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By 2050 Around 75% of All the World's Population Will be Urban. Is This a Good Thing?

posted by janrinok on Friday July 10 2015, @05:56AM   Printer-friendly
from the depends-where-you-want-to-be dept.

Phoenix666 writes:

Population density, when done right, is a great tool to make people happier, give them more opportunities (social, economic, cultural, etc) and reduce their environmental footprint. A big part of it is that you can reduce the amount of pollution caused by transportation and housing, the two biggest resource sinks, with walkable neighborhoods and mass transit, as well as smaller dwellings (but the city becomes your living room and playground, so the actual "living area" can be much larger than for those living in some exurb in a McMansion...).

Design makes all the difference. Central Park is designed such that tens of thousands of people can be in it at once, but you never see more than a score. Nanjing Road in Shanghai is, however, Blade Runner. Or are there only two kinds, Country Mouse and City Mouse?

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  • (Score: 2) by Gravis on Friday July 10 2015, @06:41AM

    by Gravis (4596) on Friday July 10 2015, @06:41AM (#207301)

    Central Park is designed such that tens of thousands of people can be in it at once, but you never see more than a score.

    never? are you sure about that?

    http://wnpr.org/post/concert-jay-z-and-indias-leader-aims-end-poverty#stream/0 [wnpr.org]

    tomorrow's Global Citizen Festival in New York's Central Park. Some 60,000 people are expected to attend

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  • (Score: 2) by TheRaven on Friday July 10 2015, @09:15AM

    by TheRaven (270) on Friday July 10 2015, @09:15AM (#207340) Journal
    I can only assume that the person who wrote that has never been to NYC in the summer. I've only spent a few weeks there and on one visit there were so many people sunbathing in central park that it looked like a beach after the tide had gone out stranding millions of jellyfish. Even in the spring or autumn it's fairly common to see hundreds - far more than I can be bothered to count, anyway. Tens of thousands may not be an everyday event, but well over a thousand seems normal.
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    sudo mod me up

    • (Score: 3, Informative) by Phoenix666 on Friday July 10 2015, @12:54PM

      by Phoenix666 (552) on Friday July 10 2015, @12:54PM (#207398) Journal

      You're talking about the Great Lawn, which represents a fraction of the acreage of Central Park. That's where they hold the outdoor concerts because it's the only place where they could hold a concert (not including the dedicated performance spaces of SummerStage and Shakespeare in the Park). The topology of the entire rest of the park is not conducive. Prospect Park also has its Long Meadow and maybe the Nethermead, but those too represent only a fraction of the acreage. Vaux and Olmstead, who designed both parks, put a lot of effort into designing those spaces in such a way as to make them feel intimate and restful, places where you can get away from the crush of crowds. Their success in meeting that goal is widely touted.

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      Washington DC delenda est.