To give a different perspective, I enjoyed the parks much more living in London than I do now, living in a sprawling suburb in the Dallas metroplex. In London I could walk to the park in 5 minutes. Here I'm lucky that it's only about a 7 minute walk, but the walk to and from is much less pleasant, having to cut through alleys and paths that were clearly an afterthought, while the park itself feels much more urban/artificial than the ones in London did.

(To be fair, London has great parks)

Density can coexist with ample green space. Remember that you don't need anything like Manhattan density to make things walkable. In my book, suburbs are only a problem to the degree that their design forces driving on residents. My vision for a perfect city has plenty of parks.

When I was talking about nature, I wasn’t thinking about city parks, but rather proper forests and mountains. City parks don’t do it for me—I need to get away from the cars and crowds. But to your point, yes, there are lots of cities with great city parks for those who are content with that sort of thing.

The more you let people build up, the more ground can be left as green space. No one is against park.

Land area/space in general is not scarce. What is scarce is land area near job centers (or more broadly, near where people want to spend their time outside the home.) The more you spread people out, the more car dependent the city, necessitating more roads and parking lots.

I don’t have any problems with people building up, but I’m very skeptical that the space between tall buildings will be made into parks, and anyway a city park is not what I would consider “nature”. For folks who want density and can content themselves with urban green spaces, I wish you well on your quest to build taller and denser, just please don’t impose that on everyone! :)

Honestly I feel like you're just failing to precisely represent what you're wanting. Here's what I think you're getting at, definitely tell me if I'm off.

1) Cities, whether they're sprawling or dense, or park-laden or not, can be suffocating. It just so happens that yours atm is less park-laden. Thus, your advice for exclusively urban people, is to actually put the effort in to get into real nature; into the mountains, the isolated wilderness, the lakes, etc.. because there's a serenity like that you can't get with facsimiles like neighborhood parks

2) Space between high rises isn't used all that effectively. I think this is particularly a problem with downtown core areas moreso than downtown adjacent areas in a lot of cities.

I'm personally not anti-car outright, just anti-car as a primary means of day to day utility oriented travel and the design of urban spaces that prioritize that over others. If you walk or bike or skateboard most of the time, you develop a feeling for the space you're doing that in, and it has an affect on your life. If you're only walking through parking lots, on broken old slabs of sidewalk that nobody cares about, with no flowers or trees or cats or people around, you're going to want to avoid that. I'm a huge advocate for building your immediate surroundings so they facilitate healthy and sustainable living (the opposite of broken parking lots in a suburbab wasteland) but also for getting the fuck out of the whole city pretty often if you can. I rent a car to do this, and might buy a beater in the future to have more flexibility in that respect, but definitely get the hell out once in a while if you can.

Sorry for the imprecision.

My city is “park laden”. I live next to a 1200 acre park. City parks aren’t nature; however, and having seen the real deal there’s only so much one can do to convince one’s subconscious otherwise.

But yes, I find daily life in an urban environment (however park laden!) to be depleting. Cities are still tons of fun to visit and explore, I’m glad they exist, etc. This might be different if I could reasonably make it to some nature between work and sunset, but in most cities you won’t make it past the burbs.

Hopefully that’s clarifying.

I should also note that I'm glad that there is a movement to make cities more walkable, but I duck out when that sentiment pours over into a sort of religious zeal against more nature-ful ways of life.

So on a more frequent basis, what would you hope to be doing in nature, assuming you also work?

Specifically, I'd like to do more hiking and cycling, but honestly just being around it--having fresh air and room to breath is great. Also, my geriatric dog is much happier when we take trips out of the city. It's easy enough to work during the day and go for little hikes or bike rides in the evening if you don't have to drive 3 hours round trip.

Yes, urban nature/parks is not exactly the same as being in a forest, or climbing a mountain. But neither is suburban green space! And again, unlike dense urban cores, suburban sprawl requires more destruction of natural environments, not less.

What exactly is it you are advocating for/against? If you want to live in “real” nature, like in a cabin in a forest, or on a ranch in the country, then go do that. Nobody is stopping you.

Edit: Just to put a concrete point on it, it now takes approximately an hour to get out of the suburbs from urban / downtown Dallas. Nature is further away than ever.

Edit 2: Of course you will find people on Twitter or whatever who want to “ban all cars”, but this is not a serious movement or position held by the vast majority of YIMBY/urbanism people. I think most of us would like exactly what you’re talking about: the freedom to let people do what they want on the land they own, and make their own choices as to what living arrangements best for them and their customers. Currently, this option is only denied to people wanting to build up, while suburban sprawl is allowed virtually everywhere. Where I live, Austin, TX, there are parts of our downtown central business district that are zoned for SFH only! It is absurd, we wouldn’t inflict this level of economic destruction on our worst enemies.

Not all urban parks are created equally. I live close to a park 100s of acres in size in a city (Austin, TX).

We just have different standards for “nature”. If it’s hundreds of acres of undisturbed forest and you can’t see or hear the city, then it’ll probably scratch the itch, but most large urban parks are mostly grass, gardens, sports fields, playgrounds, etc with a few acres of feel-good wetlands or prairie or bird sanctuary sprinkled around. “Acres” does not nature make.

You’re presenting a false dichotomy. There are plenty of dense places with incredible nature within just an hours drive. In the USA, Maybe not so much outside of the West Coast of the USA however.

Personally, living in a city close to nature(seattle area) has been the best thing for me so far in my life; I have spent a stupid amount of money making it happen but wouldn’t trade it for anything. On the flip side it’s not for everybody, so don’t just take my word for it.

On the other hand I will be riding my bike to a ferry, and then riding to a camp site on a beach on an island after work on Friday- weather permitting.

> within just an hours drive

Wow that's depressing, I live in a very high density area by western standards and there's 50,000 acres of pristine rainforest literally on my doorstep while the mall is 5 minutes drive away and the city centre is 15 mins. During covid even the rare and endangered gibbons would come out hang out in the street.

Everytime I go back to Australia it seems like a suburban dystopia with 8 lane roads 60kms from the actual city. People commuting 2+ hours a day is the norm there.

You wrote: <<there's 50,000 acres of pristine rainforest literally on my doorstep while the mall is 5 minutes drive away and the city centre is 15 mins>>

Woah. Where do you live? This sounds "impossible". Singapore or Kuala Lumpur?

The presence of gibbons probably means somewhere in Malaysia or Singapore

Yes, this is absolutely a false dichotomy. I live in Zurich, with access to varied nature (hills, lake, river) all within a 15 minutes' walk and lots of stunning scenery easily accessible by train.

> There are plenty of dense places with incredible nature within just an hours drive.

