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Total Members Voted: 19

[Char13magne]

So, new random discussion topic for you guys (tell me if I'm getting good at this! )
Do you think that sustainable urban living without the use of excessive natural resources must be our future? Discuss.

             Cheers!

[alway]

Do you think that sustainable urban living without the use of excessive natural resources must be our future? Discuss.

Remember the 3 R's!
Reuse, Asteroid Mining, Recycle!
Because we sure as heck won't settle for reducing the resources we use.

[Cthulhu]

On urbanization:  I found out in class the other day that they're expecting Cincinnati and Dayton to be one city by 2100 or so, with Interstate 75 being Main Street.  That is insane.  Those cities are 50 miles apart.  Considering the amount of scary ghettos in Cincinnati now, can you imagine what the ghettos will look like in 90 years when the cities are gigantic?  It'll be like Condemned: Criminal Origins or something.  Crazy, man.

[Aqizzar]

The "Dallas / Fort Worth Metroplex" already stretches over like six hundred square miles of suburban sprawl, in a big blob around White Settlement, Waxahachie, Rockwall, McKinney, and Denton.  And it's expanding north at a rate of I'd guess 50 miles a year.  A decade ago, I-75 was a trip though barren land, with McKinney as an island of development.  Now, McKinney is just a blip along northern Plano, and there's 400sqft McMansion developments springing up like mushroom colonies all the way up to Sherman.  To the point that finder websites (for jobs and store locaters and stuff) consider Sherman within the neighborhood of DFW, when it's like 80 miles from downtown Dallas.  Ditto for the rich crap spreading northwest out of Keller.  Driving anywhere around DFW is assumed to take at least an hour to reach any destination.

[Cthulhu]

Everything's bigger in Texas, I guess.  We've been having the McMansion thing too.  Gated communities with huge houses springing up all over.

[Aqizzar]

And not one goddamned tree in sight, except the little twigs they plant after building.  God I hate them.  Everything about those developments is bad for the planet.  Giant lawns of bright green grass and shrubs, by spraying water and chemicals (and managed by dirt poor Mexicans); huge swaths of blacktop; loads of cheap insulation, wood, and particle board to make the houses; incredibly long commuting times, by office-drones and soccer moms who think they need an F-350 to carry groceries; and wherever they plant their stakes they bring with them a cardboard-cutout shopping district of Wal-Mart, Applebees, Wendy's, and Home Depot.  The whole metroplex looks like that now, you can drive from Denton to DeSoto and never realize you've gone from one "city" to another.  And now they're built so damn many of them, the cities are lowering building codes to squeeze in more.  The "most desirable" properties are the deceptively cheap neighborhoods of perfectly similar houses built in the dicentennial floodplain.

God how I hate them so.  Developers are even buying up the cool old houses downtown, to tear them down and squeeze McMansions into the little lots by filling the walls right up the fireline.

[Char13magne]

And not one goddamned tree in sight, except the little twigs they plant after building.  God I hate them.  Everything about those developments is bad for the planet.  Giant lawns of bright green grass and shrubs, by spraying water and chemicals (and managed by dirt poor Mexicans); huge swaths of blacktop; loads of cheap insulation, wood, and particle board to make the houses; incredibly long commuting times, by office-drones and soccer moms who think they need an F-350 to carry groceries; and wherever they plant their stakes they bring with them a cardboard-cutout shopping district of Wal-Mart, Applebees, Wendy's, and Home Depot.  The whole metroplex looks like that now, you can drive from Denton to DeSoto and never realize you've gone from one "city" to another.  And now they're built so damn many of them, the cities are lowering building codes to squeeze in more.  The "most desirable" properties are the deceptively cheap neighborhoods of perfectly similar houses built in the dicentennial floodplain.

God how I hate them so.  Developers are even buying up the cool old houses downtown, to tear them down and squeeze McMansions into the little lots by filling the walls right up the fireline.

And the mcmansions are not only identical, but they don't even make good use of space, with their enormous cathedral ceilings that take up the energy use of 5 houses to heat/cool that they probobly only put in in the first place to allow for twelve foot tall Christmas trees! (Not that I would know about that, as I'm Jewish). Good point!

