Re. Sonja and how the food gets there:
What you said, is about how food gets from the entrance of the highrise to the apartments IN the highrise. I was asking about how the food gets TO the highrises. From the farms, to the market or store shelves, to the front door of the highrise (or whatever building the eater of the food lives in).
Our food supply largely moves by truck, at cross country distances, and the difference in total truck miles to city, suburban, and rural destinations, is minimal.
The primary added impact of suburbs and rural is of individuals driving to the store for resupply. But the country mice and suburban mice both have more space in their nests to store food, than the city mice do, so they end up making fewer trips for food. Country mice also tend to make food shopping a social activity with neighbors, so the trips that are made are often car-pooled.
The way to get the cars out of the equation is by having a sufficient number of grocery stores within true walking distance to homes. That means a couple of blocks at most, and real grocery stores, not "convenience" stores. That's the development pattern in Manhattan. New York City also has grocery delivery from most of those stores via pedal-powered cargo tricycles (these are even manufactured locally).
One thing New York City doesn't have a whole lot of, is solar power, because a concrete jungle of highrises is also a truly crappy landscape for solar, and one couldn't generate enough power on those rooftops to even begin to provide for the actual usage in the apartments below.
Discussions of sustainability and density all too easily succumb to one of the fatal flaws of the Western system of logic, "the fallacy of the excluded middle," where the choices are "bloated suburbs" on one hand, and "high-density highrises" on the other, with nothing in between, when in fact there are plenty of design options in between.
-G.
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On 13-06-11-Tue 6:55 PM, Sonja Trauss wrote:
HOW DOES THE FOOD GET TO THE HIGHRISES!??!?! If only .... People could .... Hold groceries ... In ... i don't know .... Their arms?!?!?! While standing in some kind of box .... That moves vertically. It's all just too hard to imagine. Surely there is no place on earth where people live in high rise apartment buildings.
On Tuesday, June 11, 2013, Jehan Tremback wrote:
Are you telling us that high density urban housing is not more efficient than sprawled out rural housing? Keep in mind that the vast majority of people will not be subsistence farming. Also, as it relates to the Bay, people are not going to be going back to the land because of SF rent. They will move to Walnut Creek and sit in traffic for 2 hours a day, burning gas.
-Jehan
On Tue, Jun 11, 2013 at 6:01 PM, GtwoG PublicOhOne <g2g-public01@att.net> wrote:
Hi Jehan;-)
Ahh, the good ol' city mouse vs. country mouse arguement. If we avoid ad-homs this should be fun.
First of all, a-priori generalizations are a-priori invalid. Individual ecological impact depends on lifestyle and employment, which vary widely for both city and country.
One of the largest impacts is commuting by automobile. A country mouse who's a telecommuter will have a zero commuting impact. A city mouse whose workplace isn't served by public transport will most likely end up driving to work. That comparison, in and of itself, falsifies your generalization.
Are you willing to argue publicly that all the city mice whose places of employment aren't served by public transport, or who work late/overnight shift and live or work in places where taking public transport is overtly dangerous, should quit their jobs and seek employment elsewhere?
Re. smaller apartments: Can you operationalize your variables? How small? Have you ever drawn a floorplan for one? I've drawn plenty of floorplans, down to 160 square feet, and I'll gladly show them to you any time we have a chance to get together.
Re. highrises: Can you operationalize those variables too? How does the water get in, how does the sewage get out, and where does the money come from to rip & replace the existing underground infrastructure for that purpose? And what do you do with a 10- or 20- story building full of people, after the expected 7.0+ on the Hayward or San Andreas takes out the power grid, water mains, and sewer mains, for a period of weeks to months? (We'll assume the building remains standing, though that can't be taken for granted.)
Also about highrises, what do the children do at playtime?, where does the food come from to feed all those people in the high-density highrises?, and how does the food get there? Who has ownership? Who has control? Who makes the rules?
Sweeping generalizations are easy; designing in detail and walking the talk isn't.
In the next round I'll describe what I do about water, electricity, gasoline, and refuse.
Cheers-
-G.
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On 13-06-11-Tue 9:34 AM, Jehan Tremback wrote:
"Also there's a difference between a 160-square-foot house you build for yourself on land you and your friends own, and a 160-square-foot cell in an apartment complex that some developer builds as a means of extracting more money from the tenants."
If you want to go out to the country and build a house on cheap land, that's your choice. You will be damaging the environment with your inevitable automobile use. If you want to live in the city, as many of us do, you will have to deal with the fact that many other people do as well.
There are 2 ways to get more people onto a smaller piece of land-
1. Smaller apartments (I put tenants subdividing apartments in this category as well)2. Replace 1950's style suburban houses with high rises.
These facts are completely independent of whatever system of government and economy.