Comment by hogFeast | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hogFeast | Hacker News Reader

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Most cities used to have all the industry located in the centre. It led to huge slums (because there was insufficient supply and massive demand) and everyone leaving the city when the slums got cleared.

Even if you have great transportation (Tokyo, London, New York), the commute is still pretty brutal.

The only real "solution" that was ever presented to this problem was to create smaller garden cities that would have their own industries...this never worked out because everyone had to be in the city (perhaps coincident with more service-based economies, manufacturing did move out of big cities).

It is an extremely hard problem (and to be blunt, the solution of most planners has been: make me emperor, I will allocate the resources...it is a huge political/social/everything problem) but remote working is a very legitimate solution...although the response of any company towards better conditions for workers is always suspicion (if the workers are happier, don't we lose...somehow?).

(An extremely nerdy comparison is with proto-industry in the early stages of the Industrial Revolution...a lot of the intermediate production in textiles was done in homes by, what we would call today, independent contractors...as the capital intensity of the textile industry increased and new technology was developed so...to put it bluntly...that you could employ children to do the work then you saw industry move into city centres and slums appear. But before this time, you had people working in their own homes and on their own machines, and it was far more decentralised...although these people were often localised geographically as there was a whole supply chain. Definitely indicates that things don't really need to be the way they are.)

>Most cities used to have all the industry located in the centre. It led to huge slums (because there was insufficient supply and massive demand) and everyone leaving the city when the slums got cleared.

I had this realization recently. Our entire society and work culture is structured around the laws of thermodynamics. In the industrial age, you had a mill or a forge, or a steam engine that was running 24/7 and necessitated high concentration of the workforce purely for reasons of thermodynamic efficiency of operating said equipment. Everyone had to "gather around the fire" so to speak because having disparate smaller works would be incredibly inefficient. In a world where information work now dominates, these constraints have become meaningless and are only perpetuated via institutional inertia.

Slum is a comment about the quality of the structures. That happens when your civilization is poor and a typical worker’s wages don’t buy much building material. Marginal structures are a thing in rural settings too, only there it’s “rustic” instead of “slum.”

Anyway, we are not that fledgling economy anymore. Contemporary high-rise apartments are really nice! Even the mass-produced 5+1s are perfectly comfortable and dignified homes.

No, it is a comment about overcrowding. The point is: there was no way to move lots of people into these areas to do work and maintain living standards. Buildings also cost labour to produce, now that society is rich, can everyone just buy infinite building materials?

Correct, the ones we have now that only rich people can buy and which exist during a shortage of housing. Assuming that this can just scale up to house millions of people makes no sense (and has never occurred anywhere, the reason why public transit systems are so important is because it has never been possible to economically build enough housing within cities).

This "assumption" is called Manhattan, where in fact 1.6 million people live in apartments, no more than a few blocks from a train that comes every few minutes. The economic conditions to reproduce this model are in several other places. The only reason it's not happening is our decision to ban it.

>the solution of most planners has been: make me emperor, I will allocate the resources...it is a huge political/social/everything problem

One thing that I've found absolutely fascinating is looking at the Soviet sphere when it comes to residential housing. A lot of housing got destroyed in WWII, and the soviets realized that the best way to house a lot of people in a hurry was to build apartment blocks. These blocks were designed to have everything one needed, shops, schools, etc, within reasonable walking distance. The commute to work was handled with public transport.

Now, I'm not saying everything was perfect, but I do find it interesting as an approach to residential design, mandating a mix of essential services within walking distance of housing is unheard of here in the US, and really only exists in cities that existed pre-car.

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