[RedKing]

Uhh...Shanghai. 'Nuff said.

I looked for some pictures to get my point across, but there just aren't any that do it justice (in part because the smog is so bad that photos don't capture depth-of-field properly). Picture L.A. as seen in Blade Runner, but cross it with the infinite rows of pod towers in The Matrix. It's the only city that ever made my physically ill just from its size.

China's stated goal is to have 90% of its population living in cities by 2050, mostly concentrated in three mega-cities: the Bohai Bay region (Beijing-Tianjin), the Yangtze River delta (Shanghai-Hangzhou-Nanjing) and the Pearl River delta (Guangzhou-Shenzhen). Each of these would house roughly 300 million people, with the remaining ~300 million or so Chinese scattered in smaller cities in central and western China, especiallly Chongqing.

Think about that for a minute. Three urban sprawls each containing roughly the population of the entire United States. You want to talk unsustainable? The sewage output alone is horrifying to think of. And the latter two will basically have to drain their rivers dry to provide enough water. I have no freakin' idea where they think they're going to get enough water for the Bohai megaplex, unless they're planning to desalinate the entire bay.

So...do I think it *must* be our future? Only in the sense that we'll probably have to after everything collapses because we didn't make it sustainable enough. Or we invent practical fusion. Everything is solveable with enough energy.

   

[alway]

On urbanization:  I found out in class the other day that they're expecting Cincinnati and Dayton to be one city by 2100 or so, with Interstate 75 being Main Street.

Heh, sounds about right. Aside from Wright Pat AFB, we don't have much in Dayton. Dayton will go back to being farmland, leaving just Cincinnati. 

[Nilocy]

Theres a project going down somewhere in the middle east to build a town for 50k people that is completely carbon neutral, possibly carbon negative (thats a good thing).

Its possible, but we'd probably have to use other planets to sustain the wests current behaviour...

[Judas Maccabeus]

Well, the Cincinnati metropolitan area has already pushed forward to reach Hamilton and Mason, and I wouldn't bet against it engulfing Middletown soon enough.  Then again, a lot of things could happen between now and 2100.

It's stretching pretty far south, too, with the maze of subdivisions all the way down to Union.  How long until Cincinnati and Lexington merge? 

All I know is, we're either going to have to fund some sort of real public transportation around here, whether people like it or not.  Bring back the streetcars, or at least fund Metro* properly!  Or revive that old subway project that went nowhere a several decades ago.

(I'm not quite so sure about it turning into the Los Angeles of the Midwest, though; if Newport could clean up its act, so can its northern neighbour.)

__________
*The Cincinnati-area bus system,** for those outside the area.
**Well, not the whole area, Northern Kentucky has a separate one.

[sonerohi]

Shit, I used to have 3 miles of fields and undeveloped land in between me and the nearest fringes of the city. Now, I've got gas stations and restaurants 1 mile away and my parents have turned down several offers to sell some of our acreage for developers to put in roads through our backyard to reach their subdivisions.

[smigenboger]

Wow, there's a lot more people around the Dayton area on here than I thought. I use I-75 to get to work, and it sucks, what with the narrow highway lanes and continuous road work, not to mention how it's a speed trap. Once you get to Montgomery County it goes back to 65mph

There's no way Dayton and Cincinnati could be conjoined in 90 years. If there's that much trouble just maintaining a highway, I couldn't imagine those problems just fixing Main Street

[andrea]

In the future I would like to see self-contained cities, recycling everything they use. Which means that only energy is needed to keep people inside healthy. Energy that could be provided in many ways, possibly excluding fossile fuels. All the now unused farm land would then be converted into forests.

Just a dream, but it may be what we will HAVE to do to survive.

[Cthulhu]

I don't live around Dayton, I'm in Loveland.  I-75 is a mess right now, though, I'll agree.  They're finally getting most of the construction finished, and then orange barrels start springing up in an intersection near my house!  Come on guys...  Jeez.