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Traditional cities have functioned and existed for millennia and still function and exist with tens of millions of people living in pre car developments across the western world. What hasn't been able to function well is the complete break with tradition after WWII when cities were entirely redesigned and we ended up with long range commuting, massive environmental damage, low social cohesion, extreme blandness and the sheer ugliness of urban sprawl. Looking at what has actually worked and created cities like Barcelona, Budapest, Boston before WWII or Copenhagen is a much better route than continuing with one of the biggest failures of progressivism in the 20th century. Suburbia was a progressive project, and it doesn't make sense for conservatives to take the blame for it.
Those places exist, but not as conservative communities. Cities are consistently the most progressive places in their regions, so it's hard to see them as the way to work out conservative values.
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Can you link to an example of your ideal city? Is it working well there?
Singapore.
It's doing great! Its public transport is excellent and rates of car ownership are much lower than in America. By metrics like life expectancy and quality of health care, it's one of the best places in the world. It also has an ethnically and religiously diverse population (including a higher proportion of Muslims than any Western city), so objections that it wouldn't work in America because of a lack of cohesion are not valid.
Besides the other comments, Singapore also has a brutally-authoritarian government. Being like Singapore would produce cities that even Conservatives might love to live in, but at a cost that no liberal could ever countenance (namely, beatings and executions).
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Singapore's not diverse at all -- there's hardly any blacks or hispanics.
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While I am a strong proponent of conservative urbanism, and I wholeheartedly agree with your choice of Singapore as a model example, I think you’re barking up a wrong tree by positing Singapore’s ethnic diversity as a counterpoint to American concerns about racial issues in contemporary urban society.
Yes, Singapore has a variety of different native East Asian and South Asian ethnicities. None of those ethnic groups is remotely close to American blacks in terms of their propensity to crime, their inability to maintain an orderly and peaceful society, or their glowering hostility to other races, constantly threatening to boil over into stochastic interpersonal violence.
When 21st-century Americans complain that cities are too diverse, what they really mean is that there are too many blacks. Full stop. You cannot possibly make sense of discussions of race in America if you interpret the term “diversity” literally and naïvely. Our cities would work just fine if they were 30% white, 30% Asian, and 30% Jewish. This isn’t my optimal society, but it would absolutely be orderly and pleasant.
Actually, I think Malay–Chinese relations in Singapore are an excellent analogy for Black–White relations in America.
Singapore is roughly 15% Malay and 80% Chinese, with the rest being smaller ethnic groups that don't really matter for Malay–Chinese relations. This is very similar to the US a few decades ago: 15% Black, 80% White, with the rest being Asians etc. Malays and Blacks consistently underperform economically relative to the Chinese and to Whites, respectively. Both the US and Singapore had race riots in the 1960s. Since then, the US has had race riots regularly, while Singapore hasn't had any.* Singapore also has extremely low crime rates. I think this demonstrates that improving race relations in America is possible.
What do you think makes Black Americans so much more problematic than Malays?
* Singapore had one relatively small riot in 2013, but this is unrelated to the Malay–Chinese conflict.
Violent crime. Again, Malays don’t remotely compare to American blacks on that axis. Yes, American blacks improved significantly on certain metrics - literacy, legitimacy rates, employment - in the first half of the 20th century relative to where they had been previously, but even that “improved” state was still bad in absolute terms. I really think you’re underestimating the vast disparities in violent crime that define current American race relations.
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Their DNA.
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I understand what you're going for, the question is whether you can reproduce that in a modern context.
Maybe they just don't want to take the blame for whatever comes next.
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I think the thrust of Arjin's criticism here is this: okay, suburbia sucks. Now what? What do you propose to do about suburbia sucking? All the car-centric infrastructure in the US, well, exists. It would presumably cost an astronomical amount to get rid of it, possibly more real or financial resources to rip all of it up than it did to put all of it there in the first place.
The other argument often lobbed at pro-city people (one I don't necessarily agree with, but see as an unavoidable stumbling block) is that cities suck to live in because criminals and other ne'er-do-wells will shit up the place and get away with it. Those same people will point to recent developments as evidence that the city-dwellers making cities worse places to live will never be held accountable for such.
The first step would be to allow densification of existing areas instead of continuing to build more far flung suburbs. At least in my city, property in denser areas is much more expensive than in the suburbs. This means we're building out a bunch of suburbs for people who would rather live in the city but can't because bad land use policies have resulted in a shortage of housing.
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