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Comment by richliss | Hacker News Reader

As someone who grew up in a city that did this, it was a terrible idea then and remains so. Town planners who like brutalism and everything modern are insane. Just look at Birmingham, England - they knocked down beautiful buildings to put up brutalist eyesores to then knock down brutalist eyesores and replace them with a different type of modern architecture that will look awful in 20 years.

There's a reason that people want to live in Bath.

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They should tear it down and rewrite it all in Rust.

give the people who will live and work in the space ability to locally control the design, as espoused by Christopher Alexander.

that means getting the end users out in the field and teaching them how to build or customise the system to meet their needs using simpler and cheaper traditional materials. maybe perl, javascript, wordpress. maybe excel. maybe bash & cron. smother those high modernist RSI-inducing SaaS user interfaces with a layer of malleable user-written robotic process automation.

High modernists are like the somewhat narcissistic recluse programmer who thinks everything is crap. They shut themselves in and rewrite everything in their own superior paradigm without bothering to look at any real world use case or ask anyone anything. Then they're surprised that nobody uses what they built.

As a (software) developer and (building) architect I like this analogy a lot.

"dude. i know that's not what it's supposed to do, but actually it's better. it's a feature, not a bug. no, no. it's not shitty, and no i'm not refactoring it and neither are you. it works better and they'll never be able to fire us. it's like jane jacobs and shit. leave it alone. the bits are happy."

haha, great comment. This whole thread is full of people who enjoyed Seeing Like a State loving the discussion

this module is a thriving, multi-use community of interacting concerns and responsibilities. yes, it would be more legible to central administrators like us if we evicted all the requirements and implementation details, paved it over, then redeveloped it into a high modernist Corbusian hexagonal microservices architecture. but truly, who would want to live or work inside such a bleak module structure, where instead of simply nipping downstairs to share surplus resources with unrelated business logic in the parent stack frame, you would have to traverse through endless tiers of serialization, transit, deserialization & be subjected to endless authoritarian checkpoints for authorisation by central authorities?

I think it’s less about the specific architectural style and more about if the building itself is designed well. There are both good and bad “modern” buildings. For example, I think the Seagram building is beautiful, but I don’t like a lot of the buildings that ripped off its style. Most buildings I see attributed to a “modernist” style are actually just cheap ugly buildings.

Furthermore, when we see old buildings there is a lot of survival bias going on.

Turns out that people who dislike brutalist living silos are often also the same people who think we have a housing crisis. You can't have everyone live in Bath unless you demolish it and put Pruitt-Igoe 2.0 onto it. And as you've correctly pointed out: what then would be the attraction of any desirable place?

The problem is too many people.

The question is, what horrible dystopian method are we gonna use for those who insist on breeding like rats?

Forced sterilization? Containment ghettos? Euthanasia squads?...

Yes, scary. But so are megablocks.

You should take the first step and kill yourself. Then we can talk about what others should do.

The first step is to practice a little self-restraint with the baby-making, obviously.

Just telling people to exercise self-restraint as a means to reduce fertility rates has historically never worked anywhere.

Name a single developed country where to high birth rates are an issue? What? You can’t?

Well usa is getting pretty packed. Visit any big city and it's all giant concrete hives and special roads so we can crawl over each other.

The US is 185th of 248th on Wikipedia's list of countries and dependencies by population density [1], and the US' fertility rate is well below replacement at less than 1.8 [2] (replacement is ca. 2.1), and hasn't exceeded replacement since 1972, which would imply US population growth is down to immigration.

Your statement is also pretty nonsensical. If you visit the highest density spots in a country, then it's naturally going to be high density, and that tells you absolutely nothing about the overall density of the country.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependen...

[2] https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/fert...

From your comments I think I understand your feelings on this issue, but please understand that you're ignoring reality and getting upset about something that isn't even happening. The population is dropping in many developed countries and fertility rates are plummeting. The world with fewer humans you seem to seek is already happening.

Bravo, you'll make Malthus and eugenics peddlers proud...

Then offer a better solution.

Because humans stacked 1000 per acre emitting rivers of sewage is pretty bad too. If it wasn't so normal it would be hellish.

Why would I offer a solution to a problem that is non-existent. The world will have less population by the end of the century.

You would make a more cogent point if instead you were asking about policies improving the quality of life of future people instead of defending genocidal ideas. Sadly you don't.

First you tell me that my horrible solutions are horrible. Then you tell me that there isn't a problem. Your end seems to be the unreasonable one.

Your solutions are bad because they are trying to solve problems that don't exist.

Before you start on a solution, understand your requirements and existing state of the art

The question is rather, what (possibly horrible, dystopian) methods will we use to prevent a demographic crisis as fertility rates are plummeting most places in the world, as most projections now suggest population decline will start within a century.

Turns out the method that have worked the best against "those who insist on breeding like rats" is to treat them humanely, reduce childhood mortality, increase education and provide a more stable economic environment - do that and fertility rates plummet - with or without additional pressure like China's infamous one-child policy.

As it stands, China is set to face decline within a decade or two despite having dropped their previous draconian measures to reduce fertility rates - their fertility rates are now slowly increasing, but they're still far below replacement. India is set to see decline ~3-4 decades later - they're now about at replacement, with fertility still dropping, but there's a lag of a few of decades from the decrease in fertility to population decline. Sub-saharan Africa will likely be last, but even those countries are seeing declining birth rates (e.g. even Niger, which has one of, if not the, highest fertility rates in the world is at around 6.6 births per woman now, but the rate peaked at 7.9 in 1983 and has been declining consistently since, currently at a rate of about 1.3% a year; UN projections suggest they'll reach ~4 by 2050, and around ~2.3, slightly above replacement, around year 2100)

As a result, expect countries to start competing for immigrants, and to start increasingly desperate attempts to get people to have more children. E.g. China has gone from it's one-child policy to allowing three [1] in an attempt to stem the coming decline, with only little effect so far, and you can expect China will see additional policy changes to try to drive the fertility rates back up.

[1] https://www.eastasiaforum.org/2021/06/07/chinas-declining-po...

Education of girls and young women. That's it. That's the biggest ROI.

This is a solved problem - provide education and empowerment for women. This is why advanced societies are seeing flat birth rates (indeed often declining).

Why not build more Baths next to the old one instead?

The Chinese did that. They ended up with still-overcrowded megacities and completely empty "new towns", which often featured fake, "beautifully" old architecture. It turns out that people don't just want affordable housing or nice surroundings, they also want pre-existing culture, something banlieus often lack.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Under-occupied_developments_in...

I don’t know about building codes in Britain, but in almost all of the US it would be illegal to build a carbon copy of the beloved older cities we have, because huge roads, parking lots, and setbacks are all mandatory.

And of course, these short-sighted car-centric ideas are all part of the problem.

In North America there are planners and activists trying to change this[1] & world-wide, planners can achieve walkable, people-centric urban planning [2].

[1] - https://www.strongtowns.org

[2] - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC0intLFzLaudFG-xAvUEO-A

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