[kkfx]

I was living, now circa 8 years ago, in a big city, now I'm living in the french Alps and I have exactly ZERO intention to come back in a prisons named city.

USA suburbs for my little US experience have a simple issue: they are residential ONLY. Here we have sparse homes AND commerce of various kind, in few km/miles from my home there are a handful of other homes, but also a small supermarket, a blacksmith shed, a brico-like shop (semi-finished wood like panels, lumbers etc and metal products, paint, ...) a multi-service small center (from tobacco shop to parcel shipping and so on), as a result we move of course, but much less than in the USA.

In cities on contrary instead of living in nature, moving in nature, we commute between big buildings used for less than half a day, to seed physical ads (shop windows) in between them, wasting a gazillion of natural resources, being unable to evolve due to density, being in a thermal mass island to augment the effects of climate changes, having waterproofed so killed, a vast area of soil, created subsidence problems, disrupted the natural water cycle for a much bigger then the city radius, ... to the point nearby some coastal cities sharks get too much cocaine from humans.

Dear city-lovers: in the past cities was NEEDED, not a good place anyway but a needed one, because of scarce, slow and expensive logistics, paperwork who need offices, absence of modern TLCs etc, nowadays cities have grown big enough to being unmaintainable, ghettos for poor and desperate slaves of the finance capitalism who NEED CITIES to keep up, the sole, without any other purpose. Did you now the Green New Deal? Well, allow me, since I've built a new home, with p.v., a bit of energy storage, BEV etc to tell a thing: the Green New Deal work. But work ONLY in small buildings, single family homes, hens etc. NOT in cities. Oh, yes you can theoretically build new cities, the Saudis knows a bit with their failed Neom project, failed like the ancient Fordlandia or modern Arkadag, Prospera, Innopolis, ... smart-lagers for citizens-inmates to be exploited by giants, so costly we can't even build a first generation of smart cities, while we can and we build and have already built countless new green new deal compliant homes. Cities are modern mainframe, needed by the cloud+mobile world witch is a fragile and distopic one.

To correct suburbs just buy and destroy some homes there if the density it's too much and insert some sheds with various shops, and you'll discover how is easy to live with them. Than you'll discover again the strong-town classic physical work from home with the barber shop in the basement and the barber's home on top because hey, we have hairs to be cut, teeth to treated and so on whenever we live, so instead of having X dentist in a dense area of a city we have the same number of dentists spread as we are spread. The sole who loose are the giants because in single family homes we own and we are naturally pushed to own instead of rent, there is room for LOCAL economy while giants struggle to be spread and so on. If you want a clean planet remember cities are polluted and incompatible with nature, humans are part of the nature and integrated in it live well.

[timeon]

I do not think you would be happy if suburbs came to French Alps.

[kkfx]

They can't came unless major revolutions happen because the country is not organized like "dense cities, vast residential-only suburbs and the countryside", France compared to USA it's much smaller so while not that dense compared to the rest of the EU there is no room to grow big cities and endless suburbs, beside that most french love to be outside (the opposite for the part of the USA I know) so they love to have small farms, schools with nature around, marching under the trees etc, they do NOT like the "artificial nature" of a suburb not much the artificial environment of a dense city.

The point though it's simply that USA suburbs could easily became much better simply adding a bit of commerce, while dense cities can't be made livable without redesigning so rebuilding them. In costs terms improving a USA-style suburb is damn cheap even in an era of recession and scarce resources, quick and done could create a new-old-local-economy that's essentially the "Strong Town" economic model, minus the density because with today tech we need more space. Rebuild a city... Good luck... The Saudis (who are stuffed of money) have tried ONE city alone and they essentially give up. IMF in Turkmenistan funded Arkadag, a substantial failure even if the country is rich in resources and a dictatorship strong enough to do pretty anything without much opposition in between. Now try to imaging something "a bit bigger" like NY...

Long story short: in the past cities was a NEEDED nightmare, full of pollution, issues, but full also of services, of knowledge, factories, ... the core of any economy in any country, the place where innovation happen, decisions was made and so on. With modern logistics (starting from the '80s) it became cheaper moving factories away where land was cheaper and there was no local constraint to expansions or costs for contraction when needed, with modern remote work the office is not needed anymore because "paper works" are now digital, do not demand local physical presence etc so cities have lost essentially their last purposes. They are now just needed by big finance that to fund itself need consumer depending on anything, not owning nothing to be kept in line with social score and prices. We can't re-create the old "small town" model, simply because today jobs and tech demand something else, while we can re-create a distributed model apt to the present world, able to cope with climate, social and technological change using not too much resources to be made.

Do you really think an NT tower can implement the green new deal heating, cooling and functioning on p.v.? Do you think we can even made so much needed steel to build new, well insulated, Sun shielded etc ones with renewables? On the other side we can cut trees and produce panels, lumbers etc for small homes on renewable, modern architecture scale well for all climate, some design element changes, like the thickness of the insulation, the elements to shadow the Sun in summer etc, but the overall design it's the same from poles to the tropics, heating and cooling, ventilation systems as well, so we have the largest industrial scale possible, we still can't be only on renewables on scale, factories consume still too much, producing steel so far need coke and so on, but we can made a big step toward general electrification is this model, we can't in cities. Yes, you can electrically heating a '60s tower, but we can't produce enough electricity for all buildings if they all demand that much and we can't anyway evolve an existing building more than a bit. In single family homes adding p.v. is very easy in nearly all buildings where it's reasonable to install p.v., placing a big hot water tank for thermodynamic heating it's not much an issue as well, recharging and EV at home similarly and so on. On contrary you can't do much in a condo without rebuild it in most cases. That's the real point.

We witness a big pro-urban campaign backed by big money because big money need smart cities, but the rest of the humanity need something else and actually we can't even build smart cities for all while we probably can build accommodations for all in a spread model, not so comfy for all perhaps, but still enough to live and evolve.