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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   11334 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 21, 2026

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Yet, if you look at a random US "city" in Google Maps, you will see lots of single-family houses with their own backyards and limited access to mass transit.

So, what do you actually mean when you say "urban", "suburban", and "rural" living? Maybe it's something like this.

Urban living: Row houses and apartment buildings, with incidental retail Suburban living: Single-family and two-family houses, and nothing else Rural living: Incidental single-family houses in land that is largely agricultural or undeveloped

My personal tongue-in-cheek definition:

  • Urban living: cars are an optional purchase to support specific careers and/or lifestyles. Middle-class aspiration for non-car owners includes frequent taxi/Uber use.
  • Suburban living: Working-class respectability requires one car per family (with carless living possible for the childless possible but not ideal). Middle-class aspiration is one car per employed adult.
  • Exurban or rural living: Working-class respectability requires one car per employed adult. Middle-class aspiration is one car per licensed driver, with the car being a pickup, SUV or 4x4 if the driver is an employed adult who doesn't drive a van for work reasons.

Note that on this definition, a lot of American "suburbia" falls into the exurban/rural category. This is deliberate. "Urban" living by my definition is compatible with upper-middle-class people having houses with private gardens (many such neighbourhoods in London zone 2/3), though probably not detached ones.

This is America, and there are neighborhoods in the city center which are exurban in most metros.

One imagines this will change completely the moment self-driving cars and self-driving fleets reach mainstream acceptance. This has been talked about for ages now but I would be genuinely surprised, especially with latest AI progress, if it isn't all sorted out within ~20 years. Actually as I think about it I can imagine some big problems that have to be solved even after the cars can be trusted to drive themselves, but in theory there's so much money at stake that I would expect them to be solved. And I would expect that to have massive repercussions on urban development and suburban density.

I very much agree. There are two great questions about the self-driving car era that we don't know the answer to yet:

  • Will self-driving cars be hired like taxis or will they be privately owned? Or in other words, will people still own a car once renting it on the spot market not longer adds the cost of a chauffeur.
  • What is the geometric constraint on cities in the world where self-driving cars are the main form of transit? (From Babylon to the Victorians, it was walking distance. In the private car era, it was parking scarcity first and carriageway scarcity for moving vehicles second)

Seems to me like the problem is rushhour -- everyone wants a self-driving car at the same time. If you can't convince people to get self-driving rideshares or even a bespoke self-driving programmable bus, then everyone wants their own car. And then you still need parking because otherwise empty cars returning home just produce twice as much traffic and exponential congestion.

To your first question, I think it is likely that we will see a progression over time. At first, self-driving cars will likely be sold privately to individual owners to appeal to the existing culture of private car ownership. Tesla has already begun this. However, I'd imagine that eventually, manufacturers will transition to larger and larger taxi-style fleets, as this seems to me a more profitable business model. They might even have a subscription model where you pay X amount for Y miles of travel per month. The question will be in how these fleets are administered. Will these fleets be controlled by municipalities? Will multiple fleets coexist or will there be a clear winner that later becomes impenetrable due to market dominance? How will rural or suburban areas be served? It is going to be an interesting few decades.

I'm not sure it'd ever fully replace ownership. Many people don't treat their cars as interchangeable parts today. If you have a work truck with tools in the back, you may not want to move those often. Or reinstall a bike rack every time you use it. I do think it could replace a lot of uses, but probably not all of them.

Tongue-in-cheek extension to Europe:

  • Urban living: public transit is so ubiquitous people never check schedules for departure times. public transit within the area is significantly faster than car travel - mainly because of parking and congestion, which means transit that ignores congestion (subway, light rail or reserved track trams) are available.
  • Suburban living: public transit provides at least 4 departures per hour in any direction. public transit within the area is as fast as car travel, but slower when going to a different suburban area (and again faster when traveling into the urban core).
  • Exurban or rural living: 2 public transit departures per hour or less, requires one car per household, transit is to slow as primary transportation for working adults, reaching a transit stop requires at least a bike.

Housing style is a bit useless as definitions, since both the suburbs and rural villages will have a double digit percentage of residents living in apartment buildings.

I would put the suburban threshold at 2 rides/hour rather than 4. Hell, at the height of the train maintenance crisis a few years ago, some inner-ring parts of Berlin were reduced to 1/20min at peak hours, and I've lived in areas with 20- and 30-minute period transit that were nevertheless within 20 minutes of the centre and largely housed urban commuters.

Yeah, that's why it's tongue in cheek. This definition classes even core parts of cities like Cologne as rural. This is by design.

More seriously, I forgot about Berlin and Munich running 20 min intervals on many lines. Those can be suburban in my book (but it's not nearly enough for urban).

Every city has some rich people who live in the center with gardens. I would guess even in Beijing there are people who rent the old-fashioned courtyard homes in the city center from centuries ago, I think quite a few still exist.

Luxury condos of course wildly outnumber them in Beijing, but if you're interested in elite siheyuan:

https://architizer.com/blog/inspiration/collections/siheyuan-chinese-courtyards-renovated-with-contemporary-flare/amp/

Yeah, I wonder how much these are, I’ve heard that until recently a lot of them were actually lived in by wealthy Western expats since even very rich Chinese tend to want new build McMansion type homes.

Xicheng (near Tiananmen), 11.9M USD, ~4k USD/sq ft (estimated): https://bj.lizihang.com/siheyuanchushou/783052.html

Dongcheng (contains Tiananmen), 8.8M USD, 3121 USD/sq ft: https://mbj.lizihang.com/siheyuanchushou/872357.html

These seem lower end than the ones in the article, though, at least the finishings.

So beautiful, especially the second one that seems to have had the period detailing and artwork largely preserved. I wonder if that furniture is original.

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