Boring Cities Are Bad for Your Health (wired.com)
- Reference: 0175816745
- News link: https://science.slashdot.org/story/25/01/02/1259221/boring-cities-are-bad-for-your-health
- Source link: https://www.wired.com/story/boring-cities-are-bad-for-your-health/
[1] https://www.wired.com/story/boring-cities-are-bad-for-your-health/
Retitled (Score:3)
The the word "Boring" out of the title, and it's much more accurate.
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On the contrary; life expectancy in cities are healthier than outside cities. See e.g. [1]https://www.utmb.edu/newsroomarchive/article13609.aspx [utmb.edu].
[1] https://www.utmb.edu/newsroomarchive/article13609.aspx
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Wow, they didn't control for wealth or diet?
Not having done so it would seem the concrete is even worse than I imagined given the small ~2yr difference.
Sometimes we see effect sizes close to 7 yrs on just those two (which have bidirectional causation).
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"Wow, they didn't control for wealth or diet?"
Wealth and diet are independent factors? LOL
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I suppose they are correlated, but up to a point. Somebody making, say, 1 million a year may afford more fancy restaurants than someone making 100k, but they both have access to high-quality food, especially if the 100k person chooses to buy fresh ingredients and cook themselves. On the other hand, in the village where my parents come from there were people (now dead at an above average age) quite poor, but were growing their own vegetables, raising chickens and goats, making their own olive oil and their c
Retitled - "Agenda based news article claims" (Score:2)
Wired used to be better than just agenda based 'news' articles.
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False. You can't lump all cities together and expect a consistent result. There are absolutely cities which are bad for your health. There are also cities which are good for your health. Around the world cities vary greatly in air quality, noise level, walkability, all which negatively affect health. But on the flip side cities also allow great access to other benefits, such as easier access to a wider variety of nutrition, better access to healthcare, and often feature more recent and up to date developmen
Stockholm (Score:2)
Stockholm provides the best balance between urbanization and nature. Not only that, it provides the right stimulus to its citizens: amazement, excitement, inspiration, happiness, curiosity, comfort, enlightenment and a sense of connection to something greater than oneself: a sense of belonging.
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Maybe I was captured by Stockholm and utterly I developed the Stockholm syndrome...
Dodging hobo with scissors: keeps you sharp (Score:1)
So does having to be hyperaware on subway platforms.
And don't forget the mental calisthenics that is remembering how to open up your absurdly complex bike lock.
Urban environments are nice but for one crucial factor: they are inhabited by humans. Humans aren't meant to live in such close proximity. We are meant to spread out to distant treetops or caves or whatever. If we'd come up from ants or bees instead of apes, cities perhaps wouldn't bring out our worst aspects the way the do with us upright monkeys.
Re: Dodging hobo with scissors: keeps you sharp (Score:1)
And we're better because we wage wars measured in miles instead of millimeters?
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> So does having to be hyperaware on subway platforms.
> And don't forget the mental calisthenics that is remembering how to open up your absurdly complex bike lock.
> Urban environments are nice but for one crucial factor: they are inhabited by humans. Humans aren't meant to live in such close proximity. We are meant to spread out to distant treetops or caves or whatever. If we'd come up from ants or bees instead of apes, cities perhaps wouldn't bring out our worst aspects the way the do with us upright monkeys.
To your point, country village living is a more normal situation for humans. And our "tribal limits" are pretty much hardwired into us.
In my wooded village, and especially on my street, we look at each other eye to eye, we say hello and have impromptu conversations, we know each other's names. There is more than just my street, but the streets and woods are constructed to segment everyone. When I'm in a large city, I do as the people there do, I don't look people in the eye, and acknowledge or converse a
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> In my wooded village
Papa Smurf, is that you?
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>> In my wooded village
> Papa Smurf, is that you?
Did ya ever wonder how tired Smurfette had to be as the only woman in a world of blue dudes? But no doubt quite popular. But she's mine [1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VGBrdr5Ghn8
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"And don't forget the mental calisthenics that is remembering how to open up your absurdly complex bike lock."
Come on, we know you've never ridden a bike.
"Urban environments are nice but for one crucial factor: they are inhabited by humans."
Same with rural environments, only in urban environments people don't shoot your pets.
"Humans aren't meant to live in such close proximity. We are meant to spread out to distant treetops or caves or whatever. If we'd come up from ants or bees instead of apes, cities perh
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And don't forget the mental calisthenics that is remembering how to open up your absurdly complex bike lock.
Bragging about finding bike locks too complicated is a weird flex, but you do you.
Re: Dodging hobo with scissors: keeps you sharp (Score:1)
No, bragging about living in a place where anything that isn't bolted down grows legs in 30 minutes or less is the weird flex.
I lock my doors, but I don't expect that my lawn chairs would get jacked if I leave them outside.
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No, bragging about living
No, you really were bragging about how hard you find bike locks. Maybe I'm just naturally smart but I've never found my bike lock required "mental calisthenics".
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> I live in a city and leave my lawn chairs outside. Have for years and never had one "jacked". I've also never had to dodge a hobo with scissors; worst a hobo has ever done to me is ask for change. How often has these things happened to you? I'm going to guess never. You just have a wild imagination about what goes on in cities. (Maybe that's why you find bike locks complex - you have a creative mind rather than a logical one.)
> And by the way, study after study shows that being around others is good for your health while being isolated is bad for your health. If you truly didn't want to be around others, you wouldn't feel the need to attempt some form of social interaction by posting here.
