Books Sep 18, 2013 at 4:00 am

The Hottest Ideas and Thinkers in Contemporary Urbanism Are in Cities Are Good for You

Comments

1
I like living in a city. And one of my favorite things about living in the city is taking a quality jaunt ount to visit the countryside every now and again. Not a big gun nut or anything. Just enjoy getting my gravel road on occasionally so I can suck some fresh air into my gills and maybe indulge my inner-lake poet out there.
2
Shirtcocker: driving on any gravel road - even just a gravel driveway - definitely makes you a dyed-in-the-wool gun-nut. Period.

Someone had to tell you.

3
“Urban thinker”, “urbanist”, “urbanism”
Please. The level of self aggrandizement dripping from the overuse of these terms compels me to get a mop.

". . . revealed the astonishing truth that living in New York is a more environmentally friendly lifestyle than living in the suburbs or even the countryside," . . ."The city suddenly became not a destroyer of nature but possibly its best hope. . . Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier."

And, paradoxically, as cities get larger they become increasingly dependent external inputs for all aspects of survival they also lose the basic understanding of what it takes to provide those resources.

Oh, and did you know that if you live in a rural environment and start doing the things for yourself that you are more likely to get injured by doing those things? Wow, we all better go live in the big cities and become urban thinkers so that we too can revel in our own magnificence.

And concerning the correlation of hunting to guns to suicide. I am sure the author was not suggesting that the fact that guns are around causes someone to commit suicide as he was very careful to frame it as “deaths from suicide”. As always , the devil is in the details. It is not surprising that if you have access to firearms your attempt to kill yourself will be exceptionally more successful. Nothing new here. Go about your business.
5
Mr. Mudede --
As the token heterosexual male at this august weekly journal, I find it ironic that you happen to be the one working double-time to both fellate the Landscape Urbanists (hey there, Edward G., D. Owen) and their comprehensiveely implausible green-city hyperdream, while also issuing reach-arounds to The Stranger's predominant audience - preening, tight-jean wearing, tattooed narcissist hipster types - for being so eco-aware and reducing their carbon footprint by choosing to consume their lattes, iGadgets, and other purchased self-identifiers in a high-density setting.
6
"We leave the chapter with a sense of the sublime chaos of this fascinating and complex social system. To look on Dharavi is to see a massive engine for the transformation of humans into a brand-new race."

Is anyone buying this bullshit? It's a fucking slum. At most, it's an engine for the warehousing of human misery. As for "the transformation of humans into a brand new race" - what the hell are you even talking about? Are you guys having a "Weekend at Bernie's" moment at the Editor's Desk, or something?
7
having little money in rural India sucks, too
8
Good point. Where the underlying oeuvre of most urban-focused rhetoric seems both to generate from and find itself explicitly tied to cyclical processes of commerce and trade, the sensory system of your typical country mouse is conversely compelled to align itself more presciently within the ebb and flow of our natural world. If the city is brain, then countryside is body.
9
what a piece of garbage posing as intellectual "thought".

I HATE cities - I'm 64 and have traveled the world and I've yet to find a city I would want to spend more than 48 hours in.

Cities are un-natural attempts by marxism to remove people from their natural, God-given environment.

Please wait...

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