This is an average landscape in America

I always see America, rightfully so, criticized for its urban design. But it's not like a lot of Europe is any better. Mainland anyways, isn't as bad. But the British Isles aren't criticized nearly enough. So much of England at least is just pavement.

For as terrible as America is, Britain has long completely fucking annihilated its past local ecosystem as well.

I grew up in suburbia.

It's bad, but not any worse than a choking polluted, noisy industrial environment or a culture-less, poor, backward rural area. Basically anywhere in our society is gonna suck.

Go to bed you retarded jungle monkey.

In fact as the British Isle's ecosystems begin to die off rapidly over the past century, alien species are making their home in its urban centers and killing off its original ecosystem

It deserves to be discussed tbh. Britain has always been worse about paving over everything and building it up.

Thanks user.

Come to Maine.

This.

They are not as offensively utilitarian in the way they go about it and they at least have the excuse of being an Island nation. The same goes for Japan. If you want to about countries other than America, look at Russia. They have more land, less people and capital to develop it with yet the environmental damage is completely out of proportion.

This is what a neighborhood looks like in India.

Doesn't most of humanity live in super cities now? No wonder we're so fucked.

Yeah, you have a point, I lived in Ireland and as much as I enjoyed the place, the outskirts of every town are fucking littered with suburbs filled with standardized two stories houses that all look the same. I remember getting lost more than once visiting people because I coudn't tell one street from the other.
That said I think we Euros have the excuse that at least here it's not a continent wide thing.

You gonna get me a job that pays enough to live there?

Thats just sandpape- …Holy fuck

I'm just saying if the criticism being leveled here is urbanization, Britain's density is far more impressive than America's. And the problems associated here would be true for there as well, if not more so. America has a lot more breathing space than European posters here give credit for. I mean even California has a lot more wooded area than you would think. I'm just saying Britain is the hell OP should be imagining. Everything is paved.

Maine is not that expensive fyam…

You fucking mong, density isn't so much the problem, it's the artificial nature of American suburbs and the stifling conformity and unnaturalness it perpetuates. Learn to fucking read an OP.

You're acting like this isn't a problem Britain has. It is.

As someone who lives in Britain, I can tell you that only the newer shit is even close to as bad as American shit.

Take your autistic screeching elsewhere please.

I'm not the person you're replying to, but OP's question was-

The key words are psyche and artificial environments.

Homogeneous suburbia and the even more densely packed Britain are both equally artificial, so what is left to examine is the psyche of someone who lives in these environments. Living in very close proximity to your neighbors in an artificial environment is indeed something that impacts the psyche. Suffice to say, Hooochie's point is not off base. You, on the other hand, added nothing to the thread by sperging out. Please think a little harder before posting next time.

How is it not as bad. You just said "No it isn't."

I grew up In a similar area.

God, no.

I just can't to see people who clearly know nothing about something make such false assumptions when I'm surrounded by proof that you're wrong every day. I think it is you who needs to think before posting such utter bullshit. Don't get surprised when you're called out on it.

Idiot tea slurping inbred retard.

You've never done much lab-work with animals, have you, user?

European countries don't have 3 fucking time zones in the same country, of course there's plenty of space in USA.
My country has the same number of population than New York and Los Angeles combined. My village of 33k people is considered a city.

ITT: Wow glad I am better than /those/ stupid fucks.

Honestly OP I thought it was self-evident that suburbs and suburbanites are trash.

Please don't insult tea. It's a real shame that tea gets slandered as a culturally British thing when Brits have one of the worst tea cultures in the world.

the problem with that picture is not the absence of "nature".
The problem is that space is being used to make this individual houses instead of building tall and fitting more people into the same horizontal space. The consequences of buildings being placed like in OP's pic, which in my understanding is very common in the US, has led to massive traffic congestion and having to spend so much time travelling to get to a place its like you have to ride to another city to get to the supermarket.

I realized my mistake and concede.

this

This is quite true. I've very rarely lived in places in the US where it was even feasible to walk to the grocery store. The two places where I could walk were not really well suited to pedestrian traffic.

