samiholloway:locusnegotium: samiholloway: mapsontheweb: America’s Urbanized Areas Look at all
samiholloway:locusnegotium: samiholloway: mapsontheweb: America’s Urbanized Areas Look at all that space. We should spread out. Some might rather argue that remaining condensed while simply turning cities “greener” & more walkable is better–urban sprawl is a real problem, but so are food deserts, and not all landscapes are viable for construction (either because they’re too rocky/harsh in climate, or are being used for something else like conservation or farmland.) If the “spreading” takes the form of breaking urbanized areas & cities up while keeping both homes & food together, *and* ensuring no overdevelopment (at the expense of wildlife & Native protected areas) takes place, that might help, as well. Right now, city planning prioritizes corporate interest at the expense of both humans and nature; it may not look it, but there are plenty of people between visible red zones on the map, and plenty of red zones are not city but urban sprawl (typically food deserts, too.) City structures most beneficial to nature are beneficial to humans, too, because we *are* nature, and don’t actually thrive surrounded by concrete and waste. As someone living in a hugely sprawled out city prioritizing corporate needs over people? Yeah, I think you’re 100% right. Realize that much of the structure of American cities today is a result of deliberate policy choices in the 50s and 60s, meant fundamentally to suburbanize cities and reduce walkability and mass transit. The intent was to make people buy cars: mass transit options were reduced or outright dismantled, highways were cut through (mostly poor, minority) neighborhoods, and farmland within driving distance of city centers was turned into suburban developments - many of which were subsequently redlined to keep out the people who had been displaced within the cities.Since then, city services have generally been saddled with so much debt they cannot hope to expand, urban housing growth has been a joke compared to urban population growth, cost of living has skyrocketed, and extreme gerrymandering has rendered large swathes of the population essentially voiceless in legislatures.Urbanization is not the problem. There is no reason cities cannot be environmentally friendly - indeed, it’s easier to make a city green than having that same population spread out evenly. And there’s no reason that living in a city has to be difficult for poor people - in this, too, it’s easier than when there’s more sprawl.Our poorly-run cities are a conscious choice, and can be changed. These failures are not inevitable, they are deliberate. -- source link