I finally got around to reading a little bit of Murray Bookchin

[zompist]

I've come to realize that most people fall squarely into two categories: city mice and country mice. City mice find the country boring, backwards and unsanitary, country mice view cities as wretched hives of scum and villainy. It never seems to occur to anyone in either category that their preferences aren't universal and that in fact, both forms of human habitation (and in fact, there are a lot more intermediate options) are legitimate.

My own view is that I have a hunch that concentrating 80% of the population in the cities as we do now is perhaps not ideal and probably doesn't fit people's actual preferences.

In North America, there's a third option, the suburbs. According to Pew Research, 14% of the US population is rural, 31% is urban, and 55% suburban. There's a lot to say for the suburban lifestyle: you get a big lot of your own, you can work in the city and visit whenever you want, it's safe and quiet.

It's also ecologically inefficient, and the local temptation is always for more sprawl. Which is a problem: developers only pay part of the cost of expanding town services, and those services may get more expensive while not really getting a larger taxpayer base. Plus traffic gets really tedious. There are trains but they were built for the population density of a century ago. The restaurant and entertainment options are subpar.

Anyway, for a better society I think the question is just how to make both rural and urban lives better.

(I certainly don't despise rural life-- my brother has lived in a small town for fifty years and he loves it. Though he jokes that after that time he's only slightly considered a newcomer.)

My impression-- though it's been decades since I've been there-- is that European cities are far more pleasant... but don't know how to achieve density.

[Ares Land]

In North America, there's a third option, the suburbs. According to Pew Research, 14% of the US population is rural, 31% is urban, and 55% suburban. There's a lot to say for the suburban lifestyle: you get a big lot of your own, you can work in the city and visit whenever you want, it's safe and quiet.

It's also ecologically inefficient, and the local temptation is always for more sprawl. Which is a problem: developers only pay part of the cost of expanding town services, and those services may get more expensive while not really getting a larger taxpayer base. Plus traffic gets really tedious. There are trains but they were built for the population density of a century ago. The restaurant and entertainment options are subpar.

There's sort of a third option in Europe too; it's said French suburbs are ghettoes, which is often true but there are nice suburbs too. There's a lot less sprawl! but the problems you mention are still applicable to some extent.

My impression-- though it's been decades since I've been there-- is that European cities are far more pleasant... but don't know how to achieve density.

I'm surprised at the last remark. Cities are pretty densely built - Inner Paris is comparable to Manhattan. Other cities I'm familiar with (Lyon, Marseille, London, Munich, Berlin, Brussels) are less spectacular in that respect but still very densely populated; and outside inner cities there's a lot less urban sprawl.
Not that urban planning was competently handled; outside inner city limits, the Paris area looks pretty much awful. There's also the perennial housing crisis -- it more or less always was bad, but it really took a turn for the worse in the past few years.

[Mornche Geddick]

In North America, there's a third option, the suburbs. According to Pew Research, 14% of the US population is rural, 31% is urban, and 55% suburban. There's a lot to say for the suburban lifestyle: you get a big lot of your own, you can work in the city and visit whenever you want, it's safe and quiet.

It's also ecologically inefficient, and the local temptation is always for more sprawl. Which is a problem: developers only pay part of the cost of expanding town services, and those services may get more expensive while not really getting a larger taxpayer base. Plus traffic gets really tedious. There are trains but they were built for the population density of a century ago. The restaurant and entertainment options are subpar.

There's sort of a third option in Europe too; it's said French suburbs are ghettoes, which is often true but there are nice suburbs too. There's a lot less sprawl! but the problems you mention are still applicable to some extent.

My impression-- though it's been decades since I've been there-- is that European cities are far more pleasant... but don't know how to achieve density.

I'm surprised at the last remark. Cities are pretty densely built - Inner Paris is comparable to Manhattan. Other cities I'm familiar with (Lyon, Marseille, London, Munich, Berlin, Brussels) are less spectacular in that respect but still very densely populated; and outside inner cities there's a lot less urban sprawl.
Not that urban planning was competently handled; outside inner city limits, the Paris area looks pretty much awful. There's also the perennial housing crisis -- it more or less always was bad, but it really took a turn for the worse in the past few years.