Gas stations can sometimes fill that role depending on what you need, which is what I think a lot of these suburban areas have within biking distance, but still, American infrastructure is very much set up to assume you have a car to get around with.

Honestly the worst part of the ever expanding American suburb is the car culture and the disdain for urban planning in these communities. Everyone drIves everywhere because it's all so spread out just enough but also because no one built sidewalks or walkable streets. And then people get very fat and die from eating shitty chain food which is the only type of restaurant in suburbia. In suburbia every thing gets commodified and sold to you. Newer Strip malls have fake public squares, community protests take place in megastore parking lots, and entire neighborhoods become gated to those who have less.

The richest country in the world ladies and gentlemen

And in the places with people lucky enough to be able to bike ride, they forced to share lanes with cars and trucks, who treat them like they aren't there. Sometimes a big car or truck will hit the biker and not even stop. It's awful!!

christ, that must be horrible
I just gained some new respect for burgers
I have 7 grocery stores within walking distance

jesus christ I might shoot myself
are you a strawman trying to perpetuate the myth that Holla Forums is all cosmopolitan fucks who hever never left the concrete except to enter the smooth tile of a starbucks?

Dude a lot of people live in cities.
And even I who live in a rural are can walk for 30 minutes into a small village and there is at least 4 different grocery stores. Welcome to Europe

It sucks, dude. I just checked how far my current house is from the nearest proper grocery store. 7.1 miles (or like 11.4km).

There's a shitty gas station convenience store that's only 1.3 miles away. That's not too bad, but all I could get there would be like jerky, chips, candy or soda - freshest thing you could get there would be like a microwaveable burrito, or a hot dog that's been rolling on a cooker all day.

There's a lot of reasons why burgers are so fucking fat. This is just one of them.

Christ thank you Zizek poster. This is the biggest problem I never see people bring up about america. Really our car culture has fucked up our country a lot. It's another reason that public transportation is so shitty. Just gives you another reason to buy a car and "contribute to the economy".

No, I just live in a somewhat big city (800k inhabitants) in Europe
urban planning will have to be a priority for the second american revolution

what the actual fuck

That's pretty anti-materialist of you. Cars are so prominent because the US government promoted them by prioritizing highways over railroads.

youtube.com/watch?v=2_2lGkEU4Xs

Not sure if you're just being pedantic. I already mentioned that they screw over public transportation so people have to buy cars.

Also recall GM's old slogan: What's good for General Motors, is good for America. You're a moron if you think highways are the only reason americans are obsessed with cars.

no please tell me

The houses have no land and are made of plywood and stucco.
Nobody knows their neighbors name
Overbearing HoA.
Fearful parents keep their children inside.
Fuck you I got mine.
Applebees.
Wal-Mart.

Am I the only one who thinks American suburban neighbourhood design's pretty neet? I don't see the problem here.

Not this time, comradeplasm.

Not really, maybe it looks alright but there is many problems that arise from this type of design.

Anti-materialists, anti-materialists everywhere

The worst offenders (like in OP's pic) have little to no mixed development. Why add the odd park, greenspace or train line if you're a developer? Just cram in as many lots as the infrastructure will permit. The end result is that you're creating a community that makes driving everywhere the option of least resistance. Drive to work, drive to the movies, drive to the bank, drive to get groceries, drive to see your friends. That makes owning multiple cars (unless you want to constantly juggle a single car with your family all day)

But the rows of houses look so nice and uniform. What kinda problems arise from this sorta planning?

Beyond this, owning all of this personal property burdens a family with expenses and responsibilities. You have the obvious mortgage plus a host of utilities and property tax. The house and surrounding property also demands constant maitenance and repair. Since you're driving everywhere you have similar obligations for your vehicles.

The end result is that you're tied down maintaining your estate to actually enjoy it. Owning all of this property is also a fast-track route to turning into the worst kind of reactionary, since your state of mind is rewired to focus on maintaining and defending your estate from taxes, petty criminals, disruptive public works projects, and your shithead neighbours. I forget where I read this but the government's rationale for underwriting mortgages in the immediate post-wpost-war era was to inoculate people from socialism by turning them into petty bourgeois landowners constantly fretting over property values

Hold up, did I just witness Hooochie defending America in patriotic fervor?

