I get New York and Chicago and LA and Boston and New Orleans and San Francisco. These are cities that make sense. I even get the reasons why Las Vegas exists, perverse as they are.
But what possibly justifies the existence of Pheonix Arizona?
The Salt River used to be a real river before it was dammed and diverted, and stage coaches crossed it at Hayden's Ferry in what is now Tempe (a suburb of Phoenix), as well as others like the Verde. Additionally, there was a lot of irrigation infrastructure already built by the native peoples who were forcibly displaced by the settlers. Before it became a huge sprawl, temperatures weren't as ridiculous (concrete heat island effect).
Managed properly, it could be a less terrible place. Instead, all of the worst US urban planning techniques came together to make the hellscape that it is today.
Proper management would include picking up half the population of the southwest and moving them east.
Its not noticeably salty (I lost a bet), turns out it just runs over an area that has a bunch of salt deposits
I'm inclined to think something running over salt deposits makes it salty. Perhaps not noticeably to the human tongue, but did you see plants growing in it or near it as one is accustomed to seeing on land?
I mean, yeah? The intermitent part of the river down from the dam is very lush. Like even if there was much salt in it it can't be worse for plants then whatever got the Indian bend wash turned into a Superfund site. Those are like underground salt deposits, in mines.
There really is a Hexbear emoji for every situation. How do you guys memorize them all?
To serve as a ward against Phoenixes, used to be a nesting ground. That's why it's so hot there. All the buried Phoenix eggs.
A lot of the towns in the USA's West and Southwest that popped up because of resource locations (usually water) either lived or died because of the railways. Where I grew up they loaded an entire town onto logs and rolled the buildings to the new location because they wanted to be closer to the railway so they could have a station and get plugged into the supply network. As the frontier/homestead style of settlement dwindled and people started clustering in towns the rails became far more important for civic growth.
But we can still get mad at whatever idiot conductor that decided Phoenix was a place worth stopping. Could have nipped that one in the bud.
It's just, it's a desert. Like the indigenous people of the southwest had the good sense to carve their towns into the sides of cliffs or build big communal buidlings next to waterways with lots of ways to mitigate heat. But Pheonix is just... like if you built a whole bunch of Ohio suburbs in the middle of the Nejd.
Like the indigenous people of the southwest had the good sense to carve their towns into the sides of cliffs or build big communal buidlings next to waterways
Indigenous people were/are too dumb to figure out that sprawling concrete heat traps with golf courses in the middle of some hot ass desert is optimal design. Are you saying there might be something WRONG with Western Civilization?
It has good dry air to help with your tuberculosis!
no seriously those were some of the first citizens
Like Dallas and Jacksonville, they were small cities originally with a rail line going through it. Then in the age of the automobile, two things happened 1- you no longer needed rails 2 it was cheap land essentially :free-real-estate:. So Phoenix becomes this city that is open to whatever business will come because there’s nothing there. Instead of warehousing your stuff in California it was easier and cheaper to do it in Arizona. Then in the computer age, you got these Silicon Valley companies trying to figure out where to put things like server farms or a place to test their new products. California wasn’t good because energy prices are too high along with land and there’s some push back with certain products. One being the self driving car, which is why you see all these self driving cars being tested in Arizona. They want this because it’s better than admitting this shit shouldn’t exist in the middle of the dessert. But now you got these rich fucks in the Middle East who want to recreate this bullshit because they desperately need capital in the future when the oil runs out. It’s why i would say Dubai and Abu Dhabi are the three city’s spiritual successor. They are cities with nothing in them with as much culture as a McDonald’s restroom. I’ve visited all these cities in my life and can just say that there’s a reason why prostitution is such a big business in all these cities. But you couldn’t build a city like Phoenix anymore in the US. I hope it burns down in the impending climate crisis. :amerikkka:
See I've thought about this a bit to much and it doesn't make sense, Phoenix never had a real rail boom, Tucson was always the primary transportation hub in Arizona. Really the only thing Phoenix ever had going for it was agriculture.
The slaves servicing the retirees in scottsdale, glendale and paradise valley have to live somewhere
it's the nesting ground of the next, worse version of america. If we get nuked, all the energy diverts there and it blossoms into something truly awful.