What a hilarious example of what the original commenter was saying. Apparently you think having nature an hour away is acceptable, or at least counts as being close to nature. As a very anti-urban person, I consider that nightmarish. I'm glad other people like that kind of world, and hope they all keep moving to the cities to leave the rest of the world open and spacious for the rest of us.

The bay area is great in this front as well. I live in the east Bay and it's an easy bike ride to redwood groves...

Yeah, I didn’t mean to frame it as a dichotomy, but it was a HN comment so I didn’t explore the full depth of nuance, and it was scoped to the US. Yes, some places are dense while still allowing some access to nature.

No worries! I have lived in dense places on the east coast too and always felt super cramped in them as well.

I live in Berlin. I can take public transit to the forest or beautiful swimmable lakes. And there are tons of parks within the city.

Vienna even has a national park in the city. (Lobau Nationalpark)

> pro-urban/pro-density/anti-car people

I would want to meet this person.

I am a huge proponent of walkable cities, and I definitely see a city that is urban, high density and with a lot of nature.

Heck Copenhagen, where I live, do it quite well -- within 20 minutes from the absolute center of the city (eg. Noerreport), I can be with grassing Alpacas (https://goo.gl/maps/jcA6VFMPHC5qmYCp6) or I can be with large herds of deer (https://goo.gl/maps/8YDPDfTPCHhTbdps5) or I can be on huge grass lands (https://goo.gl/maps/3YxztVvYeUwSJge89), and no, these areas would not be considered regular parks.

Attitudes vary from person to person, but I don't really think being 20 minutes from nature really counts. I lived in Paris until recently and had a really rough time for a few reasons, but the biggest one is was the lack of green places to walk. Whenever I brought it up to anyone, people would say "oh, what about Bois de Boulogne or Bois de Vincennes?" Both were inaccessible by foot from where I lived due to distance and would take 30 minutes to get to by public transit. So what's the idea, then? We should budget an hour in a subway tunnel each day so we can spend some time in a park? That's no way to live; nature isn't something we should treat like a museum. It is something we should feel a part of.

For me, thankfully, there was an easy solution: I moved to one of the towns just outside of the city. Now I have ample access to lots of trees, birds, flowers, etc. If I get on my bike, which I do frequently, I can be in some really beautiful regional parks within 40 minutes or so, and the ride there ain't too bad either.

I love Paris and would love to hear about some good Paris-adjacent nature opportunities if you're up for sharing.

My favorite place to bike is Parc naturel régional de la Haute Vallée de Chevreuse (French people aren't into the whole brevity thing). I can't speak to hiking but I have to assume there are nice walks to be had in the area because I frequently see people with hiking gear on. You can get there from Paris on the RER B: just take it all the way south to Saint-Rémy-lès-Chevreuse. Île-de-France is, by and large, quite flat, but Chevreuse is a nice valley so you can get some really pretty scenery.

EDIT: I'll add that last fall I was biking around there with my wife and we found some most righteous porcini mushrooms growing on the side of the road. It really is nice out there.

I should also add that nearer Paris is Forêt domaniale de Meudon, which is in the direction of Versailles. Nice forested area. I can't speak to the walking/hiking but I assume it is not bad (I've only been out that way on bike).

I'm a big proponent of walkable cities too, but I diverge from these people in that I don't think it's desirable to make everyone live in a dense urban environment or else extend public transit to every corner of the US in the name of abolishing cars.

Nature is also against walkability when it puts frigging hills on my way! Also the weather is way too agressive near the equator... I can endure it with sports clothes but not before work.

Seriously: walking/cycling on Amsterdam, Lisbon or Paris when the weather is 15 °C, mostly on flat ways, is a pleasure. You arrive at the office just a little heated up, I imagine.

That’s just excuses though, people cycle even in Norway where it’s below freezing most of the year

I find it much easier to do exercise in the cold than in the heat. In the cold it's just a matter of having the right gear and layers. In the heat, there's nothing you can do. It'll be extremely hot, you'll be sweating like crazy and get tired quicker (or at least I do).

Well... exercising in the cold makes you hotter, that makes sense. And I bet they have Canada-level of socks/parkas/etc which you can remove as you get hotter.

I'm okay with being the "weak person" who doesn't enjoy cycling in below-freezing weather.

Walking hills is the best walk.

Anti-car is pro-nature not pro concrete jungle. Cars are a big part of why we have a concrete jungle and not nature intersected with density. Think of cities with substantial nature passages, botanic gardens and reserves throughout. Not just one big one but many.

Suburbia isn't nature either, at least not standard suburbia. It's carbon intense lawn, concrete and asphalt. A front lawn and a big tree isn't nature. The pro-car angle seeks to expand suburbia, and destroy more and more nature. You may see more greenery but it's just grass and the odd pasture.

I don't think anyone in the anti-car movement is saying, don't drive to a national park or mountain. The anti-car movement is about removing cars from the city and reducing the impact of suburbia on the greater area, which includes national parks.

Why do people keep framing this as a dichotomy between urban areas and suburbs? I agree that suburbs aren’t “nature”, obviously. There’s a lot more to the US than urban cores and suburbs.

I can’t claim to have visited all major cities in the US, but they do seem to match the “urban core and suburbs” pattern, compared with my experiences visiting European cities.

Not Just Bikes has a video about that: https://youtu.be/CCOdQsZa15o

To be fair, you did the same, hence my defense specifically of anti-car thoughts. I very much agree that this isn't a dichotomy.

I certainly didn't frame anything as a dichotomy between suburbs and urban area. I did generalize cities as not having easy access to nature, which is strictly true even if there are exceptions that prove the rule. Generalization doesn't imply dichotomy.

Perhaps we're not gaining much from this clarification except resetting the stage, but the dichotomy I was seeing was anti-car vs pro-car, which for America I feel is synonymous with urban density vs suburbia due to the way zoning laws pretty much mandate suburbia be pro-car. The bit I was specifically rebutting was that anti-car is somehow anti-nature, which was what I felt you were implying.

My hope would be that a city planned more around human level interaction with less focus on cars would reduce urban size overall, and reduce suburban sprawl. Better integrating nature all the way from the outer burbs and in toward the city.

Having visited many of Japans incredibly dense cities, and ending up yearning for the sight of a tree, I can totally see the negatives of extreme density, and that's definitely not what I'd want from a low-car city. I also live in a fairly exceptional city in regards to nature, I have national parks outside my doorstep and can ride from suburbia into the city and from the city to the beach along reserves and greenways, not just parks but regenerated forest, so I can see the very thing I'm advocating for and I fucking love it. The bad parts of my city are always related to how car infrastructure has ruined that in some way. That's why I'm passionate about it.

