Skip to main content

Changing the way we think to change the way we live


Properties are more costly in dense city center but the money saved from having to commute for work from a suburban area to downtown and back again make well worth it. The full spectrum of amenities, services and a walk able lifestyle are bonus of living in city center. And don't forget,rapidly growing population is also making traffic a bit more staggering than it has been in the past. Longer commuting time means more cash spent on fuel, automobile repairs and service, while the lost time between home and employment could be spent doing more productive things such as, spending quality time with family or putting extra hours at the office for a more paycheck.
People often assume that high density discourages social interaction for social sustainability but that is not true. High-rise residents can run across their neighbors in corridors, elevators, in the car park and in the foyer, just as they do in low rise developments. In fact, in some ways they have more opportunities for social interaction by sharing facilities; such as BBQ, gyms and pools. High-rise developments are also more likely to be located within close proximity to activity centers with lots of adjacent ground level activities and create chance for residents to participate in street life.
Due to their decision making process through the body corporate, residents have more reasons to interact at a more meaningful and intimate social interaction than mere glances across the street neighborhood relationship in suburbs. I think designers and planners are prone to give way too much weight to the benefits of casual interactions between strangers then acquaintances, but in my opinion high-rise provide more social interaction opportunities, not lesser.

People craving for fresh air and bigger living rooms which drives not only the preservation of wilderness areas but also the construction of disconnected subdivisions and daily long distance car commutes. Nature landscapes are less often destroyed by people who despise nature landscapes than by people who love them or think they do. People move to be near and close to them, and then when others follow, they move again. This never ending chase creates urban sprawl and threatens unspoiled natural landscape that they love. In this perspective, dense cities are more sustainable and sensitive to natural landscapes from an environmental point of view.

Source- http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/nsw/sydney-real-estate-mike-baird-has-bad-news-about-homes-with-yards/news-story/6a318581da1124c7057b75eaa46dcb2c
Image credit- http://blog.rent.com/rent-com-survey-best-place-to-raise-kids-city-vs-suburbs/

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Start the fight

Most people don’t realize that food waste goes beyond the moral implications, wasting food when one billion people go to bed hungry every night and it is also a major environmental problem. It is so sad that we have the power to feed the hungry with all of the food we waste and yet we just throw it into the garbage. Food production is also the largest single driver of biodiversity loss and creates at least 30 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. In addition to wasting labor and resources, as food decomposes in landfills it produces methane, a greenhouse gas. Food waste is occur in the field, in storage, in transport, and at home. Everyone including farmers, food manufacturers, and consumers are responsible for food waste footprints. Despite what many consumers think, expiry dates are unregulated and do not indicate food safety. One of the best ways to tell if food has gone bad is not by using some fancy technology, but by simply putting our senses to w...
Post a Comment
Read more

Living smaller and closer

As population density increase, the distance between people and their destinations decrease. Can reduces energy use, carbon emission, and waste in all sectors of city. The most important factor is automobile use, which is bad for the environment not only because they directly consume fuel and emit pollutants but because they facilitate the creation of far greater sources of energy and environmental damage. Automobile usage also encourage sprawling communities, over sized dwellings, inefficient commerce, and huge networks of redundant urban infrastructure. Density allows people walk from place to place due to proximity of services. Dense urban centers offer one of the few plausible templates for addressing one of the world’s most discouraging environmental illness, climate change. We need to find ways to reduce the size of our living spaces, and decrease the distance between ourselves and our destinations, and begin to step ourselves away from our near total dependence on automobil...
Post a Comment
Read more

Less is more

Necessities and well-made special things that bring us happiness are great, but needless stuff are wasteful to produce, package and ship and once we start drowning in our stuff we either suffer from the stress of it or we end up send it packing to the landfill, where it may endure for many lifetimes. And while swapping and sharing and donating may postpone stuff's trip to landfill site, it still weighs heavy on the planet. Our obsession with owning needless things becomes nightmare to our planet. It’s time for us to start practicing minimalism and enjoy the beauty of simple living. We can take a stand and maximize the principles of minimalism to counter attack with less to discover how little we actually need to be happier, more content, and less stressed in life and also contribute towards sustainability by consuming less. Minimalism is just keeping things we most value and the removal of everything that distracts us from it to improve in almost all aspects of our life. The...
Post a Comment
Read more