An anecdote for an anecdote: I used to live out in rural Texas, my parents live in the rural midwest. Left our cars unlocked 90% of the time, didn't even lock our house at night, never had anyone shoot any pets, never got robbed or had things stolen. I have also lived on Long Island in New York and Newport News in Virginia. My three year old son's tricycle was stolen off the porch the first night it was outside. I have been robbed at gunpoint once. Have been hassled and bothered by random people on the stre
New meme curse dropping (Score:2)
May you live in interesting times, but in a boring city
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> May you live in interesting times, but in a boring city
Awesome sig!
Because architects build for architects not people (Score:1)
Architects are nasty, vein, untalented bastards who want their pathetic creations to STICK OUT, not blend in with the lovely old buildings around them.
They call building that fit in "pastiche" and hate it, while people want that because IT LOOKS NICE.
They don't get famous for building nice stuff that fits in - they build to show off to other shitty architects and hate building WHAT PEOPLE LIKE.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balfron_Tower#/media/File:Balfron_tower.jpg
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Yep, that's all architects, not an absurd generalization at all. If only there was a school that could teach architects how to design things that people wanted and could use.
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Mies Van Der Rohe, is that you?
Ridiculous article (Score:2)
Something you see daily that doesn't change in any way is not stimulating. Thus, architecture can have zero impact on someone's mental state in the way they claim. There are better studies saying plants in cities make people happier and healthier. I, for one, just wouldn't live in a large over-dense city. Noise and traffic tend to make people unhappy too. That's not a study. People just know that.
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> Something you see daily that doesn't change in any way is not stimulating
So, Vegas?
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No, the lighting changes, as do the giant digital billboards.
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Yeah, just like nature. You see nature every day, it cannot be stimulating.
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Nope, nature changes based on seasons and wildlife are pretty dynamic within it too. Rabbits move around, different birds are spotted, etc.
Happiness metrics?! Just stop architects' shit! (Score:1)
Local governments don't need new age Happiness Metrics, they just need to stop giving permission for shit modern architects to put up their disgusting monstrosities and let the people, not architects or their planner chums, choose what will be built, or demolished.
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Fuck Newham's planners, architects and their happiness index.
A street in Newham:
https://imgur.com/a/oRXaPfm
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Replying to your own posts to make it look like there's a single person that agrees with your bias? LOL
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I replied to illustrate my post, you prick.
Now tell us how much you love the planning and architecture in that image and which fucked-up schools teach architects that that is what people want.
Bias?!
Yes, I'm biased!
And that "bias" is the bias of normal, decent people for nice towns and against the anti-social architects and planners who have fucked up Newham and everywhere like it, building stuff to further their own careers, but doing nothing for the people who have to live in that ugly shit.
And those shit
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That looks like a victim of building for car dependence. Bring on LTNs and an end to the default dominance of cars.
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Low traffic is shit. It does not give the space back to the human beings.
Car *free* is what we, city residents, need.
But, anyway, planners cannot themselves decide to remove cars from an area.
They can - without pathetic Happiness indices or any other academic bullshit - stop approving shit buildings by shit architects and only approve buildings that the residents want.
"Car Culture" creates soul-crushing architecture (Score:2)
If you build a place to prioritize cars, that place will eventually resemble a parking lot.
I want you to visualize a parking lot in your mind. Visualize yourself standing there. Sitting there. Setting up a dining table and eating a meal there. Going to bed there. Driving to work in another parking-lot-city, where you sit at a desk in the parking lot trying to work. And then on the weekends, put the fam in the car and drive to tour a distant parking lot.
That summarizes 90% of the experience of living in a US
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100% this. It's similar in Canada which is why I like to escape periodically to a place with great urban design like The Netherlands. Cities and towns there are fantastic places that put people first.
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Major metro areas are less car dependent... Accomplishing day-to-day activities without a car outside of a major metro in the US is usually extraordinarily difficult.
Suburbanites often must spend multiple hours a day driving. The solution is urbanization. [1]https://slate.com/business/202... [slate.com]
[1] https://slate.com/business/2023/06/suburbs-driving-traffic-housing-affordable-solutions.html
Doesn't have to look good (Score:2)
I doubt it has much to do with how "interesting" or "pretty" a building is but more to do with how hard your brain has to work to tell the difference between one location and the next. If everything is exactly the same and "fits in" nicely, then you have to work really hard to figure out where you are. If you are in an area where every building is unique, then you will have a much easier time building a mental map. Subdivisions where every house has one of 5 building templates are a worst case scenario a
Good thing we didn't... (Score:1)
...bulldoze half the space in cities to make room for privately owned cars, taking architectural gems with it, or anything.
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...bulldoze half the space in cities to make room for privately owned cars, taking architectural gems with it, or anything.
Such as [1]Penn Station [allthatsinteresting.com]? [2]That place [rarehistoricalphotos.com] which now has tons of [3]privately owned cars [nytimes.com].
[1] https://allthatsinteresting.com/old-penn-station
[2] https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/old-penn-station-pictures-new-york/
[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/24/nyregion/old-penn-station-pictures-new-york.html
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[1]Atlanta 1919 and today [instagram.com]. It looks like the city got bombed.
[1] https://www.instagram.com/p/ChfOzOcuT0S/?igshid=YmMyMTA2M2Y%3D
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Of course, it wouldn't have been an issue if we didn't listen to commie losers of the Bauhaus school of architecture in the first place.