I dont really like using the term Desertification for urban sprawl and surburban blights, because its more similar to badlands. Harsh exposed cement and asphalt absorbing and radiating heat surrounded by houses that collectively blot out the wind. Water and rain dont seep into anything and instead rush away from the artifical rocks to the sewer and storm drain systems. The days are never cool and moist as the only thing moisturizing the air is lawns. When things die their corpses are shuttled away from the environment and thrown into the city dump, where their body's nutrients will never feed a tree or fungus or other animal. It is a bad land, where as deserts can be beautiful.
Badlands are probably more descriptively correct, but what's the term for the process of land degrading into it? I love deserts as a natural landscape but in this context am drawing from the idea of food deserts. There are big swaths of urban areas where similarly alienated humans have to travel similar distances for accessible nutritious food. Suburban desertification would extend that same process to the larger variety of animals trying to coexist in the space.
I think we're going to have to make a term for it, especially as the suburbs become depopulated in the face of post-industrialization. I'm not feeling extremely poetic or artful rn so I dont think I could make a term like that, but maybe something like suburosion or anthrosion.
I dont really like using the term Desertification for urban sprawl and surburban blights, because its more similar to badlands. Harsh exposed cement and asphalt absorbing and radiating heat surrounded by houses that collectively blot out the wind. Water and rain dont seep into anything and instead rush away from the artifical rocks to the sewer and storm drain systems. The days are never cool and moist as the only thing moisturizing the air is lawns. When things die their corpses are shuttled away from the environment and thrown into the city dump, where their body's nutrients will never feed a tree or fungus or other animal. It is a bad land, where as deserts can be beautiful.
Badlands are probably more descriptively correct, but what's the term for the process of land degrading into it? I love deserts as a natural landscape but in this context am drawing from the idea of food deserts. There are big swaths of urban areas where similarly alienated humans have to travel similar distances for accessible nutritious food. Suburban desertification would extend that same process to the larger variety of animals trying to coexist in the space.
I think we're going to have to make a term for it, especially as the suburbs become depopulated in the face of post-industrialization. I'm not feeling extremely poetic or artful rn so I dont think I could make a term like that, but maybe something like suburosion or anthrosion.