There are obvious ecological problems with modern auto-oriented suburbs but from a social perspective the greatest problem is their location, and the mobility of their occupants.

Old-school suburbs were denser, but more importantly were often located close to major factories or industrial areas and populated by the families of people who all worked in similar industries. These places are well-remembered and were great places to raise a family because there was a thick social solidarity created by Fordist industrial employment, which allowed people to build a tangible "community" over several generations. Nowadays employment is far more piecemeal and precarious, and everyone uses cars to commute everywhere, so neighborhoods are a jumble of people who all work different jobs in different places. Commercial space is out of walking distance because of cars and postwar zoning codes and open/public space is nowhere to be found because it isn't profitable to provide that. You end up with neighborhoods filled with neurotic shut-ins who don't talk to each other, with any sense of community forming in spite of how suburbs are designed, usually because of local schools. The people who grow up here are incredibly disconnected from their fellow citizens, and are overly fearful and litigious.

The place my parents live is a particularly egregious example of this: a couple meandering streets worth of cheaply build, large lot homes carved out of reforested farmland in the early 2000s. It was a good 20 minute drive to the nearest urban area, and bus rides to school took over an hour. Most of the neighbors barely speak to one another outside of plowing driveways when it snows.

I'm not concerned with the planning (which is good, though I'd prefer a more practical Roman grid) but the sheer size of the development. You can mitigate the downsides by breaking up the rows of suburbs with mixed-development shopping districts, trunk roads or rail lines to provide public transit options, greenbelts to provide parkland and mitigate environmental issues

It's certainly better than slums or large ghettos of apartment towers and I understand the reasons people live in suburbs. I just don't think that it should be inevitable that cities are unlivable shitholes and suburbs are the only choice for a cozy domestic haven. I've lived in high-density communities done right and have never looked back

That's every major American city except Boston, DC and New York. I heard public transportation's purposefully shit so people spend as much money on petrol to keep the automobile industry booming. Look at cities like Phoenix, you've gotta drive through miles of desert "highway" just to get to work.

It's easier to expropriate land for dedicated rail lines or busways in Canada. Same thing with amalgamating municipalities to force cooperation on planning projects. Also lib politicians are learning that for reasons explained precariat millenials and other workers value a functioning transit system

One of the few things suburban areas have going for them is that you're not surrounded by businesses. You can't walk one block in the city without seeing a store selling shit you don't need or a restaurant that sells the same shit as the identical restaurant on the same street. At least in the suburbs, you don't have to be bombarded by all that private property unless you want to.

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user…

Dude I linked you the post I made earlier
In more detail planning like this will make people more dependent on cars that will cause pollution and massive hours spend being in traffic, cities that have the spaced out planning will spend a lot more time in the car than one living in a city with proper planning.
So of the biggest problems arising from this type of planning are the following
In short proper planning has to be done that makes it so people can travel faster and cheaper. A type of planning that we see in Europe is a very good example of proper city/suburbs planning, it remains aesthetically pleasant and removes this problems that the USandA is currently dealing with specifically California.

I have had nightmares like this.

yuropoors out

where is the thermal exhaust port?

Might as well post some more suburban Spectaclescapes.

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Pathetic

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Aren't malls dying because of online shopping?

Thank god a lot of Indians are vegetarian or their rivers would turn red of blood and the stench/sanitation would be far worse.

this looks like a small town in the mediterranean except the vegetation is red instead of green

50s suburbia was a deep state experiment from day one. Ex nazi social scientists brought along by Operation Paperclip laid out post war suburbia as an ideal breeding ground for fascism. A world of atomised family/labor units united in universal separation by TV and the automobile. Green suburban lawns are merely a clever ruse that conceals the transformation of daily life into dystopian sci fi.

The uniformity of some of these pics is honestly terrifying to me. Where I live it's really varies, you've got old as dirt spanish colonial houses, baroque stuff by englishmen and italians, a lot of other stuff I don't even know how to classify and more modern stuff, those plain monochrome houses and flashy looking buildings.
The houses in these pictures look so identical, it's really fucking strange.

