Cities

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anon (not verified)
Cities

what do you think will happen to cities? do you think there will be a wave of white flight/wealth flight? will cities be more out of control?
corona has already shown signs of prompting richer people to leave cities and probably a lot of businesses that can function without having people coming in physically might strip down or leave behind their brick and mortar presence. there might be a bunch of vacant shit as a result. desert and military analysts are both talking about the growth of cities creating things that feel more uncontrollable from a governmental perspective, though not necessarily outside of capital. with the whole smart city thing coming up and the trend of yuppies basing a part of their identity on being into urban life (bars, proximity to prole shit, local food) will that keep the "decline" in check? longer term climate change seems like it would make crime in cities go up as shit get worse.

anon (not verified)
what's been termed in

what's been termed in urbanist cricles as "retrofitting suburbia" will end up happening.
some sprawling metropolitan areas will become more densely populated by housing and retrofitted to accommodate more multi-use businesses. 5g network will make telework viable from even more remote, and affordable, locations. cities will rather demolish "vacant" (or occupied by "homeless" people) and unkempt buildings than let them be repurposed by lefties, except for a few cases which will happen if they're lucky, privileged and they play their cards "right" (implying concessions or submission). an aging population makes for less younger people to occupy many places, plus availability and concentration of those willing across large cities which are far apart. gentrification implies the poor have been displaced, so the yuppies could move in. if the yuppies then move out, who's left? there exists plenty of ghost towns and abandoned walmarts, yet people don't flock to them, they don't find them as appealing as informally occupying some piece of rural land and setting up there, calling out less attention to themselves and staying there longer before anyone bats an eye.

on the whole, it will not be perceived as a big shift, or at least not as big as the urbanization (migration from rural to urban, and the transformation of rural into urban) of the past centuries has been, which has had existential consequences for life on earth on the whole.

anon (not verified)
oh, and for sure, property

oh, and for sure, property values will drop, and shift accordingly.
expect another bubble to burst. a lot of people sitting on houses speculating.
since investments are gambles, some will win. some will lose.

anon (not verified)
shities

'the growth of cities creating things that feel more uncontrollable from a governmental perspective'

???

cities are the state''s favoured living conditions. how do you think so many people ended up living in them?

anon (not verified)
that's correct. some people

that's correct. some people even see cities as indistinct from civilization. but apart from that, there is some truth to the statement that you're quoting.

cities were historically much smaller and less populated than the sprawling and towering mega-cities, megalopolises and conurbations we have going on now. originally, cities weren't a centrally planned and designed thing, you can look at the haphazard aspect of the footprint of the more antique and original parts of cities (were old enough and where still preserved) vs the modern and contemporary parts that were built recently.

rather than tearing them down and start from the bottom up in one go, as the naive aspiring technocrats of modernist architects and urbanist of the mid of last century proposed to do, they'll make gradual changes to make it easier and more efficient for them to govern, like they've always tried to do: the "Haussmannization", the Robert Mosesing, and older and newer examples. in the end, their modernist dystopias have been continously built and their vision remains intact for the most part.

historically fire has been a weakness of cities, with being a bunch of flammable stuff piled together and what not, but if things are spaced out and well surveyed, the fire can be contained before it spreads and ever be prevented before it happens (literally and figuratively). but spreading out things is also inefficient in terms of transport and fuels.
technological improvements in communication infrastructure, mainly roads, vehicles, the internet, etc. have made it more efficient to project power over vast empires.
those with power will always look for ways of innovating and improving what they're doing, or pay the consequences. making infrastructure resilient to "natural disasters", and the economy, to pandemics, and terrorism, and other threats to "national security.

those fighting power are pretty much fucked at this point. luddites made a point of breaking machines, but at this point, and onwards, maybe the human cogs in the machines are weakest link in the chain. Ted took this as meaning that he should murder those people crucial for the maintaining and improvement of this system and its infrastructure, every single person is involved in reproducing and maintaining it. Many eagerly cheering for it and enjoying its excesses so fully as to have no regrets. This last part answers the "how do you think so many people ended up living in them?" as much as the state's initiative.

as for what to do, the of meme version of Desert and Blessed is Flame are often shared, and for some they suffice as answers of the attitudes and the practices to adopt. some resort to committing to tend to wild habitats or to rewilding wherever they are, and part of that is being vegan for some

but for more than half of the world's population, "proper"cities will remain their habitat for the next decades and "the built environment" (whatever flavor of civ you got) is increasingly the main environment humans get to live in, to explore and get to know, or even be familiar with.

anon (not verified)
cities and civ

> but for more than half of the world's population, "proper"cities will remain their habitat for the next decades and "the built environment" (whatever flavor of civ you got) is increasingly the main environment humans get to live in, to explore and get to know, or even be familiar with.

In places like the UK even the least densely populated areas, far away from London or Edinburgh etc, still function as cities. England is essentially one giant city, with the occasional pocket of gated forest interrupting the sprawl. In this context, the idea of 'desertion' seems nigh impossible, unless the British author of Desert means desert Britain for, say, southern Europe or the Americas.

anon (not verified)
i'm not trying to come off

i'm not trying to come off pro-city. rather that it's possible that as cities keep growing there will be (unevenly) parts that fall out of or push off government control. that's not to say authority and civilization will leave certain neighborhoods, just that the whole mega-city thing has gov authority shook as they fear being stretched too thin, dealing with more informal economy, class disparity, terror, whatever. basically that very large cities can be difficult to control by the state in some ways.

anon (not verified)
Understood, that’s seems

Understood, that’s seems accurate to me.

Another related thing that’s interesting to me is how the government agencies and the military (and other sectors) play up their vulnerabilities as scaremongering to get funding and whip-up support. Sometimes it seems they’re overpowered as it is, though obviously not omnipotent nor omniscient.

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