Death in the city: what happens when all our cemeteries are full?

It's interesting though because this is not a technical problem. A cremated body's ashes don't take up much space, and don't need to be housed in an urn.

It's entirely a cultural issue, in that we have special feelings about death and the treatment of a body after death. But thing about culture is that it's really flexible, but really resistant to change.

It's never going to be a problem that can't be solved. People are resilient and eventually if cemetery space does become completely unavailable, we'll make due. But it doesn't mean we won't be upset while we learn to cope.

It's more that it's a problem that we don't want to solve (because it would mean changing our cultural habits) but not a problem that is hard to solve. It just needs to get to a point where we actually need to solve it before anyone will worry about it.

Highly recommend people look for photos of the French Catacombs if you want some ideas of what to do with around 6 million skeletons. It's a very surreal day trip o_0

It's not like there isn't space outside the cities. Take SF for example, they banned cemeteries in the city so there's a "city of the dead" just down the 280 freeway, Colma which is like 80% cemeteries.

Of course a cultural change so they took no space would be fine with me but still, most cities are surrounding by vast quantities of mostly unused or under used land.

If Cities: Skylines has taught me anything, I can answer this question without reading the article.

First, dead bodies start to build up in various buildings, especially well-trafficked buildings such as high density commercial buildings and offices.

The presence of the bodies dramatically decreases land value and happiness resulting in an exodus from the city.

As people leave the city, demand for new development rapidly decreases, along with revenues.

The city quickly digs itself into deep debt as it quickly becomes a ghost town, thousands of buildings become derelict, further decreasing the land value. Nobody wants to live here any more. Chirpy wheezes his last tweet as the last person complains they no longer want to live in this city and leaves.

(though, in cities skylines this usually happens because you have so many garbage trucks and hearses trying to collect the dead people & garbage that they all get stuck)

The usual reason people prefer burial over cremation isn't so much the sanctity of the body, as that there is a permanent space to visit, lay flowers, etc.

I've always been fond of the idea of funeral-home "rememberance rooms", where urns of ashes are stored in small "shrine" spaces that can be visited instead. Japan's pet cemeteries[1] in particular take this to its natural conclusion: grids of cubby-hole shrines creating the mortuary equivalent of a rental-box consignment store[2].

[1] http://japanvisitor.blogspot.ca/2012/10/jindaiji-pet-cemeter...

[2] A.k.a. "Cube stores": https://www.google.ca/search?q=%E6%A0%BC%E4%BB%94%E8%88%96&t...

Death and cemeteries are different than they used to be. Cemeteries used to be places to go on picnics, for kids to play, and so on. It's a relatively recent phenomenon for death to be seen as something to be removed from daily life. Perhaps due to modern medicine and disease? I'm not sure. But I am sure that cemeteries are unsustainable unless we reincorporate them into a part of our communities, rather than being places to avoid.

this is mainly a cultural problem. We have to accept that if we want to be truly sustainable we have to make every proces of our life sustainable, including death. This mean using the death in some way(as a fertilizer, for example)

Incinerate your loved ones!

Cemetery places in Italy are not permanent - they get recycled and the remains dumped into some kind of common area. I think it's supposed to happen well after anyone who would remember the person is still around, but... still, I don't much care for the idea.

What happened in London was this: http://www.orderofthegooddeath.com/enon-chapel-londons-victo...

Also: http://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/jan/22/death-city-gri..., and an attempt to solve the problem: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Necropolis_Railway

This problem has been solved already, even for cultures that do not cremate bodies.

The scarce cemetery space is devoted to recent burials. The corpse is left in the ground long enough for all the soft tissues to decompose. It is then exhumed, and given a second burial in an ossuary, or for the more prestigious deceased, a reliquary.

The mass of a dry skeleton is about 1/5 that of a wet body, and without the connective tissues, you can stack bones more efficiently.

Or just borrow a trick from hard disk drive manufacturers and orient the corpses vertically instead of horizontally. In other words, bury bodies in a standing position, rather than lying down.

What we do in Chicago is bury people in the suburbs. The rates are better there and there's availability. Its also less cramped and allows for larger tombstones and such. People just need to get used to driving 30-60 minutes to visit deceased loved ones as opposed to taking a stroll to the nearest cemetery.

I encountered this problem when playing Cities: Skylines. Simple solution: build more crematories

When traveling to LGA from Manhattan, I'd usually pass by what is a very large cemetery compared to what I'm used to here in the rural South; it always made me wonder how a city the size of NYC dealt with the deceased.

Ray Kurzweil predicts that "aging" will be solved very soon. So this problem will go away.

http://www.singularity.com

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