Holy shit.

New Zealand cities are exactly like this as well
I have a feeling this is an Anglosphere problem, not just an American problem

Today I will remind them

Here's the full video. This stuff gives me a bone because I fucking hate cars and the fact you basically need one to exist.

youtube.com/watch?v=QtzZRVhODvk&index=6&

This is how Mexican social housing looks like. It's like US suburbia, except the houses are tiny and made out of concrete.

I went to Acadia with my family a few years back, I envy you user, it's very pleasant up there.

That puts them above American houses, which are made of flimsy plywood and will still put you in debt for decades.

marxists.org/reference/archive/benjamin/1940/history.htm

looks like some video game

My house in NZ of extremely thin cardboardy stuff with no insulation and surrounded with corrugated iron

At least these buildings are colourful
I have to look at swathes of drab dreary grey houses skies and streets with hardly any greenery

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I grew up in southern California and a lot of cities do look like this, to the point that this half of the state feels like one large city. A lot of the rest of America in my experience is more sprawling and wide open spaces. European cities are more densely populated and have more shit in the same area, so cities like this albeit with less uniformity are closer to each in similarity than the majority of America is with this.

reddit.com/r/UrbanHell/

For more nightmare fuel

I grew up in CA too, pic related was how my hometown looked like. It was just shady tree lined streets in grid patterns for miles, and I enjoyed it. Living in a commie block housing would've fucking sucked growing up. There's something comfy as fuck about being able to have a backyard/front yard, and everybody has their own space. Its also great for partying.

Forgot an example

No sidewalks. What boring repetitive garbage that you are forced to have a vehicle just to escape from.

They're all 1 or 2 floors, so they're more like cappiestains.

Put a few playgrounds or baseball diamonds or something else between those doom circles and that'd actually be a nice place for kids to live

the fine line between hypercapitalist dystopia and socialist paradise! I've been thinking anti or post-civ lately, but this is quite juicy as a comfortably middle class burgerlander. Hearkens to what the SI had in mind in he early 60s.

There was an anprim/greenie with a source showing how people respond better to rural environments as apposed to cities. I think pic related is a perfect compromise between efficiency and ease on our monkey brains.

I support every worker being a property-owner and find landlords to be shit, yet I also hate traffic and suburban "soullessness". Honestly, I find the idea of townhouses and cottages in mixed use districts with commercial buildings within walking distance in compact but still small towns, cities, and villages to be best.

Hey not all Burgers live in Suburbs. Some live in worse conditions.

New England is part of Burgerland, but not really.

With row houses you have the danger of some drunk's kitchen fire burning down half a street though

My city core is mostly wooden row housing and fires burned down the city twice in a single decade

Outside of the shitty neighbors, the idea of living in a trailer park doesn't sound all that bad honestly.

Infrastructure is usually second-rate and undermaintained
Oftentimes they're stuck near factories, airports, etc. because developers won't be willing to invest in proper housing for an undesirable location but do know poorer people with fewer options will tough it out
- Most mobile homes aren't built to last for more than 30-50 years

You're right on the dice. A lot of the problems of suburbia is its car-centered model where horizontal growth and isolated development leads to segregegation and stifling of human living environments. However, traditional development, the one that created many of the quaint, small towns are largely illegal in the U.S. Pedestrian, mixed used, living oriented spaces is what largely is missing in places like OP's pic and what makes it an expensive, wasteful and soulless space. See youtube.com/watch?v=yKCJ2qzYEtI

Gadsden, for all the years I've seen you occasionally post here, why do you wear the flag?

I live in something a bit smaller, and the houses are not that similar. It is Great. Pure anonymity. I can watch my french Kino, I can drive to the grocery store and make any kind of food I want. I host dinner parties with communists. I sit and read Lenin. I grow a spice and vegetable garden. I build up for class warfare.

Being a revolutionary subject has NOTHING to do with squalor, old bricks, graffiti, high-rises, homelessness, urban decay, public transit, elevators and so on.

Only fucking normies and liberals hate the suburbs.

