There is a huge HUGE difference between "you must own 1/3 of an acre of land to live within an hour commute of your job" and "microscopic communal living spaces", if you haven't looked at a map recently we are much much closer to the prior than the latter.
London is somewhere in-between; so are most of our towns and cities, really.
Tons of semi-detached or terraced homes, well served by public transport, which provide a decent balance.
We still can't just increase the population in those commutable areas without bound though.
What is the stopping point? Why is now the stopping point?
> The inevitable conclusion of forever-growth is, indeed, that everyone piles in to microscopic communal living spaces
I mean, or we become more efficient _now_, buy ourselves centuries more time on the planet, and then figure out a different solution, maybe involving terraforming other planets or something.
Progress isn't linear and it's unfortunate that everyone views it as such.
This is like peak San Francisco housing conversation right here.
Have you guys considering the radical idea of building a couple fucking apartment buildings instead?
I mean, seriously.
The solution right now is to build medium density housing and disincentive individuals from driving their cars alone to work.
That's my main point, not what the solution looks like.
Tall buildings are inherently communal.
Terraforming is an idea so absurd I'm not sure where to start - the dream of a 16 year old science fiction reader.
We have a solution for housing. It's called houses. This breaks down when you get millions of people and stuff them in the same small coastal region. A good start would be to, well, just not do that.
My home town of 200,000 can be cycled across in 20 minutes. It has very few apartments and is primarily made up of terraced or semi detached housing.
Sure and that's _your_ view of the matter (where I'm reading "communal" as "undesirable" here). Hundreds of thousands of people continue to view high-rise apartments as desirable places to live, as evidenced by housing demand in Manhattan, Tokyo, London, Hong Kong, and other world cities. The Bay Area has created bureaucratic and legal roadblocks from allowing these high-rise apartments. If people really didn't want them, then folks would be moving out of these high-rise cities instead of moving into them. There's no need to mandate low-rise by law as the Bay Area has done.
Cool so stop building them.
You can't make the workplaces incredibly dense and the housing incredibly sparse in a geographically constrained area though and expect things to be OK.
For every Salesforce tower build a giant apartment skyscraper. For every Google campus build a major apartment complex campus.
It's fundamentally ridiculous to just have everyone that "matters" live in the same city or small group of cities.
That's what people seem to be talking about here. In the UK it's London, in the US it's SF, NYC and a few others.
If "pack everyone into skyscrapers and have them rent their Logan's Run existence" is the model for the entire economy I'm honestly quite sad about that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sub-replacement_fertility#/med...
If fertility is below 2.1 it's below replacement.
There are not many rich countries with replacement level fertility rates.
Japan's population is decreasing at ~300K a year because they don't allow much immigration. As countries become rich people leave in lower numbers.
There are quite a few countries in the world that are already experiencing population decline :
Here's a great visualization of how we use our land: https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2018-us-land-use/
I'm pretty young.
Since my birth, the population has expanded by over 40%, and we've increased global temperature by approximately 1 degree Celsius.
The inevitable conclusion of forever-growth is, indeed, that everyone piles in to microscopic communal living spaces, that everything becomes factory farmed, that everything has to be as efficient as possible because we'll be (already are to a large extent) forced into doing it.
We can't go on like this.