> The dichotomy I was seeing was anti-car vs pro-car, which for America I feel is synonymous with urban density vs suburbia due to the way zoning laws pretty much mandate suburbia be pro-car. The bit I was specifically rebutting was that anti-car is somehow anti-nature, which was what I felt you were implying.

I'm glad we're clearing up the confusion. I certainly don't think that suburban zoning laws are the pinnacle of city planning or anything like that, and I'm optimistic that we can have walkable spaces without density. And even where there's density, I think there's a lot that can be improved.

I also think the anti-car message would go over better if there was less spite. For example, in Chicago anti-car activists want to remove Lake Shore Drive: the only major N/S thoroughfare--I90 runs NW/SE--it doesn't segregate the city, it isn't useful to commuters to/from the suburbs, and its removal will only push traffic onto the side streets making the city less pedestrian-friendly. But it spites drivers, so it's worthwhile. Instead, I wish these people would focus more on making our existing public transit more appealing: advocate for cleaner buses and train cars, advocate for the enforcement of laws and rules regarding (for example) stabbing, smoking, urinating, blasting music, panhandling, etc., advocate for punctuality. Once we have a good handle on our existing public transit infrastructure, we can then start thinking about smaller improvements--increasing capacity (especially during rush hour) so people don't have to be packed into cars like sardines, and then expand the network. Once you've made public transit attractive and practical for more people, then you can start working on deprecating car transit.

Because people have to live somewhere.

To my point they don't have to live exclusively in suburbs or cities. Exurbs, towns, villages, acreages, boonies, entirely off-grid, etc are all options. There's a whole world out there--it's pretty mind-blowing if you've never ventured beyond suburbs before.

There is of course scope for a wide variety of living situations, but aside from cities and suburbs, there is no way to accommodate a large percentage of the population. Yes, I have ventured outside of the suburbs.

How did we get from "I want to move out of my city and be closer to nature" to "good luck finding a place that can accommodate a large percentage of the population"?

My experience actually living in suburbs is that when you’re not in your house, you’re driving: either on a highway or a stroad. Now I will admit that driving on a highway with pristine nature on both sides is pretty nice (love 280) but most of the time when you go places you’re in 4-6 lane road strip mall land, which is a much worse environment than either a proper urban neighborhood or proper nature.

If I could have a house truly situated in nature, I might like that, but that’s not what happens. You get a house situated in a suburban sprawl, and that sprawl is the day to day environment, and it is mostly artificial but in the worst ways: all the human art and ingenuity is directed towards the best interests of the cars instead of the people.

Suburbs are just one of many alternatives to dense urban life--it's not a dichotomy (that's a popular misconception in this thread). Moreover, there's no law that suburbs have to be a desert of unwalkable strip malls and stroads--indeed, there's a lot of variety among suburbs. I completely favor improving our suburbs and cities--that's not incompatible with wanting to be closer to nature. :)

Suburbs are what actually trades off against pro-urban/pro—density though. No one builds a dense city in a rural area. They do build suburbs there, and then those suburbs face pressure to become denser.

I will push back a little on your claim that suburbs are different: postwar sprawl is a remarkably homogeneous product, the codes from jurisdiction to jurisdiction are very consistent, the home builders largely national chains, the businesses in the strip malls also largely national chains. I’m sure there are exceptions but really for such a big country with so many ostensibly different places and identities, it makes very little difference which sprawl-agglomeration you live in. “Local character” and distinctive building styles mostly belong to the historic walkable core districts. The suburbs could be anywhere.

> Suburbs are what actually trades off against pro-urban/pro—density though. No one builds a dense city in a rural area. They do build suburbs there, and then those suburbs face pressure to become denser.

I agree with this, but I don’t see what that has to do with our conversation.

> I will push back a little on your claim that suburbs are different: postwar sprawl is a remarkably homogeneous product, the codes from jurisdiction to jurisdiction are very consistent, the home builders largely national chains, the businesses in the strip malls also largely national chains. I’m sure there are exceptions but really for such a big country with so many ostensibly different places and identities, it makes very little difference which sprawl-agglomeration you live in. “Local character” and distinctive building styles mostly belong to the historic walkable core districts. The suburbs could be anywhere.

My claim wasn’t that suburbs are diverse, but rather that there are exceptions which suffice to prove that suburbs can be done differently. If we can rethink our cities then why can’t we also reimagine our suburbs (or at least more creatively than “make them dense and urban”)?

why does always seemed to be assumed in these discussions that alternative to cities must be suburbs? you can live in a town.

An old-school town is walkable/urban in the same way we would advocate for cities: grid layout, main street with buildings pulled up to the sidewalk, pedestrian life, apartments over the stores, duplexes and small apartment buildings giving way to to larger single family homes as you walk out towards the fringes, schools that children can walk to, etc. Good towns have a lot in common with good urban neighborhoods. Probably the main difference is they don't need transit since the whole thing is small enough to traverse under your own power.

Automobile era towns have the same forms as the suburban sprawls attached to cities: stroads, strip malls, parking lots, subdivisions containing homogeneous uses and interfacing at few points with fast arterial roads. They're just disembodied suburbs. The disembodiment if anything makes them worse.

I visit lot of auto-oriented towns on cross-country roadtrips. They're vile places. I wouldn't want to be there any longer than necessary to get gas, food, use the restroom, etc. Sometimes when I take a wrong turn I catch a glimpse of the pre-car main street rotting away, behind the gleaming cloverleaf-adjacent McDonalds. It's sad.

I visit urban towns on vacation, on the way to and from hiking, etc. Sometimes I look up the real estate listings. They're even more expensive than the big city, but without any kind of local industry to pay those prices. They're for second homes or retirement, I guess. Also sad.

I've spent the last year living at my parents' cabin in the woods. It's right next to Jackson state forest. They've got 8 acres of land full of wildlife and redwoods. Waking up and stepping out onto the deck in the morning feels like crawling out of your tent when camping.

But now it's back to SF as the office is reopening. I won't miss driving 3+ hours to see friends, but I will miss the scenery.

That sounds beautiful!

I live in Berlin, which contains many trees and parks. One of the nicest quarters of Berlin is Gartenstadt (garden city) Frohnau, which feels like houses in the forest - at decent density. So it doesn't have to be either city or nature. But I'm afraid that current cost structures and short-term thinking make another Gartenstadt very unlikely.

Well. It may be that this kind of place only really works as a suburb. It does have a small center (shops, cafes, doctors, church etc) that people can walk to, which in turn has public transport to the actual city.

There’s virtually no wildernesses in Europe. Even the famous Black Forest is more of a large public garden than nature. It does still get somewhat wild up in the Alps, but you might find it hard to notice with all the manicured farms and a Gasthof on every hilltop.