Why do you hate efficiency? Would you rather have empty mansions with big yards?

amazing. the place you live has a culture that makes consumption of products produced by the exploited and third world (food) even more efficient! Of course you'd venerate the liberal par-excellence bookchin! Culture is the commodity that makes the sale of all other commodities possible. your architecture is as bourgeois as your heart.

Source?

Then try to avoid having many houses made of wood and have some proper fire safety systems on every house. This kind of shit is needed for ANY modern city, rowhouse or apartment.

This applies to even wooden detached housing (if close enough together, which is actually the case in many denser suburbs) and apartments.

The flag has became a symbol of my presence in a way. (And, the presence of anyone who takes up the cause.) Contrary to modern libertarian appropriations, the Gadsden flag was a patriotic symbol based on the "Join or die" snake that ironic symbolized the need for American states to unite against British imperialism. The rattlesnake also was meant to represent America, who would defend herself from foreign invasion but not start a quarrel. It was never meant to be the flag of an individual protesting against being tread as much as a nation, a people, a united citizenry, the 13 states standing united against a foreign, tyrannical occupier.

That and it looks pretty cool.

I agree with the basic sentiment. The real bastions of the working class are the ranch houses in the working class suburbs. However, I do think that this is hardly the ideal situation. It is the result of property prices rising and certain lumpen groups that have nicknames starting with the letter n causing a ruckus.

Now, I'd rather live in a ranch house suburb or a small town, but I actually would also like cities if they were majority white working class and relied on small rowhouses as opposed to apartments. In fact, what we need is a mixture of small towns, medium/small sized cities (instead of massive metro-areas), and countryside.

Trailer parks can be either suburban or rural. (Most of them are suburban due to the greater population there.)

Can a lefty explain why cities are better than suburbs? I can cherry pick images of Detroit as an example of what every city looks like. The reality is most suburbs aren't Agrestic. There are cycling clubs, pedestrian walkways, parks, creeks, and lakes in and around most US suburbs. I can walk at midnight and not feel like I'm going to be shot or robbed.

Spoiler alert: they aren't

This is my opinion too. I was curious how this was anymore artificial or psyche damaging than a city. I realize not every suburb is like mine, but I can walk ten minutes and cast a fishing line into a lake (and catch something). I can make out some of the milkyway. There are so many rabbits, coyotes and bobcats have made homes here. Any stone I lift in my backyard it almost guaranteed to have a rough earth snake under it. If you leave food outside, possums and raccoons will get it. I once saw a hawk lift a squirrel out of my back yard. It's not completely rural, but suburban live is pretty sweet.

Well its really dependent on the lifestyle you want and the age. I'll take a stab in the dark and assume this board skews heavily to early 20 year olds who are full of energy. Sleepy suburbs filled with boomers in $300k houses, chain restaurants, and mundane cookie cutter buildings like banks or doctors offices just aren't as appealing to youth as to a middle aged person with a steady income who's just content with living a quiet life until they can finally retire. Suburbs don't have the freedom of living rural, where you and some friends can drive 20 min into the middle of nowhere and do whatever you want, and they don't have the constant stimulation and goings on of a city.

I don't have a kid, I don't have a good paying job that locks me down to one area, I don't own a house, I don't have any specific medical needs, etc. There's just nothing for me in a suburb.

While this is accurate, freedom is closer to suburbanites than urbanites. In every form of pollution, cities are always worse on average except behind gated communities. It's a herculean effort to keep a tiny block in a city clean because the wind and people will turn right around replace the refuse before the day is done. I could never live like this.

Traditionally, Indians burn dried cakes of cowshit as fuel. Just going to throw that out there.

Anglos aren't Yuros

I live in a small town and there are about 4 grocery stores within walking distance.

Because cities, unlike suburbs don’t pave over every inch of farmland they see.

I mean this completely unironically.

You Have To Go Back

It depends on your perspective. Cities are more energy-efficient per capita but most would require a tremendous amount of effort and energy to redevelop and reorganize into walkable, sustainable and equal places in the event of a socialist takeover. Cities are also dependent on importing resources to survive, and a lot of industry has been offshored or relocated to rural areas. Finally, despite what Bookchin says I'm not sold on the ease of politically organizing a modern city with popular assemblies alone. That would work in revolutionary Petersburg or Paris but I doubt you could pull it off in modern NYC or Jakarta. A more disciplined, organized political form would be far more expedient.

