com/Housing-Bias-Rethinking-Diverse-America/dp/0230110509/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1403714629&sr=1-1&keywords=the+housing+bias

http://www.amazon.com/Triumph-City-Greatest-Invention-Healthier/dp/159420277X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1403714641&sr=1-1&keywords=triumph+of+the+city

http://www.amazon.com/Reckless-Endangerment-Outsized-Corruption-Armageddon-ebook/dp/B004H1TM1G/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1403714658&sr=1-1&keywords=reckless+endangerment+gretchen+morgenson

http://www.amazon.com/The-Rent-Too-Damn-High-ebook/dp/B0078XGJXO
Their are a lot more.

http://www.amazon.com/High-Cost-Free-Parking/dp/1884829988/ref=sr_1_1?s=textbooks-trade-in&ie=UTF8&qid=1405054547&sr=1-1&keywords=the+high+cost+of+free+parking

That's so localised it's ridiculous. Habitats are only affected WHERE the city is, but not so much between them. As well as that, city dwellers use, on average, 40% less energy than suburbanites. edit: Add onto that, we could easily have more renewable energy if we made a mass push for it.
It's more logical to have self-sufficient urban areas, renewable energy, with large nature habitats.
Though there will always be those who'd rather ignore the facts and just have half the population killed.

https://www.amazon.com/Triumph-City-Greatest-Invention-Healthier/dp/159420277X
https://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/13/books/review/Royte-t.html