10:51 AM
Okay, time to reveal one of my fringe opinions. But first, one shared by many: I hate urban sprawl. Mile after square mile of land covered with cookie cutter houses just so everyone can have their little piece of belonging and 200 square feet of lawn. It's the worst parts of the American pursuits of the rural ideal, the frontier, and conspicuous consumption all at once.

Okay, now we head for the fringe. For years, whenever I complain about sprawl, my answer has always been that everyone move into apartments. Wait, don't leave--I don't mean microflats or any traditional form of apartment. What I actually mean is that everyone move into enormous buildings that would simulate everything people get out of their sprawlhomes, but use space more wisely, more densely. Give them a four bedroom ranch house--it's just stacked atop forty others. And don't give them narrow, flouresecent-lit hallways--give them broad, high-ceilinged, street-like halls lit by sunlight piped in via fiber optics, running off of floor hubs lined by small businesses. A few small parks inside, but outside the building--okay, let's just call it what it is, an arcology--enormous tracts of forest and greenspace available to all inhabitants.

Of course, I'm not the first or the best to come up with this idea. This Village Voice article outlines things nicely, though they make brash statements that I wouldn't neccesarily be prepared to defend (like, say, to green farmers in Vermont), and I'm sad to see that Jane Jacobs disagrees--I really enjoyed her book The Life and Death of Great American Cities. But if Eugene Tsui's Ultima Tower ever gets built, I would definitely be one of the first to move in.