Same for the Netherlands. Urban cities integrated with nature. Large parks that can be easily biked to. It’s a great balance. It’s harder to have the best of both worlds in the United States though.

Berlin has large parks in the city, and even larger ones at the edges. It doesn't only work as a suburb - people in any central Kiez are within walking distance of a park.

I love that city for that. Milan felt claustrophobic without all the parks.

Due to the unique history and political situation (city state), the city also just "suddenly ends", with little suburban sprawl. That said, Germany is so densely populated overall that there are few areas of "untouched" nature that the topl level commenter seems to be craving for.

Germany has almost no untouched nature, it's true. But even a giant garden can feel nice :)

It feels weird to argue against suburbs while I'm living there, but...

Most pro-density/pro-mass-transit people aren't arguing against rural lifestyle. They're against suburban, car-dominated lifestyle.

I'll conjecture that, for many people, the potential benefit of living "close to nature" is more than negated by driving everywhere. Commuting in a subway in a mega-city easily racks up thirty minutes of brisk walking per day.

I hear a lot of them argue about how rural people waste space and how they’re sick of subsidizing rural infrastructure and we should impose policies which further incentivize people to migrate from rural to urban areas. The thrust of the issue seems to be directed at suburbs (if only because many of these folks are only marginally aware of the world beyond the suburbs), but rural life is still wholly incompatible with their car free utopian vision (although more than a few have amusingly proposed extending public transit to every rural community!).

Fascinating. I've spent a fair amount of time in/around pro-livability discussions, and I've never really come across what you're describing. In my experience a solid portion of the folks advocating for more human-friendly cities are urban dwellers who spend significant time in nature and/or wilderness.

> and how they’re sick of subsidizing rural infrastructure

I mean, it’s fine if you want to live somewhere rural, but why should that be subsidized?

    I mean, it’s fine if you want to live somewhere 
    rural, but why should that be subsidized? 

I mean, it's fine if you want to live somewhere urban, but why should that be subsidized?

I don't think we should necessarily subsidize more heavily for folks who want to live rural, but many want/need to. Of course we should subsidize schools, utilities, and other human rights for them just like we do for urban areas.

I'm also not convinced rural areas are more expensive to subsidize. Clearly many things are more expensive in rural areas, but also many things are more expensive in cities. That's a complicated equation to put it mildly.

The same reason it’s fine to subsidize bridges, public transport, and the food that enables cities?m

I’m fine with not subsidizing it but we subsidize all sorts of public goods—schools, libraries, etc. It’s not exactly unusual.

Let me rephrase that: why should we subsidize it more than we subsidize the equivalent infrastructure in urban areas?

It costs a lot more to provide infrastructure to rural areas than urban ones. If we expect both of these to be fully paid for by our taxes, and if we expect the tax burden to be similar, that means those of us living in cities are subsidizing those living in rural ones. (And note I'm not talking about actual agricultural industries that require that much space, I'm talking about people living in rural areas just because they like it better. Everyone depends on farms, we can subsidize those.)

I'm fine with people living in rural areas if they want to, but I don't think we should expect city-dwellers to subsidize them if they do.

>I'm not talking about actual agricultural industries that require that much space, I'm talking about people living in rural areas just because they like it better. Everyone depends on farms, we can subsidize those

So what about the people who live there to provide education to the farmers' kids? What about the people who work at the local restaurants and grocery stores that serve farmers? What about the people who live there to provide trash service for the people who serve the farmers?

Where does it end and why does it end at that point?

Society [noun]: the aggregate of people living together in a more or less ordered community.

It's not like we can lay out roads and say, "this is for farm machinery only, nobody else gets to use it." So, via subsidizing agriculture, you are going to subsidize some people who choose to live out there.

I don't get how you could possibly disentangle that in any way that isn't completely unsustainable. I also don't understand why you would want to; something, something, common good.

Sure, you can’t completely disentangle those things. But providing services to far-out communities takes a disproportionate amount of resources; if we pretend that it doesn’t and make it seem just as cheap as living in urban areas, we’re just encouraging more people to move out there who don’t need to. We’ve already got a ton of crumbling infrastructure and that’s in part because we’ve built too much of it to possibly maintain and it’s catching up to us.

I’m not saying I have all the answers, but something has to give.

I'm not sure "we built too much of it" as much as we failed to anticipate or account for trends such as urbanization. Anyway, it's probably more productive and less prone to chauvinism to frame it as prioritizing high value/cost infrastructure rather than morally upright urbanites subsidizing lazy, freeloading rural people (I'm exaggerating here for effect, but that's often the tone that this framing conveys whether or not it's intended). That said, I fully support gradually decommissioning the lowest value/cost infrastructure.

Does the argument require all this bellyaching when it seems as simple as “only urban residents should pay for urban services” and “only rural residents should pay for rural services”?

Yes. Because it's just not that simple. Society requires interplay among individuals. That's the entire idea behind a society. We work together for the greatest good for the greatest number of people. We don't splinter and ignore the needs of others.

In theory, urban pays for theirs and rural pays for theirs is fine. But how do goods get between urban centers? Is it magicked there, or is it brought via rail and road that goes through rural areas?

And then what is my incentive, as a rural resident, to listen to the voices of the individuals in the urban areas when it comes to matters like state laws? Why not get rid of those, because the impact of people who have zero input into my life is wildly disproportionate because there are so many of them? They don't pay for anything out here, so why should they get to tell me who is in charge?

Again, there isn't a clean way to do this, because we are all connected, and we are acutely aware of it. I would argue that's what separates us from animals.

I assume you don't actually think our taxes should be binned into distinct "urban" and "rural" pots, but are rather advocating for moving the burden for services away from the federal level and towards the local level? If so, that sounds like a fine idea but you might have a hard time getting Democrats on board.

In general, I would like to see money and decisions moved as local as possible; however, doing so can have some obvious efficiency and collective action problems. As the other poster refers to, slicing the pie on shared/interdependent resources also is a challenge.

> Let me rephrase that: why should we subsidize it more than we subsidize the equivalent infrastructure in urban areas?

I don’t think we should in the general case, but I also don’t think we should abruptly pull funding from one area (letting the infrastructure fall apart) just because it becomes abruptly fashionable to move out of that area in the near term (we’re talking about decades long time scales here). Seems like you should want some easing so you don’t have to rebuild from scratch if/when dynamics change.

But ultimately if you want less spending on rural infrastructure, that’s probably fine with me, but then don’t also complain when rural life is a luxury for the wealthy.

   ...suburban, car-dominated lifestyle.

