i’ll look forward to hearing your statement if you ever make it out
Do americans actually live like this
Ai generated photo right. Right?
that looks like an entirely normal suburban american neighborhood so if its AI-generated, it’s realistically done.
So the rest of the world watches our movies and in a lot of our movies we mock and satirize the eeriness and soullessness of these manufactured communities but I’m guessing you guys thought it was exaggeration
Okay I’ll elaborate further:
America does have cute quaint little suburbs as well, but also many many gated communities and housing developments designed to be built as quickly, cheaply and easily as possible. They completely clear a patch of land first, literally they dig it down to an expanse of barren dirt and then they carpet it with grass and erect these literally mass produced houses on it. These places are expensive to live in and they enforce rules that you can’t decorate your yard or the outside of your house any differently from the other homes.
The area where I grew up used to be rolling hills and forests and is now 90% these places in just my lifetime.
Some non Americans also think the two hour walk is exaggerated but even without living in one of these, for most of my life walking to a grocery store in America would have taken longer than that. America is spread out over a gigantic continent and there are no laws or rules ensuring that there’s food for sale within so many miles of residences or anything. Public transportation doesn’t go everywhere, either. I didn’t even see a real city bus until maybe my later 20s.
In most of this country you’re completely fucked if you don’t have access to a car. None of this ever occurred to me as unusual until I saw so many people from around the world just aghast at it all. We grow up here just assuming it’s using the same template for society as everywhere else.
Very important to note that these places also very often have irregular street layouts to try and SEEM quaint, so unless you cut through people’s yards (which is illegal and likely to get the cops called on you in a lot of places), you’ll have to take a winding, often deliberately obtuse route. So a trip that would be 15 minutes by car if streets were laid out in a grid often gets extended to 30 or 45 minutes, because everything is so spread out and indirect.
Also, it’s not that there aren’t laws or rules ensuring there are places to get food in residential areas, there are laws and rules ensuring there AREN’T places to get food.
Most housing in the US is in areas that are zoned as R-1, which means the only things allowed to be built there are single-family, detached houses. No stores/shops, no multiplexes, no apartments. MAYBE a public park and MAYBE one or two administrative buildings, but don’t hold your breath on those.
If you want to go shopping, you’ll need to drive down to a shopping center. Because you have to drive there, the roads are designed for an extremely high volume of traffic, so many places have stores sitting on four to eight lane roads with traffic speeds of at least 45 mph (about 70kph), with no sidewalks, multiple intersections with other four to eight lane roads, and frequent places where drivers are entering and exiting the traffic flow to and from parking lots.
Those areas often wind up with their landscapes dominated by billboard ads for personal injury lawyers who will represent you if you’re in a traffic accident.
as an urban planner, I want everyone to know how much this hellscape is desired by the white middle class (the target market for these developments).
This is the result of
Individualist society whose driven purpose of settlement is becoming a “king of their own castle”
Settler colonial society needing to occupy and waste as much land as possible to initiate its colonization
Capitalist society that develops what’s cheapest.
Patriarchal society that isolates families to be ruled by a father.
Classist society that needs to create barriers to entry.
Police/war society that wants to maximize surveillance.
Cultureless white society that can’t imagine a built environment that fosters social cultural development.
I could expand but the USA has this lifeless surreal development because it itself is a lifeless simulated society that drives settler colonial expansion within the confines of capitalism.
