Sublime
An inspiration engine for ideas
Cities are predicated on a set of trade-offs that no longer make sense. Middle-class people tolerate density, pollution, disease, crime, high taxes, and expensive housing to access superior employment opportunities. If comparable opportunities can be accessed without the above costs, many people will opt-out of the current arrangement.
Dror Poleg • Dror’s Substack | Substack
Cities are synonymous with modernity not just because they usually contain the latest technologies or play host to the latest trends, but because they socialize us into modern people who seek status, validation, and uniqueness.
David A. Banks • The City Authentic: How the Attention Economy Builds Urban America
After all, cities are where people are supposed to have serendipitous encounters—as the writer and critic Jane Jacobs said, “The metropolis provides what otherwise could be given only by traveling; namely, the strange.” By comparison, the cliché goes, people become more atomized the farther they move from urban environments into the clinical, safe,... See more
Allie Conti • We Really Should Hang Out More Often
No breathing room between the buildings, which means unagi restaurants rubbing shoulders with telephone clubs, and estate agents sharing walls with sex shops. Busy electric signage and pachinko parlors waving banners. Seal-engraving businesses whose owners never bothered coming in. Video arcades that looked anything but fun.
Mieko Kawakami, Sam Bett, • Breasts and Eggs
Cities emerged to solve a set of problems that no longer exist. Physical goods are already made and traded elsewhere. Information and intellectual property can now be produced and exchanged online.
Dror Poleg • Dror’s Substack | Substack
Americans used to live within “place-based networks” of clubs, churches, schools, commerce, and recreation that overlapped, wrapping individuals in social support. Local networks protected individuals from isolation and loneliness.
Those networks have largely disappeared, replaced by networks based outside the local community. We shop and interact ... See more
Those networks have largely disappeared, replaced by networks based outside the local community. We shop and interact ... See more