European cities vary quite a bit. Speaking from experience, Nantes, Reims, Cambridge and Edinburgh are pretty nice places. On the other hand London is a traffic and affordability nightmare.

[zompist]

I'm surprised at the last remark. Cities are pretty densely built - Inner Paris is comparable to Manhattan. Other cities I'm familiar with (Lyon, Marseille, London, Munich, Berlin, Brussels) are less spectacular in that respect but still very densely populated; and outside inner cities there's a lot less urban sprawl.
Not that urban planning was competently handled; outside inner city limits, the Paris area looks pretty much awful. There's also the perennial housing crisis -- it more or less always was bad, but it really took a turn for the worse in the past few years.

OK, I didn't express myself well. What I'm thinking of is that you can't really build up the city center. If another 90,000 people want to live in the Xe arrondissement, you can't tear down all the lovely old buildings and erect skyscrapers.

You could do that here, even without involving the suburbs. The overall density of NYC is about 11,000 per km². You can always build those skyscrapers in Brooklyn. However, we don't do this enough, so we have a housing affordability problem too.

Probably because it was so devastated by WWII, Tokyo has been able to build far more housing than Europe or the US, and thus is more affordable.

(BTW I say "skyscraper" just to underline the point. But even a 12-story building will feel like a skyscraper to residents intent on not allowing any change.)

[jcb]

I'm surprised at the last remark. Cities are pretty densely built - Inner Paris is comparable to Manhattan. Other cities I'm familiar with (Lyon, Marseille, London, Munich, Berlin, Brussels) are less spectacular in that respect but still very densely populated; and outside inner cities there's a lot less urban sprawl.
Not that urban planning was competently handled; outside inner city limits, the Paris area looks pretty much awful. There's also the perennial housing crisis -- it more or less always was bad, but it really took a turn for the worse in the past few years.

OK, I didn't express myself well. What I'm thinking of is that you can't really build up the city center. If another 90,000 people want to live in the Xe arrondissement, you can't tear down all the lovely old buildings and erect skyscrapers.

You could do that here, even without involving the suburbs. The overall density of NYC is about 11,000 per km². You can always build those skyscrapers in Brooklyn. However, we don't do this enough, so we have a housing affordability problem too.

Probably because it was so devastated by WWII, Tokyo has been able to build far more housing than Europe or the US, and thus is more affordable.

(BTW I say "skyscraper" just to underline the point. But even a 12-story building will feel like a skyscraper to residents intent on not allowing any change.)

Perhaps part of the reason why Japan has more affordable housing is simply cultural? Japan has 377,975 km² of land. 75% of that is unlivable mountains. So it has 94,493 km² of livable land. Japan has 122.3 million people. So it has 1,294 people / 1 km² of livable land.

Japan's livable land is about the same size as Indiana, which has 6.97 million people, so it has only 75.15 people / 1 km² of livable land. (As far as I know, Indiana has no mountains.)

So Japan has had no choice but to get used to smaller living spaces instead of sprawling suburbia, lest large swathes of its population go homeless.

[zompist]

Probably because it was so devastated by WWII, Tokyo has been able to build far more housing than Europe or the US, and thus is more affordable.

So Japan has had no choice but to get used to smaller living spaces instead of sprawling suburbia, lest large swathes of its population go homeless.

It's not a matter of apartment size, it's a matter of building housing.

For the last decade, California has averaged about 10,000 housing starts a month. Japan has averaged about 70,000 a month. As it has 3 times the population, an equivalent rate to California would be 30,000. It builds more than twice as much housing, per resident. As late as 2018, it was more like three times as much housing per resident.

[jcb]

Probably because it was so devastated by WWII, Tokyo has been able to build far more housing than Europe or the US, and thus is more affordable.

So Japan has had no choice but to get used to smaller living spaces instead of sprawling suburbia, lest large swathes of its population go homeless.

It's not a matter of apartment size, it's a matter of building housing.

For the last decade, California has averaged about 10,000 housing starts a month. Japan has averaged about 70,000 a month. As it has 3 times the population, an equivalent rate to California would be 30,000. It builds more than twice as much housing, per resident. As late as 2018, it was more like three times as much housing per resident.

