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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   24149 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 8, 2025

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Also as somebody who lives in Asia/wander aimlessly around China fairly frequently the attraction of the Pod apartment is higher when you've got a genuine 15 minute city. I've spent time staying over in friends' HDBs in Singapore and whilst there's no personal yard, there's good access to shared utilities & minimal nonsense from apartment neighbors compared to when I've lived in the West and had to deal with potential homeless/drug encounters

I once lived in a neighborhood that had practically 0 yard-space but 5 different parks/playgrounds within a 5-10 minute walk. It still wasn't "city living" since the nearest grocery store was still a good distance away, but I would take that over the 1/4 acre typical American suburb.

Yeah I mean the main barrier to this stuff in the West at this point is keeping the homeless/drug enthusiasts out of the shared communal greenspaces which a lot of Asian countries are more willing to actually attempt.

They managed to keep out the riff raff with few strategies:

  • 0 parking. No street parking, no parking lots, you needed to park on your own driveway and walk to the parks.

  • 0 bathrooms. Kind of inconvenient when you have a potty-training child, but maybe a potty-training child is one of the riff raff they want to keep out.

  • 0 public transportation routes nearby.

The three combined guaranteed that everyone at the parks was a neighbor.

I've lived in a big apartment block which had exactly 0 year space and the nearest grocery store was literally on our ground floor (though it was more expensive than the supermarket 5 minutes walk away). And yeah I had access to a well maintained very large green space two minutes from the apartment lobby much bigger than the yard even massive detached houses have.

Are Chinese cities 15 minute ones? My impression is that, outside of the big metropolises, you just have a bunch of high-rises surrounded by 4-lane roads. Like the worst of Asian high-rise living combined with the worst of American car culture.

Like the worst of Asian high-rise living combined with the worst of American car culture.

Genuinely kind of impressive how awful these look on YouTube.

"Okay so you know how people love gated communities right? And also how people love living in small spaces? What if, hear me out, we combined those, and also put them in the middle of fucking nowhere. There's literally no issues with my plan at all, pass the opium"

Your impression is correct, that is what you will see if you drive an hour out from the city center of Beijing in any direction.

In the third tier city where I've spent the most time the high rise compounds have retail on the bottom of the buildings that face the roads, similar to a strip mall. You'll usually have a bodega-ish grocer in one of those, a small medical clinic, restaurants, hairdressers, etc. Day-to-day needs often don't necessitate a trip elsewhere.

If you do want a bigger grocer you'll usually find one in nearby shopping malls, they're comparable to American grocery stores. The hospital is where you'll go for things that can't be handled by the small clinic.

Mass transit in the city is just buses, but I've only taken the bus once. Didi (Chinese Uber) is plentiful and cheap. It's a few American dollars to go pretty much anywhere in a small city.

I haven't been to low-tier Chinese cities for the most part but in my experience even the suburbs of the 1st & second-tier have a lot of redundancy and buildout even into the suburbs. Plus the insane scale of Chinese Ecommerce means that access to big box stores is probably less important than it is in most of the West.

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