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.
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
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.
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