Yes, and it's cheaper to build smaller units than bigger ones, one can fit more smaller units than bigger ones in a given space, and therefore the units should be cheaper to rent.

Anyways, why do you think that California hasn't built more?

[zompist]

Anyways, why do you think that California hasn't built more?

In general, NIMBYism. It's so engrained in the US that people are barely aware of it. People everywhere, left or right, feel threatened by increased density. Then they wonder why a house costs over half a million dollars.

This page (found in quick web search) gives some regional comparisons; also notable for an absolutely awful AI image. (Look at the state names in the east.)

Basically: houses are more affordable in the Midwest and South. They're least affordable in California and the Northeast. The range in median home value goes from $296K (Indiana) to $742K (California).

But the Midwest is the best bargain: all the states where a median-income worker can afford a median-value home are there. That includes Illinois, though house building here is a little too low.

[Ares Land]

OK, I didn't express myself well. What I'm thinking of is that you can't really build up the city center. If another 90,000 people want to live in the Xe arrondissement, you can't tear down all the lovely old buildings and erect skyscrapers.

You could do that here, even without involving the suburbs. The overall density of NYC is about 11,000 per km². You can always build those skyscrapers in Brooklyn. However, we don't do this enough, so we have a housing affordability problem too.

Probably because it was so devastated by WWII, Tokyo has been able to build far more housing than Europe or the US, and thus is more affordable.

(BTW I say "skyscraper" just to underline the point. But even a 12-story building will feel like a skyscraper to residents intent on not allowing any change.)

Inner Paris is about 28% "recent" (as in, post-WWII) construction. You can (or could) build up to a certain extent. Some of the lovely old buildings weren't so lovely (that is, plenty of slums were cleared up), they also cleared down a lot of old industrial infrastucture.
My impression is that this has accelerated somewhat in recent years.
You can't increase the population spectacularly, though. Most of those old buildings (what we call haussmannien) are very high density housing: they're six (sometimes seven- or eight-)stories building packed closely together. You can build higher than that, but it comes with a tradeoff -- the streets have to be larger (so they get some sunlight, plus safety reasons).
To use the Xè arrondissement as an example, the density is 29,000 per km². Getting higher than that is a challenge, to say the least.
Well, historically it was even higher. In the XIXth century density reached 55,000 per km², but it must've been a really grim place back then.

Part of the solution would be to make the closer suburbs places people actually want to live in; and with decent public transportation. We're getting there, but it's a slow process.

[Nortaneous]

And no, I don't really think anyone should have the material standard of living of the seriously money-dripping people.

Why not?

There are goods that aren't easily distributed. We can't all have a beachfront villa and a sports car.

There's no law of the universe that says the price of sports cars can't come down. We can all have nutmeg and cloves; we can all have sports cars. Meeting the latent demand for beachfront villas is more difficult, but not in principle impossible. Beaches can be made.

There is a key difference between sports cars and beachfront villas ─ the price of sports cars is kept high in order to make a profit, but there is nothing that inherently says that every car couldn't be a sports car (aside from people's practical needs mandating vehicles other than sports cars in reality), so if profit was no concern there is no reason their price could not fall dramatically ─ but beachfront villas are inherently limited by the amount of beachfront that could possibly exist, and creating more beachfront to meet demand would likely be very environmentally harmful due to destroying existing habits to replace them with expanses of sand. As a result, everyone could just potentially have a sports car if they so desired one, but not everyone can own a beachfront villa, so in the new society beachfront villas would have to be assigned by lottery or timeshared or like.

Habits shmabits. What endangered species only lives in, say, the ten-mile radius around Long Island? There's plenty of East Coast, at least, and by the time we run out of that we'll hopefully be ready to terraform Mars. Actually, what would it take to terraform Venus? Would it be easier? We know how to make new habitable land and eventually we'll do it at scale. Similarly for sports cars: if iron ever becomes scarce enough, asteroid mining will be economical.

European cities vary quite a bit. Speaking from experience, Nantes, Reims, Cambridge and Edinburgh are pretty nice places. On the other hand London is a traffic and affordability nightmare.