At a glance suburbs suck, they're far too auto-oriented and waste far too much energy. The thing is, it's far easier to reconfigure a single family subdivision than a dozen city blocks, and if you rearrange people so that they are close to employment, limit energy consumption, provide public transportation, and allow small mixed-use shops, parks, and gardens/farmland in between homes you'd end up with a pretty sustainable and comfy place to live. Furthermore, it'd be a helluva lot easier to organize a bunch of cul-de-sacs into directly democratic assemblies.

Basically, in the future, big cities will belong to the MLs, while towns and suburbs will belong to the anarchists.

Is pic related unironically better choice to living in an american suburb? Asking from everyone still in this thread.

I'm eastern euro myself you see :ˇ)

I'm not sure that not being able to walk to a store, that is to say, requiring you to own, insure, and maintain a vehicle of some sort simply in order to travel to the store to buy the goods of the exploited makes that system of consumption more efficient… Kinda' the opposite, really. Amazon or other delivery-based systems might be a better example of that system being made more efficient - unless your point is that using civic planning to create a landscape that requires people to buy vehicles in order to buy stuff at stores makes the consumption of products more efficient in that more products are required to be owned just for one to exist in this society - and that's not an entirely inaccurate point to my mind (buy stuff so you can actually buy more stuff and now you need a job to pay off the stuff you need to buy stuff), though I'd say that has less to do with 'culture' than it does have to do with the way the government started structuring cities back in the 30s or so. It's not a choice most people would make, though its the one we were handed by a corrupt government and a for-profit automotive industry.

I wouldn't say posting Bookchin memes is the same as venerating him, though let me toss in some Bookchin quotes because I do quite like a bit of his work.

“To speak of ‘limits to growth’ under a capitalistic market economy is as meaningless as to speak of limits of warfare under a warrior society. The moral pieties, that are voiced today by many well-meaning environmentalists, are as naive as the moral pieties of multinationals are manipulative. Capitalism can no more be ‘persuaded’ to limit growth than a human being can be ‘persuaded’ to stop breathing. Attempts to ‘green’ capitalism, to make it ‘ecological’, are doomed by the very nature of the system as a system of endless growth.”
– Murray Bookchin

“Humanity has passed through a long history of one-sidedness and of a social condition that has always contained the potential of destruction, despite its creative achievements in technology. The great project of our time must be to open the other eye: to see all-sidedly and wholly, to heal and transcend the cleavage between humanity and nature that came with early wisdom.”
– Murray Bookchin

“Power to the people' can only be put into practice when the power exercised by social elites is dissolved into the people. Each individual can then take control of his daily life. If 'Power to the people' means nothing more than power to the 'leaders' of the people, then the people remain an undifferentiated, manipulatable mass, as powerless after the revolution as they were before. In the last analysis, the people can never have power until they disappear as a 'people.”
– Murray Bookchin

“Our Being is Becoming, not stasis. Our Science is Utopia, our Reality is Eros, our Desire is Revolution.”
– Murray Bookchin

If your reading of Bookchin came away with you imagining him as a stellar example of contemporary liberalism then I question your reading comprehension and your understanding of those terms. I'd actually enjoy conversations with liberals if they were thought more like Bookchin - but if they did that they wouldn't be liberals, so…

My architecture? I've never built or designed structures…
You mean the architecture I'm subjected to? The one that forces me to buy a car and have a job to afford a car just so I can acquire food? Yeah, that's real bourgeois of me - being born in America and all- what a shitty choice I made.

This tbqh. When I was younger and edgier I hated the suburbs but there's no more sense of community in a city, in fact it seems to be less in a lot of them. Suburban socializing is oriented around dumb shit but this user is right. If you reorganized them in a fairly energy inexpensive way they could become much more like small towns with a real sense of community than a large city ever could.

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Fucking moron

Why don't Americans have sidewalks? Every country I've been to has them.

