I disagree. A strong counterpoint is that rural and suburban infrastructure is impossible to financially support based on the limited tax base you get from them compared to dense neighborhoods. Much fewer people on the same amount of roads and sewer systems means spending way more per capita to maintain and build them. Way more than the tax base can provide, even. On top of that, neighborhoods that are spread out require more people to drive cars, which not only increases the maintenance burden, but also requires loads of parking lots at grocery stores. And none of that grocery store parking lot is going to generate the tax income required to pay for the infrastructure needed to travel there.

Beyond that, rural and suburban services are very heavily subsidized by federal and state grants, most of which comes from urban areas.

I would say that urban living in North America has two fatal flaws:

1. Housing prices (and other cost of living)

2. Incorrect city design based on cars.

High prices, especially for housing, increase the number of homeless and desperate people. This increases crime by a lot.

Car-centric design makes moving about a dense area very tedious for everyone, including car drivers. Urban design ought to be more centered on people throughout, which means pedestrians, bicyclists, and public transit are treated with more priority than cars. Every city in North America is designed the complete opposite. Not only that, but cars are very noisy and dirty compared to other modes, making the urban area even worse.

At least the city design portion can have a huge benefit. A counterexample to your point is likely most cities in the Netherlands, like Amsterdam, which reportedly have very happy citizens and very people-centric design.

Plus, 83% of Americans choose (or need) to live in an urban area despite the flaws.

For more info on the financial aspect, this video and the others in the series are great: https://youtu.be/XfQUOHlAocY

> Much fewer people on the same amount of roads and sewer systems means spending way more per capita to maintain and build them. Way more than the tax base can provide, even.

This is simply false. Maintaining roads takes typically less than 10% of the budget of the municipality. Additionally, road construction and maintenance is significantly more time consuming and expensive in dense urban areas.

> On top of that, neighborhoods that are spread out require more people to drive cars, which not only increases the maintenance burden, but also requires loads of parking lots at grocery stores. And none of that grocery store parking lot is going to generate the tax income required to pay for the infrastructure needed to travel there.

Huh? The grocery store’s parking is part of grocery store, which generates tax income.

Per capita, costs to support people in dense urban areas is lower than that of suburban areas [1].

[1] https://usa.streetsblog.org/2015/03/05/sprawl-costs-the-publ...

> Plus, 83% of Americans choose (or need) to live in an urban area despite the flaws.

Yes, ~80% of Americans live in "urban" areas, but the majority of those living in "urban" are living in "suburban" areas if you actually look closely. For most classifications its simply either urban or rural, not urban/suburban/rural.

If it definitely failed then Japan definitely failed to demonstrate it, with their vastly lower number of virus numbers per capita (and deaths) and high urban density.

I always struggle with Japan comparisons; it seems like the variables we often want to directly compare are not easily isolated from deep, fundamental differences in culture, institutions, politics, and even geography.

Japan, Singapore, China (if their numbers are to be believed), Taiwan… all fairly dense places compared to the US.

In my opinion, the marginal reduction in transmission of infectious disease during a pandemic is not worth the cost moving away from urbanism. Humans are meant to congregate together, and city living and everything that comes with it are the most efficient ways to do so.

Humans have historically always congregated together, but never at the scale of urbanism — if historical precedent is the argument here, we’ve almost always operated at the much lower densities of rural environments.

City urbanism might be the most resource-efficient in many ways, but animal well-being isn’t measured solely in terms of how efficiently we can feed and house you.

If it were, factory farms would be the ideal.

Humans are not humans in cities. “Who survives in NYC without amphetamines”, I remember from a movie when I was a kid. Now I understand the sentence: With no connection to the earth, city dwellers invent an idea of ecology and relation to nature that is in total disconnect with people in farming.

For my goddaughter, killing ants is the top of all evils. Ecology should be able protecting cute things. For me, terraforming kilometers of arable land to build her colonies on Earth, that was the real crime. Cities bring the illusion that humans are legitimate in unfathomable numbers. Cities hide away nature’s constraints.

I think you misunderstood the quote as a kid. People (or at least those without ADD, narcolepsy, etc) are taking amphetamines to compete in a fast-paced city. And besides from my limited personal experience city people may misuse amphetamines at therapeutic doses, but it seems like it’s rural people who abuse them at toxic doses.

> innate flaws in urbanism

Care to elaborate?

Rampant crime, human waste on sidewalks, parks filled with homeless encampments, used needles everywhere, riots, looting?

Not every city is San Francisco

Or LA, Seattle, Portland, San Diego, Detroit, Baltimore, DC, Chicago, Minneapolis........

Essentially, flaws that are unique to and induced by scale and consolidation.

Outside of the current pandemic, those problems range from the rent-seeking consolidation of housing ownership into very few hands, to the elimination of forms of self-reliance that create healthy community — instead shifting those responsibilities to government and large institutions.

Scale also requires more top-down centralized control and regulation in order to function at all.

The issues you stated could be suburban or even rural issues, not just urban issues. In other words I think you might be conflating the difference between an agrarian economy with a modern economy with specialization, not urban vs rural.

I saw a different explanation. Cities are inheriently high density and make things used enmasse as much as possible and inevitably leads to more contact among others. This is unfortunately also a good way for pandemics to travel. The isolation highlighted how little they owned spacewise.

Now that is a spectrum and we are all dependent on others but they are at the high end. The low end is "compound in the middle of the wilderness which is dependent indirectly for there to be wilderness unused for them to DYI everything".

The issue will hopefully wind up rare but there is no great certainty in these matters.