Traffic in what sense? There aren't many cars - congestion pricing works very well. But foot traffic is a nightmare. In Zone 1 you can experience the sidewalk equivalent of the Beltway at 5:30. And if I had to commute on the Underground I'd go insane within the month. It certainly knows how to achieve density; I have much more sympathy for American city planners now.

(That's not to say London achieves density well! There are very few tall residential buildings; most of the housing, at least close enough to the center to avoid contracting suicidality from a commute, is sardine cans in N<5-story walkups.)

[rotting bones]

OP: Bourgeois means middle class. Middle class people are traditionally allergic to talking about things outside their point of view, which they regard as a waste of time. From personal experience, the only things one of my family members is capable of talking about are family, work, money, shopping and maybe religion, but only if it's her religion and the conversation is relatively superficial. She thinks those who spend their time on anything else are bad people.

The best contemporary replacement for the old term bourgeois is "normie". Traditionally, normies regard scholars who delve unnaturally deep into esoteric lore as Bohemians like artists and revolutionaries, not upright pillars of society like bankers.

[Ares Land]

Yes, I think it's bourgeois as in bourgeois vs. revolutionary, as opposed to bourgeois vs. proletariat.

It's one of those fine points of 60s-70s leftist thought that hasn't aged that well

[Travis B.]

The usage you use here is close to the German term Spießer, but I have seen leftists apply the word bourgeois to anything that is not stereotypically working-class. Homosexuality was bourgeois, for instance, even though it certainly does not fit with how you define the term.

[rotting bones]

Yes, I think it's bourgeois as in bourgeois vs. revolutionary, as opposed to bourgeois vs. proletariat.

It's one of those fine points of 60s-70s leftist thought that hasn't aged that well

A lot of proletarians had revolutionary sympathies before the media capture. Propagandists conducted psychological studies to figure out how to get the poor to fight for the upper classes. Looks like it worked in the sense that whatever resistance remains is frankly toothless.

The usage you use here is close to the German term Spießer, but I have seen leftists apply the word bourgeois to anything that is not stereotypically working-class. Homosexuality was bourgeois, for instance, even though it certainly does not fit with how you define the term.

I'm talking about the sense theorists were getting at. E.g. See Rilke's bourgeois upbringing.

Outside principled theorists, anything is possible:

Foucault thought heteronormativity is bourgeois.

Tankies think anything outside the Soviet Union is bourgeois.

Fascists call liberals normies too.

This is how all humans potentially use every descriptor. It's a degenerate case.

[Travis B.]

That usage of bourgeois lends itself to meaning "things I don't like that don't seem working-class to me". I think this usage ought to be avoided and bourgeois ought to be reserved for the meaning "of those who can solely live off the exploitation of others, not needing to work to survive".

[Ares Land]

Yes, I think it's bourgeois as in bourgeois vs. revolutionary, as opposed to bourgeois vs. proletariat.

It's one of those fine points of 60s-70s leftist thought that hasn't aged that well

A lot of proletarians had revolutionary sympathies before the media capture.

It's true. But intellectuals with revolutionary sympathies rarely were proletarian

Propagandists conducted psychological studies to figure out how to get the poor to fight for the upper classes. Looks like it worked in the sense that whatever resistance remains is frankly toothless.

Oh, my view on this is that the right defines the working class as that subset of the working class they approve of (that is, white cis straight industrial workers in small towns) and then congratulates itself on having working class support. Regrettably, everyone kind of follows this analysis. I think that if you expand the definition of the working class to something reasonable, you get a lot more leftists. Also, working-class right-wing voters are nothing new. So all in all, well, the reality is that the far-right made some gains among the poor (which doesn't sound so impressive.)

One issue is that in the modern world, the 'proletariat' comprises minorities (disenfranchised in various ways) and a lot of immigrants, legal or illegal, who of course can't vote.

Outside principled theorists, anything is possible:

Foucault thought heteronormativity is bourgeois.

Tankies think anything outside the Soviet Union is bourgeois.

Fascists call liberals normies too.

This is how all humans potentially use every descriptor. It's a degenerate case.