   I'll conjecture that, for many people, the potential 
   benefit of living "close to nature" is more than negated 
   by driving everywhere

It's not possible for everyone, of course, but the work-from-home rural/suburban lifestyle has a lot more plusses than minuses IMO.

It's close to nature, and my driving is very minimal. In an average month I spend maybe 3 hours in a car. Can walk in the park every day, etc.

Unless you’re Amish or otherwise plain living, the rural lifestyle is exceedingly automobile dependent.

These days a whole lot of the Amish are also automobile dependent. :)

I was just in the forest this weekend. I can take a train to get there - it runs every 15 minutes or more often depending on time of day.

I got nervous towards the end of the walk because I was seemingly in the middle of nowhere - no one in sight - and I was losing the light.

If I take the train the other direction, I can walk up a mountain (actually a dormant volcano) and enjoy the park there. That tends to be a bit busier, but then again, humans are also animals that exist in naturally, and they tend to be less intrusive than other animals in parks.

And I didn’t even mention the rivers, islands, and beaches I can get to on foot or by transit. I haven’t tried visiting the buttes yet, but I know at minimum one is accessible by bike.

All of that nature is available and present in part because of an urban growth boundary that constrained the expansion of suburbs.

That sounds great! Where at?

Portland, OR.

That makes sense. As I understand it, Portland isn’t particularly dense. Someone yesterday was just likening it to suburbs and talking about the great access to nature: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31241348

It certainly sounds appealing!

It’s true, Portland isn’t nearly as dense as it should be. The result is that (hundreds of) thousands of people who would like to live here can’t afford to.

But everything I shared about access to nature would be just as true if the urban core was made more dense. Replacing sfh lots with multi use buildings doesn’t affect the access to nature in any way. If anything, it would help the situation by providing more ridership and tax revenue to support transit to nature and investment in parks.

> Replacing sfh lots with multi use buildings doesn’t affect the access to nature in any way.

It may if it just pushes people who prefer sfhs farther outside of the urban core, thus increasing the distance between urban core and nature. Maybe if you can pass zoning laws to prevent it, but that seems like a politically uphill battle (if there's already an existing state or national park or conservation area, it's probably not at risk of becoming a subdivision, but it will be hard to keep a patchwork of farms, acreages, and privately owned timber from being parceled off to meet the demand for single family dwellings).

Increasing urban density also increases the amount of nature because you aren't building suburbs on top of it.

eg Silicon Valley would be one of the world's most productive fruit farming regions if we hadn't covered it in single family houses in 1950.

Note there is a kind of "towers in the park" urbanism seen in China that actually is a bad balance between the two and kind of unpleasant to live in.

>The idea that we should all live this way to conserve space—a resource which is only scarce in these urban places—seems excessive to put it mildly.

We're not only conserving space, we're conserving distance. Consider a uniformly populated city with a circular boundary (spherical cow). For a density of X, the mean distance from anyone's residence to nature is L. If that density becomes 2X, that distance is now 0.7L. A denser city directly puts its residents closer to nature — real nature, although we can't move the mountains!

Your argument is a complaint about the size of cities, which is mostly orthogonal to density (Honolulu is much denser than Atlanta!).

> A lot of urban folks are rebutting my “substantial nature” complaint with references to their city’s parks

One important aspect of nature is the ability to escape people. Most city parks cannot do that.

I agree. That was my point, in case that’s not evident.

When I've lived in a dense city, there have always been large natural areas within walking distance. The ideal is something like 1/2 of the land as lots, 1/3 as parks, and 1/6 for streets and other paved areas. "Parks" includes both developed urban parks and larger forested/coastal areas with wide walking trails. The trade-off is that there is not much space for ground-level parking, and most people commuting from outside the city must use public transport.

The suburbs don't actually present a solution to this. There is no more nature in them than there is in any other urban environment. It's all manicured lawns and endless pavement, and you can't even walk to a park, because getting anywhere requires hopping into a car.

If you want to see nature, you have to live way out in the boonies, on at a minimum, two-acre lots. If everyone lived like that, we'd all have two-hour commutes on twenty-lane highways.

I wasn’t advocating for suburbs. There are more options besides suburbs and urban areas—you should check them out!

> If you want to see nature, you have to live way out in the boonies, on at a minimum, two-acre lots. If everyone lived like that, we'd all have two-hour commutes on twenty-lane highways.

What a strange comment! Millions of people live with reasonable access to nature and most of them don’t have 2 acre lots nor do they need “twenty-lane highways”. Y’all urban folks need to venture out of your cities once in a while—it’s a biiiiggg world out there.

I don't quite get your point, are you suggesting to live near nature or to have the ability to access nature when you want to?

If the second, I really don't see how taking cars out of urban centers and making nice walkable people-focused areas stops you from taking a bus out and biking the rest of the way, or even renting a car once you're out of the city part

> I don't quite get your point, are you suggesting to live near nature or to have the ability to access nature when you want to?

Both? I’m not really sure how these are different given that proximity is the limiting factor in access.

> If the second, I really don't see how taking cars out of urban centers and making nice walkable people-focused areas stops you from taking a bus out and biking the rest of the way, or even renting a car once you're out of the city part

I’m not sure what you’re arguing here. I certainly don’t have a problem with making urban areas more walkable. That said, an hour of driving after work isn’t going to get you past the suburbs in most US cities, which means you’re limited to weekend trips and if you’re spending every weekend trying to get out of the city it’s worth asking if city life is optimal for you.

> Both? I’m not really sure how these are different given that proximity is the limiting factor in access.

Think about what happens if everyone does this. There are about 613,000 households in my city; what does it look like if all of them were to move out of the city and go somewhere closer to nature? Well, they'd probably each take up a lot more space, and... well, that sounds a lot like suburban sprawl! And suddenly you're not quite so proximate to nature anymore.

No, I'd rather let cities build up, and build/maintain better access to nature outside the city via transit. Leave nature be, and make it easy to get to when you want to.

The US has 2.2 BN acres which is 7 acres for every man, woman, and child, and yet each person resides on maybe 0.05 acres (average lot size is .2 acres divided by average household size of 2.5 people/household is 0.08 rounding down because tens of millions don’t live in a single-family building). There is a tremendous amount of space that isn’t inhabited—much of that is used for farming, but we farm far more than we need—millions of acres could be used for housing.

Anyway, I’m not saying everyone needs to pack up and move out of cities—only that the gospel of urban density sounds dystopian to me.

Sure, there’s plenty of space out in the middle of nowhere. But can you imagine the scale of the infrastructure that would be required to turn so much of that into living space? Think streets, water, sewer, power, food distribution, etc.

Anyway, I’m not saying everyone should live in concrete jungles either. Think more like the Netherlands than New York City.