Scooters are too big for sidewalks, they just use the roads.

Wtf are you talking about. I live in America and there’s sidewalks.

More like sidewaddles amirite

Because
1. Americans don't like paying taxes, like REALLY don't like paying taxes. If you ask the average american if we should get rid of all taxes they'd say no because we do need some taxes, but yet they'll always support asymptotically lowering them.
2. Since americans hate taxes and motor companies lobby against it, outside of major cities there is no public transportation. This means most americans have to own a car, it also means that buildings can be spaced further out and the likely hood of landing a job that's a 30min drive on a highway is pretty big. Since most americans now own cars companies can continue building further and further from residential areas which feeds back into the need for a car in a self feeding cycle. As car owners people are more likely to not complain about lack of sidewalks since they hardly walk anywhere and think they're a waste of tax money.

They exist but where I live not very well. You'll have them only were legally required like outside of houses in residential areas, but anywhere else they just don't exist, you have to walk along the curb of the road.

Same replier. Other videos on youtube about arcology are shit since they aren't explicitly seeking a new way of life, they just want to do the same shit more 'sustainably'. Unitary urbanism or bust.

American here. I've lived in the suburbs and when I studied in Austria I lived in a commieblock. I prefer the commieblock tbh, it was much more convenient because public transportation was right by my house so I could travel the city and there was a grocery store right near my area so if I wanted to snack and not want to drive 15 minutes to a grocery store I could. Suburbs in the South East USA are really spread out and are often in rural areas away from city so you're going to have to drive 10-15minutes to get anywhere interesting. I live in a city now that is pretty walk-able/bike friendly but I still have my car for work and to get places faster.

Depends on where you're at. Most big cities in any state is going to have sidewalks but most people just drive because public transportation is shit here nor does it connect the city center to any of the major suburbs. In most of the towns in the South they don't have sidewalks because everyone uses a car so there is no point. I do hate our reliance on auto infrastructure in the US. That's one of the things that Europe definitely does better

I'd also like to add that the whole car thing is one of the reasons why americans are so detached from their local community. When I live in one suburb, work in another, and go to school in another it's hard to really feel like I belong to any one place. I don't know any of my neighbors because despite living within 200 feet of one another no one is ever in the same place at the same time after we leave our apartments. Suburbs are the perfect mix of big enough to have civilization but small enough to not need to interact with anyone.

No bullshit? Cities aren't built for humans to live in either, mate.
Everyone in this thread needs to read this fucking book:

I knew about Operation Paperclip, but the thing about it including social scientists who created Suburbia with deliberate intent to atomize the family and promote a "consumer's way of life" as replacement for community is new to me. Were you just . It's far-fetched, yet just depressing enough to be real.

Silly user, why would you cut into your profit maximization like that? Just so thousands of children grow up with a happier childhood and become more well-adjusted adults? I'm running a business here, not Medicare! Speaking of which, I hate Medicare and hope Trump ends it.

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What sucks about that kind of city planning is that you need a car just to go shopping.

I suppose you mean "unorganic", not "unnatural". Human houses are all unnatural.

Fair point. There are suburbs and there are suburbs. But the nice family home in Suburbia isn't a place, it's a product being built and sold in far too large quantities and in places where the environment can't cope with, as well as being built cheaper and shoddier all the time. See the pics of endless rows of houses, without a single damn park, grocer or even a church in view. Mass-produced modern American Dream, complete with cheap materials, foreign labor and planned obsolescence.

I was gonna type a bunch of personal bullshit here, but I'll just keep to saying, yeah I suppose there are good suburbs, most likely the oldest ones. Which, incidentally, were specifically designed to accommodate white people.

But then again, part of the problem with capitalism is exactly that. With every possible thing, you'll find nice instances which become ever more unattanable, and the cheap imitation with little regard to user welfare that the majority of people will get. This holds true for suburbs, cities and everything else. And that's assuming it's a sustainable model in the first place.

Dude, I don't know how to tell you this but you're a background character in The Goonies. I fucking dream of living in a suburb like that. You're definitely getting the deluxe Suburbia experience.