Alternative history

>Tokyo
Alright, I'm going to ask a really fucking dumb question about Tokyo here: why does it all look so modern? And I do mean all of it.

Before you call me a retard, allow me to use Paris and London as comparisons (as opposed to the New World cities which have nowhere near the same history to them). Paris has been relatively unchanged since the early 1900s and has delegated La Defense as its skyscraper ghetto. Meanwhile, London was sufficiently damaged by the Blitz to open up space and now it's a disgusting monstrosity where the Tower of London is within spitting distance of the Dildo of London. The fuck's the deal with Tokyo though? To my knowledge it escaped from WW2 relatively unharmed, yet it looks more like New York than any of ye olde European cities. Did the Nips just break everything down and rebuild it voluntarily? You'd expect a lot more old buildings.

>same technology as today.
Move it a bit further to sci-fi by inventing readily accessible teleportation (make it limited to earth magnetic field because reasons, if you fell like keeping it on one planet) to remove the necessity of living morning ride away from you work place. And add cultural trend Pick related, your average teleportation booth.

>it escaped from WW2 relatively unharmed,
It didn't
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Tokyo

Dude what.
France has ten times the population density of the US and the same urbanization level.

>en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Tokyo
>the single most destructive bombing raid in human history
Well, color me retarded because I sure have brain problems.

Nothing pre-WW2 in Japan really lasts without massive amounts of upkeep. Construction tended to be almost entirely wood, meaning both fires and rot do more damage faster than compared to western architecture which leaned toward stone since almost the begining. If you want to preserve old Japanese buildings you need to constantly rebuild, so once new methods came along they replaced older stuff relatively quickly, both by lasting and by a lot of "Wait, so this is an affordable material now and the building will last decades? Sign me the fuck up!"

In Japan there's a lot more building churn overall, stuff isn't built to last because earthquakes and typhoons wreck shit anyway, so they're built to be safe for a time then rebuilt. Things like the multi-century old buildings of London of Paris just wouldn't last.

France is as full of 100,000+ people settlements as anywhere else in Western Europe. If anything, you need to look at rural US for modern tech meeting tiny towns.

Earthquakes and fires where quite common before they basically rebuild Tokyo completely.

Incidentally virtually every historical building in Japan actually dates from 1800-1960, with a signpost beside it saying 'This temple was built in 1200 and burned down 9 times since then.' There's a pagoda on Mt Koya that burned down due to lightning 6 times so they built it out of concrete instead.

>Did the Nips just break everything down and rebuild it voluntarily?
Yeah. Actually yes. Japan has a custom of tearing old buildings down every so often and re-building them. I have a book or two with it in there, and have heard it from people that live in Japan. I think it's because the Japanese have a thing about cleanliness and they think that old houses are just shit by default.

You do have some old stuff like temples, but they get torn down and rebuilt too. They just rebuild with some of the old stuff, like carved stone and the like, and in the same style. Only castles tend to be original.

The entire country is based around tribes rather than a state, basically Roman-era Europe

>France has ten times the population density of the US.

Now i have this picture of the US

>10x0=0

To be fair I'm still pretty much flabbergasted at how they let Kyoto destroy itself AFTER the war, tough (and I think they don't admit it but they think it so now). As an european, it's honestly horryfing. Didnt' they have a fucking landscape committee or something?

>in my country we let much country become a sad and impractical urban sprawl, but the historical centers are mostly untouched

Also the castles are generally pretty recent, and not even particulary "like the ancients" in their rebuilds (hell, some are in fucking concrete). Temples are the one thing they consistently somehow managed not to fuck over and I think that's why the love them so dearly in fiction.

Note: I don't particulary think jap cities are ugly. Or at least, not because they're modern. But hell, even China has some qualms before destroying older parts of towns.

As a Eurofag, my image of the United states is basically this
>East Coast (consisting of the Greater New York Area, the Greater Washington Area and Maine ie. the place where every fucking Steven King story takes place
>HOLY SHIT LOOK AT ALL THIS FUCKING NOTHING
>Texas, howdy pardner we gon' build a way 'n shit y'all don't come back now
>HOLY SHIT EVEN MORE NOTHING
>A FUCKING DESERT
>Commifornia
>North West Hipster paradise
>Happy little trees: the state

>HOLY SHIT LOOK AT ALL THIS FUCKING NOTHING

That's right friend, there's nothing here. Just keep moving.