> Sure, there’s plenty of space out in the middle of nowhere. But can you imagine the scale of the infrastructure that would be required to turn so much of that into living space? Think streets, water, sewer, power, food distribution, etc.

My position is "we don't need to move everyone into cities or expand public transit infrastructure to every corner of the country". It is not "we should move everyone out of the cities and distribute them uniformly across the country".

> Anyway, I’m not saying everyone should live in concrete jungles either. Think more like the Netherlands than New York City.

The Netherlands has 10x the population density of the US, and the US probably would come to resemble NL if we didn't have the luxury of space. The US has a whole range of density, however--if you want something like NL, we certainly have it on offer, and I'm fully on board with making urban and suburban areas more people-friendly. I just disagree with people who think we all need to live urban lives.

Okay, because we haven’t actually touched on many of the reasons us pro-density folks think it’s a good thing: how do you suggest we reduce our emissions as much as we need to in the coming decades? Keeping in mind that a large proportion of emissions are from light-duty vehicles and heating/cooling buildings, both of which increase with lower densities.

In any case, I don’t think everyone needs to live an urban life, I just think suburbia should get quite a lot more urban, and both cities and suburbs should be easier to get around without a car. That’s where the vast majority of people live anyway.

> Okay, because we haven’t actually touched on many of the reasons us pro-density folks think it’s a good thing: how do you suggest we reduce our emissions as much as we need to in the coming decades? Keeping in mind that a large proportion of emissions are from light-duty vehicles and heating/cooling buildings, both of which increase with lower densities.

Massive projects to resettle people in urban areas or dramatically extend public transit networks will take many decades to break even from a carbon emissions standpoint. It's much faster (and far more politically tenable) to electrify as much transportation (e.g., EVs) and heating/cooling as possible while moving our grid to clean energy.

> In any case, I don’t think everyone needs to live an urban life, I just think suburbia should get quite a lot more urban, and both cities and suburbs should be easier to get around without a car.

I mostly agree with this, although I think we can decouple density and walkability. My grievance was with folks who want to impose an urban lifestyle on everyone.

I don't think anyone wants to force you to live an urban lifestyle. I personally wish there were places I could move that was walkable, bikeable, and without having to cross 4 lanes of loud polluting traffic.

Those places don't really exist, since most major US cities have been built to accommodate cars first. And even those are way less affordable (because people want to live in cities and theres not enough housing to cover it) forcing people who would rather live in cities to move to suburbs instead. That's what people are lamenting.

I'm sure there are some people like you're describing ("I just wish there was a walkable place for me"), but many people regularly argue that almost everyone needs to move into cities because suburban/exurban/rural sprawl is taking over the world, we're running out of space/nature, it's the only way to save our planet from climate change, infrastructure outside of cities is financially unsustainable, etc.

For what it's worth, I'm bought into walkability/bikeability/etc. I'm just tired of the density, social problems, and distance from nature associated with most US cities. I think it would be really cool to get some like-minded people together and build a little village with walkability/bikeability/nature in mind.

> It's much faster (and far more politically tenable) to electrify as much transportation (e.g., EVs) and heating/cooling as possible while moving our grid to clean energy.

Vehicle turnover is very slow, so I don’t expect this to happen as quickly as you might be thinking: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/03/10/climate/elect...

Improving public transit doesn’t have to mean huge rail projects though, it can just mean running buses more frequently and giving them their own lanes to skip traffic. And we don’t have to massively resettle people, we can let (and encourage) towns to densify and build more bike/ped/transit infrastructure.

This also isn’t necessarily fast, no. But I don’t think it’s either/or; I think we need both.

> although I think we can decouple density and walkability.

I don’t think we can. The two are directly opposed to each other. The less dense a place is, the further apart everything is, which inherently makes it less walkable. Certainly you can (and should) build sidewalks anywhere if they don’t already exist, but past a low enough density nobody is going to walk anyway unless they’re forced to.

> Vehicle turnover is very slow, so I don’t expect this to happen as quickly as you might be thinking

The best case for getting people to uproot and move to cities in significant numbers is still measured in generations, not years or even decades. The best case for extending public transit to every suburb and exurb (never mind rural community) is probably on the same order. The worst case for EVs is a couple of decades (to 80% of cars on the road; obviously there's a long tail that diminishes).

> Improving public transit doesn’t have to mean huge rail projects though, it can just mean running buses more frequently and giving them their own lanes to skip traffic.

The only people who are likely to take buses in the suburbs (with few exceptions) or exurbs or beyond are those who can't afford cars or who lack a driver's license. An extra lane to skip traffic isn't compelling because traffic is a mild problem outside of cities (perhaps with the exception in certain city-adjacent suburbs). Frankly, the same is true of rail.

> This also isn’t necessarily fast, no. But I don’t think it’s either/or; I think we need both.

I like the idea of more public transit and walkability, but I don't think there's any legitimate case to be made that these initiatives will meaningfully reduce our carbon footprint in the necessary timescales.

> I don’t think we can. The two are directly opposed to each other. The less dense a place is, the further apart everything is, which inherently makes it less walkable.

Walkable doesn't mean you can get to every place by foot, it just means you can get to the places you need to go to by foot. Today, suburbs and exurbs have huge zones for residential and commercial such that most people have to drive to get to the commercial areas, but we could easily rezone to allow for a finer-grained patchwork of residential and commercial zones. The finer-grained patchwork means that less of any zone needs to be reserved for parking/cars (it's not just breaking one big parking lot into many smaller lots with the same total area--in a finer-grained patchwork, fewer people need to drive so the total area for parking/cars is lower) which in aggregate means more space for other things. It may never be as walkable as a dense city, but there's still tremendous opportunity for improvement.

> The best case for extending public transit to every suburb and exurb (never mind rural community) is probably on the same order. The worst case for EVs is a couple of decades (to 80% of cars on the road; obviously there's a long tail that diminishes).

Why are you using the standard of "public transit to every suburb and exurb" for transit and "80% of cars" for vehicle electrification? There's a lot of low-hanging fruit in the first-ring suburbs that we can tackle before the exurbs; those may be a lost cause for now, but a lot of people live in those inner suburbs!

And that aside, we need to at least stop the bleeding, right? If metro area growth boundaries keep expanding outward, that means more cars on the road and more energy and materials needed to make that happen. If we don't allow existing towns to build up at all, the only way for them to build is outward.

> I like the idea of more public transit and walkability, but I don't think there's any legitimate case to be made that these initiatives will meaningfully reduce our carbon footprint in the necessary timescales.

Alone they won't, just like vehicle electrification alone won't. We need to both reduce VMT and electrify, and we need both now.

https://rmi.org/our-driving-habits-must-be-part-of-the-clima...

