Yes, it does. It's exactly what I want my real life city to be like.
No plants growing everywhere completely out of control and invading perimeters they aren't supposed to be in. No cracked pavement that's just a rainfall away from being replaced with potholes.
Apparently, "soul" means a city that looks like it's unmaintained and teetering on the edge of a precipice, just about to be reclaimed by nature, a few years away from turning into the green urbanscape of The Last of Us.
You're rejecting the behavior of both human nature and earthly nature in a naively idealistic manner.
From the moment an object is constructed it is being pulled into the ground. Maintenance has a far higher cost than initial construction. Relative perfection is inversely proportionate to complexity.
This is the exact same mentality that drives suburban lawn guys crazy when their grass has a brown spot. You are not fully in control.
Who would choose to live in a decaying city? Broken down buildings, screwed up roads?
This is stuff you grit your teeth and put up with because it can't be helped. Who would choose to design a city with this decay literally built into it? That's mind boggling.
Literal millions of people live in New York, Athens, London, Berlin, Rome, and tons of other places with various grades of decay visible everywhere. That’s what we usually call a place having a soul.
I don't get what your point is. Are you saying people don't fix and improve their homes?
Leave cracks and potholes on the pavement for long enough, allow some dilapidated building to stand for long enough, and it just becomes part of the identity of the city and the people who live in it? It turns into the city's "character" ?
It's very interesting to observe the different perspectives in this thread, which seem to be mutually exclusive. When talking about urban decay, some people think of an artist's loft in a run-down brick factory from the 19th century with Graffiti on the walls and exposed steel beams, others of potholes, trash, and overdue maintenance.
You make a bit of weed overgrowing a bit of pavement that's slightly broken sound like that scene in Idiocracy when the protagonist looks out of a window for the first time, come on.
The extreme opposite of that would hordes of people (or robots) with nail clippers patrolling everything 24/7. When any tile is even just chipped (or when when the scan shows the wind carried away a few molucules from the surface), it gets replaced. When tiles in that exact same color aren't available anymore, they all get replaced. Heck, when the sun was out and faded the color of something slightly more than areas that were in shade, the whole area has to be rebuilt.
Or take cutting your fingernails: do it once a week, do it daily, or why not every second? Every moment they're growing a bit, and they don't remain in the shape determined as well cut by their owner for even an hour! Unless you keep cutting/filing them. But while you are cutting your nails, you can't be cutting your hair, so that's gross. And even if you could, you cannot cut all strands of hair at the same time, it'll always be screwed up.
So of course the answer is somewhere in between, it has to be, and it's probably not the same for everybody.
> The extreme opposite of that would hordes of people (or robots) with nail clippers patrolling everything 24/7.
Hordes of robots constantly and meticulously maintaining entire cities sounds awesome, actually. That's the post scarcity society I dream of.
> Or take cutting your fingernails: do it once a week, do it daily, or why not every second?
We only need to choose because we lack the technology. Maybe one day we'll have Deus Ex style nanobot pills we can swallow. They will invisibly and continuously maintain our bodies for us. Nails are just one of countless things they will maintain.
> Who would choose to live in a decaying city? Broken down buildings, screwed up roads?
Decay is a never-ending process, as are the changing architectural tastes of city residents. Only through a continual process of demolition and rebuilding can they be kept at bay.
You see this in real cities everywhere: districts of shiny, antiseptic, newly-built towers, side-by-side with decaying warehouses and brownstones from a hundred years ago. The former are modern, the latter are charming, to be desirable a city needs a balance of the new and the old.
Every single building is a rejection of entropy. We're literally carving out a secure and comfortable space for ourselves to exist inside. It's literally built to withstand and reject the elements, the chaos of the outside universe. Even the stereotypical jungle survivalists create structures to bend the surrounding environment to their benefit instead of allowing them environment to bend them. Structure is the antithesis of entropy.
