https://www.reddit.com/r/UrbanHell/comments/pyavv4/evergrandes_handiwork/
Some cool people in the comments, and some unironic murican suburbs apologists :stalin-gun-1: :dna:
oh boy the brainworms in the comments.
lOoKs LiKe It WaS bUiLt In A sWaMp YiKeS
haha yea! imagine building a city in a swamp and having an eternal battle to uphold the infrastructure and then not do shit about it. couldnt be me (houston, florida) :agony-shivering:
You build cities in the swamp because you don't want to waste arable land. A ton of cities are built on swamps
All I can tell you is it’d be nice if they did something about the flooding :deeper-sadness:
China's doing sponge cities that are pretty neat. They're not perfect, but definitely a start.
Wow. Now that's a meme I've not heard in a long time. A long time.
Wish we didn't. Wetlands are incredibly important for the world's ecology.
San Fran is built on a landfill, which is why a recently completed, billion+ dollar building is visibly leaning towards one side
California garbage? :astronaut-2: :astronaut-1: Always has been.
California is a beautiful paradise destroyed and corrupted by capitalist extraction and neoliberal economics.
Couldn't agree more.
Fucking love California. Unfortunately, so do rich people. As a result, California becomes "chic" and they want to kick the poors out since they want the whole ass state all to themselves.
I was born in one of the highest cost of living (compared to median income) places in the world. I'll be damned if they get me to move. I may be an anarchist but I have a lot of sympathy for Maoism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Tower_(San_Francisco)#Sinking_and_tilting_problem ?
[other buildings on the street] have pushed piles directly into the bedrock 200 feet (61 m) below.
Prolly shoulda done that then.
Mexico city has at least 470 more years than DC, and back then apparently it made a lot of sense to build a city in the middle of a lake cuz easily defensible from attacks, which later still made sense for the spanish, and later it was too big and significant to ditch so...
Anyways, a bird eating a snake on top of a nopal told the mexicas to build the city there so they had no choice.
Edit: the bird told them to build the city in Chapultepec (a hill) but other people got angry and ran them off to the lake, so birds are still totally correct.
It wasn't a bad choice at all; it was simply adapted successfully to its environment. Tenochtitlan had buildings on the high ground, a bunch of bridges and stilts connecting the stuff above water, and lots of chinampas (floating gardens) everywhere. As a result it was relatively stable and not very flood-prone.
Mexico City drained the Texcoco swamps, and ever since then, it has struggled with both flooding and damage from seismic activity.
But the pyramid next to el Zocalo was the most important place and it wasn't high ground, every few decades they had to re-coat the sunking pyramid into a new pyramid. It has like seven layers and the inner most is almost at a 90 ° angle cuz it sunked sideways
They weren't perfect, and it's definitely arguable that it had sprawled larger than what made sense for islands in a lake. It's all still categorically better than draining the wetland to then build conventionally on.
I mean for sure, Just a goofy pot and kettle situation from Americans when a good percentage of our cities, incl the 4th largest one, are in swamps
How many tens of thousands of people can live in this picture? Yet if you give Americans the same piece of land, they would insist on building just 400-500 "luxury" tract homes on a half acre each with some name like "Eagle Ridge Estates", a golf course, and maybe a small commercial area that people want to pretend is like a little main street but requires a buttload of parking right in front.
I can't understand why "developers" don't just build dense main-street-like developments since that's way more lucrative than single family homes.
"Oh but zoning laws", yeah those laws would dissapear in a second if a capitalist really wanted.
I'm not saying "ha! every one of those billionares is very stupid at their own game", I just don't know what's the explanation.
It can be done though, I might mock the Green Square developments in Sydney as being shiny sub-par million-dollar apartments used as speculative capital sinks and emergency boltholes for Chinese millionaires, but to the extent normal people live in them the city council really have built a walkable, bikeable (all the way into the city!) area with good transport and excellent amenities from basically scratch.
i know what you mean. maybe i'm not clever enough to see the logic, but i've started to believe the developers are just stuck, mentally, and cannot conceptualize anything except minor tweaks to the post-war suburban explosion. or maybe, as Big Rich Dolts living in single family homes on big lots with drivers and cars, they have to believe that's how everyone wants to live, so they create smaller versions of it for us to aspire to.
there might also be something (maybe this isn't true), but the investment cost of builders for small, single family homes, is less than like 3-5 story, mixed use higher density, in terms of material and build quality. obviously, that is changing with the relaxation of building standards to let 5 over 1s exist, and i'll be damned if i am not seeing tons of those pop up in a short period of time. but, again, those are like cheap/shitty apartments. i think builders can't even conceptualize or (maybe) are risk avoidant about building high quality dense housing, because why do that when you can balloon frame a bunch of shitty mcmansions on the relatively cheap.
Had to unsubscribe from there. It's either a picture of a city from up high or a picture of a Chinese city.
Sometimes a suburb will sneak through and the entirety of the comments is just people screaming in their defense about how free they are.
they all look the same unlike the homeless tents in San Francisco, each one of them is unique and special
A classic example function over form. The amount of people that can be housed here is a lot more than some american suburban nightmare
also its form is good, it looks nice. Americans can only think in terms of their individual house, never the whole picture of where everyone lives.
Can’t say I agree, it really is not particularly aesthetically appealing imo. But that doesn’t matter lmao, what matters is that can efficiently house thousands upon thousands of people and ensure that there is actually living space left in the city and that everything is within reasonable distance.
I live in the suburbs where the individual homes look nicer, but I have to walk 20 minutes to even get to the next bus station. Fuck that.
Yeah, sure, I want my towers neo-gothic with heaps of bits on them too, but in terms of Neo-Brutalism/Late-Futurism this is well balanced and composed, as well as being quite livable.
kind of proved what I said, your individual house looks better but the whole block of suburban fake lawns probably looks like shit from a distance
Concrete wasteland
lol what amount of green that is there is 400% more green than in my city
Here's another angle where you can see between the buildings better. its not like a forest but there's definitely some thought paid to green spaces between the buildings. there's a nice walk way.
and there appears to be some small walkable markets or something on either side
That's literally a comment I saw:
"gee those apartments are surely not-empty, just look at all the cars in the streets /s "
Affordable Housing surrounded by parks and foot trails = Concrete Waste land
City of parking lots surrounded by network of houses surrounded by roads and sterile lawns = Suburban Paradise
When America copy-pastes building designs like this, each building houses just a single family and their roads wind around aimlessly for miles
I believe I can decrypt this code. Urban = buildings and Hell = China. Therefore urban hell is China buildings.
There's literally like huge ass parks in between each row, wtf they talking about it looks nice, I bet the view from the roofs are pretty sweet too
The idea of arcologies is really cool to me. Seems like they could be the next step after cities like these.
This looks great, green spaces, heaps of water, walkable. But oh no, building look same!
