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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   33764 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 27, 2023

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I’m not really an active advocate for “15 minute hellholes”, but I always find these comments a bit baffling. Surely what “everything should be within 15 minutes” is aspiring to is something like Seoul or Tokyo or Singapore, which are convenient and pleasant enough places to live, even if a bit cramped and not for everyone?

So the bait for "15 minute cities" is small Italian villages and the switch is East Asian anthills, complete with wide boulevards full of cars and motorbikes down the sidewalks (at least in Seoul's case)?

Well, I don’t really see how you’re fitting 5 million people in a small village on the Alps. I always think of Yokohama or Hong Kong when I think of “convenient city to live in”.

"bait", No, I'd say realistically the goal is how the nice parts of Chicago are where you have smaller distinct neighborhoods that have everything you regularly need/want connected by cheap and regular rail but just slightly more so. Put the houses closer together in a brownstone or townhouse configuration, make yards smaller and use much of that sqft saving for nice green parks, which are a much better space for community formation, and the rest for much more local businesses like grocers, bakeries, butchers, restaurants, ect. The areas that are like this make going about the town a pleasure rather than a chore.

Well, the difference is that those cities are in countries that, ah, generally frown upon "immoral" behaviors and crime. I'm not exactly a 15-minute-city opponent, but I can agree that any city that resembles, well, a non-US city needs to enforce laws and norms to a rather strict degree to keep it pleasant.

I will never understand why urbanists will name other countries such as Japan, South Korea, and Singapore, and then gloss over the key differences between them and the United States: Cultures, laws, and norms. Singapore even bans chewing gum, for heaven's sake. Meanwhile in the US you'd be surprised if a three-time felon murderer stays in jail for more than a year, in San Francisco they just recalled a prosecutor for not prosecuting crime, and Vancouver is flooded with homeless drug addicts under a misguided "harm reduction" policy.

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