> but we could easily rezone to allow for a finer-grained patchwork of residential and commercial zones. The finer-grained patchwork means that less of any zone needs to be reserved for parking/cars (it's not just breaking one big parking lot into many smaller lots with the same total area--in a finer-grained patchwork, fewer people need to drive so the total area for parking/cars is lower) which in aggregate means more space for other things.

This isn't separating walkability and density, this is higher density. This is the kind of thing we need!

Arguably, the suburbs make this worse, since you now need to drive through even more urban sprawl to get to true nature.

> The suburbs don't actually present a solution to this. There is no more nature in them than there is in any other urban environment. It's all manicured lawns and endless pavement, and you can't even walk to a park, because getting anywhere requires hopping into a car.

That's not a suburb, at least not many of them.

In past topics I've asked for concrete examples of these suburbs where you can't walk anywhere and have not received many answer. Can you name a handful?

There is a ton of nature near my suburb, to an extent that is impossible in a city. A 5 minute bike ride gets me into the forest (not a manicured city park, actual forest) which extends for a long distance. I can ride my mountain bike all day without getting into built areas.

From my extensive experience of a few different suburbs, neighborhoods are often separated by large stretches of nature. Perhaps we have a different understanding of what a suburb is, but they absolutely contain way more nature than any city.

I’m not really anti-car. I think cars bring a kind of personal freedom that is hard to replicate in other ways but are a big liability in cities and for pedestrians, so ideally cars in cities would all be shunted underground so the surface can be for people and parks.

My ideal vision of the future is we mostly live in luxury in dense, beautiful cities that are walkable with good, seamless transit (think like escalator-like seamlessness). People spend weekends camping in vast, re-wilded nature reserves.

Year 2100 scenario: Get rid of most suburbs and staple-crop farms eventually (vat-grown staples—think Calysta FeedKind or Solar Foods—replace the need for highly processed staples like corn or wheat or soy or factory farms). Replace with rewilded nature reserves which people get to via tunnels or electric VTOL (with special consideration to low-noise design).

Pedestrians in very dense cities walk in park-like surface paths. Solarpunk-style. :) Solarpunk cities and vast nature reserves (accessible via low-impact transport, and commonly used for camping) instead of endless row crops and suburbs. :)

> when the pro-urban/pro-density/anti-car people talk about their vision for the world

Beggars belief your response to an article on the psychological and health benefits of nature is… more cars?

Building roads, urban sprawl, the noise and pollution from the cars themselves, the destructive invasion of all the infrastructure associated with car-use - all of it is directly destructive of the nature we’re talking about.

> Beggars belief your response to an article on the psychological and health benefits of nature is… more cars?

Of course, I didn’t say that, I only said the pro-density utopia sounds super bleak to me.

Anyway, there’s still plenty of space out there and all of the urban people in this thread are talking like they’ve never seen other parts of the country before—there’s still a whole bunch of space between New York and San Fran—it’s not the endless suburbs you seem to be imagining.

As someone who lives in a suburb, every time I visit a city and go to a city park I always am like "is this it?" Access to nature is far greater in the suburbs and it is not even close.

I would also add that nature is at its best when there is not many people, or better yet no people around you. Human dense places always strike me as very unnatural.

The three options are to build densely, or to sprawl over into nature spaces, or to have fewer children.

We’re already having fewer children, and anyway there’s a whole lot of space out there. You talk like Chicago and LA are nearly bordering each other.

Boston, NYC, Philly, Baltimore, DC, and Richmond are practically bordering each other these days.

Sure, but the country is a fair bit bigger than the northern east coast. There's lots of opportunity out there.

I am very pro-pedestrian / anti-car, but that’s in the context of how to actually get around town most of the time… obviously (to me) you use the car to leave town and see the wonders of our world.

If people that live in cities are to be relegated to never leave, I for one am not interested.

Yeah, cities that have good enough transit, you often don't need to own a car, and can use an on-demand rental service for this kind of thing. (You locate a nearby car in the app and then unlock it through the app when you get to it). It's usually way, way cheaper than owning a car, and handy because for example, if you need to move stuff, you can get a van, and otherwise you can get a smaller car. You don't fall into the trap of driving a big SUV empty all of the time just in case you want to move gear, and then when you have to move stuff to realise that a lot of SUVs don't actually have that much more space than a decent sized hatchback!

> It's usually way, way cheaper than owning a car

It’s usually cheaper than each person owning their own car, but more expensive than a household sharing a car. Of course, this varies widely from city to city and it depends on how often people rent cars or use rideshare or taxis.

The nice thing is you get fast, comfortable transit all the time, but the really nice thing is how much stuff you take advantage of that you might not otherwise. For example, I’m already paying for a car, so going on big road trips is only a marginal extra cost (rather than $100/day + hassle for a car rental). Similarly, I probably wouldn’t have gotten into camping if I had to rent a car for each trip. I probably also wouldn’t visit family as often.

I definitely see the appeal of not needing to own a car, but I tried it and it wasn’t for me. For my city, I’d love to see them start by cleaning up and policing existing public transit (for example) and then scale up from there.

I live in the suburbs. And I’m anti-car in as much as we can and should do more to make cars less necessary for day-to-day life. Make schools walkable. Make basic shopping walkable. Build mix-use town centers instead of strip malls with acres of parking.

Doing these things frees up space for other things. That could be housing or green space.

And if there’s less traffic overall, it becomes easier to get out to the mountains/forest/etc.

I don’t disagree that true nature is different than groomed parks. And I like nature. But I’d rather not spend 3 hours in suburban traffic to get to the mountains that are 40 miles away.

We can better maintain mountains and forests by having dense living areas for most people. There should be good public transport links from these areas to national parks. The enemy of wilderness is not urbanists, it’s suburban sprawl.

Suburbs aren't typically replacing forests, they're typically replacing farms, and we have far more agricultural land than we need (we produce a huge surplus of food) that we aren't managing well in the first place. We can and should protect existing nature, expand our national parks, and incentivize the naturalization and public access of existing private lands; however, we can do this without packing everyone into dense urban cores.

According to a 1993 UN Food and Agriculture Organization report, it takes about 1.25 acres of agriculture land to feed one person. That value doesn't care about whether a person lives in a city or a suburb. The median suburban American lives in a 2.5 person household on 0.2 acres of land, which means about 0.08 acres per person. I'm not sure what the average urbanite lives on, but let's say it's a quarter of that: 0.02 acres per person. So we're talking about 1.33 vs 1.27--suburbanites require only about 4% more land than urbanites. Hardly a major threat to nature compared to excessive and unsustainable agricultural practices.

There are a lot more factors to the equation than farming space. And what do you think was there before the farms?