This is entirely orthogonal to economically efficient concentration. In fact, cities are an extension of it. We want to be safe and comfortable when we leave the buildings too. We don't want the cities to just look nice, we want architecture that makes our very souls feel safe and protected. We want facilities like well maintained sidewalks and roads so we can walk and drive with ease. This leads to economic efficiency.
> Every single building is a rejection of entropy.
No?
It’s just a building. I’d doubt there’s more than a handful of buildings that were made by hands that were explicitly rejecting entropy and just doing what they needed/wanted in the moment.
Do you think the builders of any randomly selected building, built said building as a rejection of entropy?
Like otherwise if we get down to philosophical bones then life is a rejection of entropy as it orders matter and energy, in which case the discussion is pointless if we’re at that level.
I'm just addressing the point about entropy that you made.
> Do you think the builders of any randomly selected building, built said building as a rejection of entropy?
I don't know. I'm just saying that every single building adds to the organization within the system, as does every single life form.
Entropy is a measure of the disorder and disorganization within a system. Any form of structure reduces entropy by definition.
You should probably engage with the second paragraph of my original reply:
> We want to be safe and comfortable when we leave the buildings too. We don't want the cities to just look nice, we want architecture that makes our very souls feel safe and protected. We want facilities like well maintained sidewalks and roads so we can walk and drive with ease.
>I don't know. I'm just saying that every single building adds to the organization within the system, as does every single life form.
No, you didnt. You said
> > You're rejecting the behavior of both human nature and earthly nature
Absolutely.
> The whole point of a city is to reject all that.
Saying the "point" of a city implies intent. You cant motte and bailey back and forth between intent and happenstance.
> You should probably engage with the second paragraph of my original reply:
If I am going to engage with your _second comment's_ _second paragraph_ (cause were skipping over your first comment I replied to and the first paragraph of your second comment apparently) that I was replying to, I would probably quibble over you trying to entwine souls and economic efficiency
matheusmoreira · · focus · HN ↗
Yes, it does. It's exactly what I want my real life city to be like.
No plants growing everywhere completely out of control and invading perimeters they aren't supposed to be in. No cracked pavement that's just a rainfall away from being replaced with potholes.
Apparently, "soul" means a city that looks like it's unmaintained and teetering on the edge of a precipice, just about to be reclaimed by nature, a few years away from turning into the green urbanscape of The Last of Us.
tcdent · · focus · HN ↗
From the moment an object is constructed it is being pulled into the ground. Maintenance has a far higher cost than initial construction. Relative perfection is inversely proportionate to complexity.
This is the exact same mentality that drives suburban lawn guys crazy when their grass has a brown spot. You are not fully in control.
matheusmoreira · · focus · HN ↗
Absolutely. The whole point of a city is to reject all that.
> You are not fully in control.
I know, which is why I don't bother with lawns. I'd rather fill the entire area with solar panels instead.
HWR_14 · · focus · HN ↗
matheusmoreira · · focus · HN ↗
This is stuff you grit your teeth and put up with because it can't be helped. Who would choose to design a city with this decay literally built into it? That's mind boggling.
kelseyfrog · · focus · HN ↗
karmakurtisaani · · focus · HN ↗
matheusmoreira · · focus · HN ↗
karmakurtisaani · · focus · HN ↗
9dev · · focus · HN ↗
matheusmoreira · · focus · HN ↗
eek2121 · · focus · HN ↗
matheusmoreira · · focus · HN ↗
Leave cracks and potholes on the pavement for long enough, allow some dilapidated building to stand for long enough, and it just becomes part of the identity of the city and the people who live in it? It turns into the city's "character" ?
To me that sounds like a coping mechanism.
9dev · · focus · HN ↗
ndriscoll · · focus · HN ↗
HWR_14 · · focus · HN ↗
Like the roads actually being used and not closed so they can be constantly repaved.
customguy · · focus · HN ↗
The extreme opposite of that would hordes of people (or robots) with nail clippers patrolling everything 24/7. When any tile is even just chipped (or when when the scan shows the wind carried away a few molucules from the surface), it gets replaced. When tiles in that exact same color aren't available anymore, they all get replaced. Heck, when the sun was out and faded the color of something slightly more than areas that were in shade, the whole area has to be rebuilt.
