It's hard to realize how bad things have gotten outside of the wilderness in which I have fastened myself. I used to go to this part of Union Station on a regular basis, and it was as advertised a thriving shopping district. Here, where we have happy children and dogs, hikers and backpackers, picnics and boat trips, everything seems like America hasn't changed all that much. I have to look at the news to remember that Washington, D.C. has turned itself into a post-apocalyptic nightmare -- as has San Francisco and many other cities.
Probably a lot more Americans live in the parts of the nation that have horrified themselves than elsewhere, though. The country has been badly hurt even if there remain oases beyond the concrete.
8 comments:
That's unbelievably empty. Is that after the Secret Service has sanitized the place?
I haven't tried to check the numbers, but the "Wuhan 2019A" seems to have taken down more businesses than ordinary attrition. A lot clawed their way through, albeit somewhat changed. (E.g. the indoor waiting room at one restaurant is now a prep room for takeout--you wait outside now until the app summons you.)
I don't see as many beggars in downtown Madison as before, though the number sleeping rough looks about the same. The rate of car thefts and "random" gunfire is way up, and the reports I hear about schools and from teachers say the classes are much harder to manage.
Apparently it's not after but before, and the businesses are empty -- just gone. It used to be a bustling place full of high end shops. There was a food court on the bottom floor for ordinary fast food, but some middle/high end dining as well. There was a Chicago-style pizzeria I liked to go to for pizza and beer while waiting on my train out to Manassas, where I'd get my own ride and head out the rest of the way. That way I didn't have to try to ride in the crazy DC traffic.
One "secular trend" that COVID and the latest psychotic break of mankind merely exacerbated: There is a sense in which "intellectual work" doesn't need cities anymore.
You don't need a city or university library to store every book ever written by man on something the size of your fingernail. (I think I have something like a few tens of thousands of books on my phone.) You don't need a concentration of people anymore to contact and collaborate with anyone you want, anywhere on Earth. You don't need to rent-with-roomies a crackhouse in the Bay Area to write software.
Even in the physical world, where you still can't live completely out in the boonies if you want to run light industry: You don't need to live next to a railhead to get access to metal stock anymore. The suburbs will work. FedEx will deliver to towns further from the beaten path.
The value proposition for extremely concentrated humanity has changed with technology, and I think it'll work out over the next few centuries the same way the mill and the rifle undermined feudalism - pretty much the only people that want people confined to a habitrail nightmare are cluster-B control freaks lusting after a Bronze-age palace economy.
What could shut this down is an energy drought that can't be worked around. But the destruction of centralized infrastructure (Hello all you cities that can't reliably supply power and water anymore) is a bit of an incentive to go get a well-system and a generator somewhere apart from roaming rioters.
What are the upsides of cities anymore? Does anyone actually have this vibrant social life? I suspect it's mythical, or predates the vast population explosion that swamped these places. You don't have time for it in a big city: You spend that time in a traffic jam trying to commute - we're basically all in each others way.
Scale matters.
Inhuman-scale cities have you waiting in traffic or walking the ways with your shields up all the time. Human-scale communities -- even a small office suite -- allow you to be open to the unexpected. I hated the cube farm I stayed in one week, but the offices with common areas allowed spontaneous discussion and bouncing ideas of each other in ways that don't work on zoom or in a crowded farm.
I can't recall the source so take this as bullshit: offered without regard to its truth.
There is an optimum population density, on the rough order of 4000 person per square mile. Less density can't support the range of amenities people like. More density creates social division and violence. The curve around optimum (amenities on the Y axis, density on the X) is asymmetric, rising sharply from very low to the peak, then falling slowly towards about 10K, then dropping steeply.
This finding drove a lot of public housing projects in the 1960s and 70s towards a housing style called "Tower in the Park", that crammed thousand of people into high density high-rise buildings on a square mile of greenbelt parkland. It didn't work. The rats in this BF Skinner horror experiment ignored the park, saw the corridors and stairwells filled tight, and went toward the crazy downslope right tail of the psych distribution curve almost the day the towers opened.
ANYhow, I resurrect this BS to wonder if the homeschool, work-from-home, distributed labor move now on (which I emotionally support) might result in communities on the sub-optimal left side of the 4K/SqMi peak -- not crazy, but unhappy with too few features like pools and libraries or symphonies and fire departments ...
I guess we'll see, soon enough.
@ J Melcher - I have no idea if this is true, but I have to think something like it is likely. It maps onto reality too well.
I've heard that 200,000 people is the point at which a city starts shifting from "large enough to have amenities but not major problems" to "big city self-isolation and segregation" with the concomitant social difficulties that follow. Which fits the area near where I live, and my observations.
LittleRed1
I hold with Diogenes that if only you could live without a few amenities, you wouldn't have to flatter Dionysus. Well, it made more sense when he said it.
Post a Comment