> There are a lot more factors to the equation than farming space

Yes, but agricultural footprint is the dominating factor.

> And what do you think was there before the farms?

Nature, to my point. Recall that you're the one arguing that suburbs rather than agriculture is threatening nature:

> The enemy of wilderness is not urbanists, it’s suburban sprawl.

> Yes, but agricultural footprint is the dominating factor.

Perhaps, but you also need to consider:

- transport to work / school / hospitals / entertainment

- food distribution

- sewage

- electricity

- emergency services coverage

- etc…

I don’t have any hard stats for you but my background reading has suggested these are significant.

> Nature, to my point. Recall that you're the one arguing that suburbs rather than agriculture is threatening nature

Yes, because we could be rewilding, creating new national parks etc. but instead are building suburbs. We can also replace existing suburbs on longer time-scales.

We're talking about land usage, not infrastructure. Agriculture completely dominates a person's land usage footprint.

No, we shouldn't all live this way. The argument is how to build the dense parts of cities so they're nice to live in. If you want to live in the countryside, that's great, but that's an entirely different thing.

Agreed. I wish more people shared your perspective! :)

> I’m sure they’ve grown, but it’s still a big world out there people. I

No, it just isn't. Humans have transformed seventy per cent of the land on Earth[1]. Including the deserts. Suburbs are the second most land intensive thing we do, after farming, and for almost every other developed-world country, this problem is more acute than in the US. Get some perspective.

That is a "wind turbines cause global warming" level of bad take. More succinctly, so close to a lie I no longer have the patience to differentiate them.

[1] https://www.ipcc.ch/srccl/

The US has nearly 7 acres of land for every man, woman, and child and yet the average lot size is only .2 acres. Since the average household size is 2.5 people, that’s about 0.08 acres used per person. Moreover, that figure ignores apartment, condo, and other multi-family buildings, so the actual land usage per person is quite a lot lower. Of course, we also need farms to support people, but the US produces much more food than it needs. And yes, the population is growing, but that growth is tapering off and anyway we could manipulate our immigration policies as well. At the end of the day, the US is a vast country, but this isn’t immediately obvious to people who have lived their whole lives in a dense urban environment.

Did you misspell "world" as "US" ? Or are you dishonestly using non-representative figures? The US has a much smaller proportion of the developed world's men, women and children than it does the land, and those men, women and children are extremely carbon-intensive.

> Did you misspell "world" as "US" ?

No, at no point have I been discussing the whole world.

> Or are you dishonestly using non-representative figures?

No, but feel free to correct me if I made a mistake in my calculations.

> The US has a much smaller proportion of the developed world's men, women and children than it does the land

Yes, this is my point. The US has a lot of land per person.

> and those men, women and children are extremely carbon-intensive.

Yes, but that has nothing to do with this conversation.

"not just green spaces scattered amid the concrete"

Most major cities have at least one park that is a few hundred acres.

A few hundred acres of forest is very different than a few hundred acres of soccer pitches, tennis courts, playgrounds, lawns, gardens, etc with a few acres of bird sanctuary, wetland, or prairie strewn about. It’s better than concrete, but it’s not nature.

Most towns and suburbs don't have acres of wild forest in them. That's not exactly a unique "flaw" of cities.

> Most towns and suburbs don't have acres of wild forest in them. That's not exactly a unique "flaw" of cities.

Not "in" them obviously, but suburbs can often have expanses of nature right next to them unlike dense cities.

Living in a suburb, I can walk to all the necessities of day to day life but in just a 5 minute bike ride I can be into the forest where I can ride for hours on end without seeing any sign of civilization. It is a wonderful escape from the stress of 24x7 slack and jira.

What a bizarre constraint. Of course the forest isn’t in the town. You live in a suburb or town or (this is going to blow some minds in this thread) acreage outside of town that is at most a reasonable drive to nature.

My criticism of cities is that a lot of them are hours away from anything that anyone would call nature (although this thread has made me aware that there are a shockingly large number of people who have never actually seen nature and for whom the word conjures up images of their local urban park).

> My criticism of cities is that a lot of them are hours away from anything that anyone would call nature

This is only because the suburbs are often sprawled in between the city and any nature that might have been nearby. It’d be a heck of a lot easier to get to from the city if you didn’t have miles and miles of low-density suburbs in each direction.

Anyway, “local urban parks” is a pretty broad category. It’s not just tiny parks we’re talking about; here’s one near me: https://fow.org/visit-the-park/photo-gallery/

> This is only because the suburbs are often sprawled in between the city and any nature that might have been nearby.

Agreed, but I don’t think there’s a realistic world where you have dense urban cores immediately juxtaposed with forest, especially considering how m any people are advocating for accelerated urbanization (moving people from suburbs and rural areas).

Sure, that park looks pretty legit. I think that’s with pretty exceptional or those photos aren’t telling the full story—my city has similar parks but behind the photographer would be rows of houses and the city would still be loud around us.

> Agreed, but I don’t think there’s a realistic world where you have dense urban cores immediately juxtaposed with forest, especially considering how m any people are advocating for accelerated urbanization (moving people from suburbs and rural areas).

At this point, maybe, because we’ve leveled any forests immediately around cities for suburban sprawl. But in the general case, if you’re starting fresh, urbanization makes it easier to leave the forest intact than if you sprawl out with low-density housing.

> Sure, that park looks pretty legit. I think that’s with pretty exceptional or those photos aren’t telling the full story—my city has similar parks but behind the photographer would be rows of houses and the city would still be loud around us.

I’ve hiked there a bunch and the photos are representative. If you’re near the edge of the park you’ll be able to hear cars as there are unfortunately large roadways nearby, but for the most part the trees tend to block out the noise.

> At this point, maybe, because we’ve leveled any forests immediately around cities for suburban sprawl.

In the general case, we've leveled forests for food production--originally Native American tribes cleared forest to help them harvest bison en masse and then the descendants of Europeans cleared forest for agriculture. Cities and suburbs eventually came to displace land that was previously used for agriculture.

But in the general case, if you’re starting fresh, urbanization makes it easier to leave the forest intact than if you sprawl out with low-density housing.

> But in the general case, if you’re starting fresh, urbanization makes it easier to leave the forest intact than if you sprawl out with low-density housing.

I mean, this is true in a contrived sense--if you plan your city from its initial settlement and create strict nature preserves then yeah, you can probably have your urban/natural juxtaposition, but that's pretty hard to achieve in a democratic context (good luck keeping this a popular priority over the decades and centuries). Your best bet is starting next to a federally-protected forest so residents of your city can't easily decide they want to expand into it. In whatever case, "starting fresh" is the least realistic option.