| |
| ▲ | Tade0 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | You'd have to either waste good soil by putting buildings on it, or use a lot of fertilizer. | |
| ▲ | bix6 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Why didn’t we do this? Seems cool. | | |
| ▲ | boc 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Because it's like 1000x more efficient to move stuff on water vs land, so industrial cities clustered around ports and rivers since it's way easier to move stuff around. | |
| ▲ | zonkerdonker 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Big cities aren't typically in such an ideal planar geological setup as that. I'm having a hard time imagining how something like that would work in the Bay area, NYC, Seattle, Miami etc | |
| ▲ | sophacles 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Because it trades most of the benefits of cities for the hassle of suburban life and less efficient food production. | |
| ▲ | HoldOnAMinute 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Because of perverse incentives | |
| ▲ | TimorousBestie 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | To be fair, Alexander was writing in the seventies, long after automobiles and the suburb had killed any hope of humane urban planning in the States. |
| |
| ▲ | nradov 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Bullshit. Christopher Alexander didn't know much about farming. I actually read his whole book. Most of his "patterns" are kind of quaint and twee, the sort of things that seem superficially attractive to people with no real domain knowledge. Highly overrated. | | |
| ▲ | TimorousBestie 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Utopian optimism really has fallen out of style, I suppose. | |
| ▲ | registeredcorn 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Do you see there being a realistic alternative? I realize we can't really go backward in time, but I would prefer if the farmers that lived close to where I am sold to people who live local to me. That can happen to some degree (open yard stands), and I like to do that for some of the smaller farms, but it's really a kind of "nice to have" rather than a "The market stocks stuff that was grown a town or two over" type thing. I feel like something probably got lost when that kind of arrangement went away. There's still one or two local businesses that manage to make it into the local market for me which is neat to see, but that's more so because they are for frozen pastries and stuff, and can prepare a metric ton in advance, and the market can mark it up for being a "local specialty" type thing. I like to buy them when I can afford it. It just sucks that essentially every other thing on a shelf probably wasn't even made in the same time zone or hemisphere. | | |
| ▲ | nradov 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Why do we need an alternative? Your preferences don't matter. | | |
| ▲ | AnimalMuppet 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | Well, they matter some. They matter to registeredcorn. More widely, they matter in that farmers markets and roadside stands and such do exist. Why do they exist? Because there are enough people that want to buy from such places. I mean, it's never going to be the way that food is sold. But those preferences matter enough for niche markets to exist. |
| |
| ▲ | sophacles 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | The thing you imagine has never really been true. Rivers, seas and canals and later railroads and highways have always brought food to the city from as far as it could be transported before it spoiled. Rome got its wheat from Egypt and its olive oil from around the Mediterranean. Ancient egypt sent food up and down the nile to population centers in Cairo and Thebes. And so on. | | |
|
|
|