Pretty much, yes. 'Bourgeois' is a meaningless category in the 21st century anyway. We just have to put up with its various idiosyncratic uses when we read older thinkers.

That usage of bourgeois lends itself to meaning "things I don't like that don't seem working-class to me". I think this usage ought to be avoided and bourgeois ought to be reserved for the meaning "of those who can solely live off the exploitation of others, not needing to work to survive".

And frankly, I'd ask, why use the word at all, except in historical contexts?
Our economies have undergone several mutations since Marx's time. There's not really a class of rentier capitalists anymore; there's a large-ish middle class everyone feels they belong to; there aren't huge proletarian masses anymore.

[Travis B.]

I disagree with the idea that the proletariat no longer exists; yes, there is less class consciousness than in times past, but that is different from saying that there is no proletariat today.

[zompist]

OP: Bourgeois means middle class

This is certainly not, say, the Marxist meaning. E.g.:

Friedrich Engels defined the bourgeois as, "...the class of modern capitalists, owners of the means of social production, and employers of wage labour."

That is what we call the 1%. Plutocrats, the people who run society and have the power to exploit everyone else.

The middle class was the mass of lawyers, doctors, teachers, clerks, journalists, and independent craftsmen, people who were neither peasants nor lords. It has vastly expanded in modern times, forming the majority in advanced countries.

But Ares Land is right-- "''Bourgeois' is a meaningless category in the 21st century anyway." It's like "liberal", used to mean "whatever class of people I hate right at this moment." Early 19th century classes are no longer any guide to the 21st century US or Europe, and not that useful elsewhere.

Raphael has a whole book suggesting that the wealth cap should be $30 million. As it happens we can quantize this: there are about 425,000 Americans with that level of wealth... so in fact 1.2% of the population. They hold 31% of the country's overall wealth.

There is no path to fully automated gay space communism which involves getting rid of the middle class before dealing with the 1%. The 1% are the bad guys responsible directly or indirectly for most of the bad things happening. Everyone else is a distraction.

(Rich people aren't all fascists, but if they're good at all they should recognize the outrageousness of 21st century inequality. And there are bad people in the 99%, but that is at the level of criminality and could be dealt with more easily in a more egalitarian society.... so long as we don't make the usual far-left mistake of impoverishing the country rather than developing it. Revolutionary chaos makes people more conservative.)

[Ares Land]

I disagree with the idea that the proletariat no longer exists; yes, there is less class consciousness than in times past, but that is different from saying that there is no proletariat today.

Well, it exists, in the sense that there is a capital vs. labor divide. Defining the proletariat as workers, people who mostly derive their income from labor, you'll see that in the present day this covers a wide range of vastly different situations: this could range from relatively comfortable highly-qualified white collar jobs, to construction work, to delivery drivers or warehouse workers or farm laborers.
The economy being global now, to be complete we should include Third World factory workers, or coltan miners, or "guest workers"/slave workers in the Emirates.

We could group all of these in a single class, but I don't think it's a very useful analysis.

I'd add that standards of living have greatly improved worldwide; in developed countries this means a reasonably comfortable lifestyle is availabe to many; jobs are also a lot more qualified. I don't think it makes sense to apply the same qualifier to a 1950s coal miner and a 2020s developer or graphic designer.

[Raphael]

OP: Bourgeois means middle class

This is certainly not, say, the Marxist meaning. E.g.:

Friedrich Engels defined the bourgeois as, "...the class of modern capitalists, owners of the means of social production, and employers of wage labour."

Unfortunately, what rb said seems to be the colloquial meaning among all too many people, though, and that's what it has apparently been since at least the Port Huron Statement. I agree with you that hating the middle class as a group is stupid, though.

Raphael has a whole book suggesting that the wealth cap should be $30 million. As it happens we can quantize this: there are about 425,000 Americans with that level of wealth... so in fact 1.2% of the population. They hold 31% of the country's overall wealth.

Thank you for that background! Though it's not really an entire book, just a part of one chapter in that book.

There is no path to fully automated gay space communism which involves getting rid of the middle class before dealing with the 1%. The 1% are the bad guys responsible directly or indirectly for most of the bad things happening. Everyone else is a distraction.

So, so much this.