Or take cutting your fingernails: do it once a week, do it daily, or why not every second? Every moment they're growing a bit, and they don't remain in the shape determined as well cut by their owner for even an hour! Unless you keep cutting/filing them. But while you are cutting your nails, you can't be cutting your hair, so that's gross. And even if you could, you cannot cut all strands of hair at the same time, it'll always be screwed up.
So of course the answer is somewhere in between, it has to be, and it's probably not the same for everybody.
matheusmoreira · · focus · HN ↗
Hordes of robots constantly and meticulously maintaining entire cities sounds awesome, actually. That's the post scarcity society I dream of.
> Or take cutting your fingernails: do it once a week, do it daily, or why not every second?
We only need to choose because we lack the technology. Maybe one day we'll have Deus Ex style nanobot pills we can swallow. They will invisibly and continuously maintain our bodies for us. Nails are just one of countless things they will maintain.
swiftcoder · · focus · HN ↗
Decay is a never-ending process, as are the changing architectural tastes of city residents. Only through a continual process of demolition and rebuilding can they be kept at bay.
You see this in real cities everywhere: districts of shiny, antiseptic, newly-built towers, side-by-side with decaying warehouses and brownstones from a hundred years ago. The former are modern, the latter are charming, to be desirable a city needs a balance of the new and the old.
JoshTriplett · · focus · HN ↗
Agreed. Or xeriscaping, or something better than grass (which is a really low bar to be better than).
lovich · · focus · HN ↗
I didn’t realize cities were made with a point to reject entropy and weren’t mostly organic congregations of people for economic reasons
matheusmoreira · · focus · HN ↗
This is entirely orthogonal to economically efficient concentration. In fact, cities are an extension of it. We want to be safe and comfortable when we leave the buildings too. We don't want the cities to just look nice, we want architecture that makes our very souls feel safe and protected. We want facilities like well maintained sidewalks and roads so we can walk and drive with ease. This leads to economic efficiency.
lovich · · focus · HN ↗
No?
It’s just a building. I’d doubt there’s more than a handful of buildings that were made by hands that were explicitly rejecting entropy and just doing what they needed/wanted in the moment.
matheusmoreira · · focus · HN ↗
lovich · · focus · HN ↗
Do you think the builders of any randomly selected building, built said building as a rejection of entropy?
Like otherwise if we get down to philosophical bones then life is a rejection of entropy as it orders matter and energy, in which case the discussion is pointless if we’re at that level.
matheusmoreira · · focus · HN ↗
I'm just addressing the point about entropy that you made.
> Do you think the builders of any randomly selected building, built said building as a rejection of entropy?
I don't know. I'm just saying that every single building adds to the organization within the system, as does every single life form.
Entropy is a measure of the disorder and disorganization within a system. Any form of structure reduces entropy by definition.
You should probably engage with the second paragraph of my original reply:
> We want to be safe and comfortable when we leave the buildings too. We don't want the cities to just look nice, we want architecture that makes our very souls feel safe and protected. We want facilities like well maintained sidewalks and roads so we can walk and drive with ease.
lovich · · focus · HN ↗
No, you didnt. You said
> > You're rejecting the behavior of both human nature and earthly nature Absolutely.
> The whole point of a city is to reject all that.
Saying the "point" of a city implies intent. You cant motte and bailey back and forth between intent and happenstance.
> You should probably engage with the second paragraph of my original reply:
If I am going to engage with your _second comment's_ _second paragraph_ (cause were skipping over your first comment I replied to and the first paragraph of your second comment apparently) that I was replying to, I would probably quibble over you trying to entwine souls and economic efficiency
bgun · · focus · HN ↗
[dead]
matheusmoreira · · focus · HN ↗