>How do you prevent urbanisation?
constant warfare

>Only castles tend to be original
They're mostly concrete, courtesy of the Americans.

There are 12 authentic castles total and only two or three are of any size.

Well, you're not wrong.

You probably don't. A lot of modern technologies needed cities to be invented and a lot of high technology still needs it to be distributed. You could advance technology to a point where small villages could survive with modern conveniences, but it would take a fundamental overhaul of our economic system - not impossible, but the people who benefit most from the current system would prevent that by any means necessary.

That's about right.

Yeah this is pretty accurate.

You could have communism or something like that where rather than having excess population you just reduce working hours

>You could have communism or something like that
you're thinking juntas

geography (lots of fjords/mountains) so little space.
laws: folk have to live within 'x' distance of their farms.
religion: this villages gods are not the gods of the next.
language disparity outside of region or even within.
villages are the best places to raise families but also to be able to control the populace as everyone kknows everyones business. centres of industry & trade would be dens of depravity/ odd ideas about the rights of beings so an authoritarion church or state would limit them & watch those who went into them.
culture: it's cosy/ xenophobia/parochialism
pic not related

La Defense isn't ugly, tough. A little unimaginative, but decent. Too bad it's Akira with banlieu gangs after offices close.

I dunno. The Rockies do sound empty but kinda cool.

>as another eurofag the strangest part of 'murrika sounds like Florida. A fucking flat freshwater swamp in the middle of the seas. And Miami is still going on in a housing bubble tough it's gloriously sinking

After a resource calamity, laws got passed to decentralize our infrastructure and make our population centers less wasteful and more sustainable. We still have our tech, but living in big dense cities has proven to be a liability.

Put them slightly ahead of us technology wise

>No need for vast farms or factories due to Microfarms and 3D printers

>No need for vast populations

>No need for large sprawling cities

>No ursury based economic due to constant debt mill being inefficient due to low Populations.

You'd basically get modern Day Switzerland.

As a eternal wood Scandinav, i sorta see the reason.
You can only go so so far with paint, poor quality wood, lacquer, and no real insulation.
My favorite is still planks in older attics, where heavier boards are used instead of 2-3 layers of proper wood. And they where not painted/coated before being attached, so its fully possible for them to be exposed to leftover root.
Mostly because old attics are drafty, and some times are not sealed properly.

My other favorite is public benches, that isn't reoiled every 3-6 years.
Mostly because they turn grey, start taking in water, and then suffer from moss and rot.

Come visit Maine sometime friend! We are all very friendly here. As long as you stay inside at night you will have a very lovely time! Eat some lobster, pick some blueberries, and ignore any sounds outside your window.

>communist agrarian society
So Pol Pot? He took care of the excess population by murdering them.

>La Defense isn't ugly, tough
It isn't. Especially with the whole "three arcs" thing Paris has going on, I think it's the best example of an old city getting a new business center (and London by far the worst example).

I just hate what your politicians are doing to Paris almost as much as I hate the Tour Montparnasse. Seeing Paris' demographic change feels like... you're a kid who just built the greatest sandcastle ever, and your dad stomps on it because "it's better this way".

>mfw I'm in Florida
>Never thought anything was weird or strange here
>Started making internet friends from other states
>Find out how wrong I was
I guess shoveling snow isn't as weird as chasing land crabs out of your garage with a rapier.

I'm not french tough. At the very most you could say to me shit about the Bosco Verticale.

It's not really the tropical sheaninigans, it's the topography that's pretty unique to me.

It makes no sense to do so. Imagine any positive stat a place could have compared to any other. The bigger and denser a city is, the better it is in all of these. Cities scale superlinearly in basically everything. More energy efficient, bigger economy per head, higher intelligence per capita, etc.

Technically cities are very environmentally friendly as well, the problems just arise when the pollution is ignored. In a small city you can get away with a lot more in regards to the environment because wind, weather and natural decompositon will enable to ignore a certain level of, say, air pollution. On the other hand, more concentrated pollution also makes it cheaper to get rid of, if you bother at all.

Basically every nice thing we have today, at all, is directly or indirectly a result of urbanization.

>Wait, you mean you guys don't chase crabs out of your garage with a spear?
>So you mean to tell me you guys don't get high on meth and fight the police while masturbating?
>Is punching an aligator in the face because he was mocking you "weird" in other states or something?

>destroy farmland through bombing
>Wonder why there's mass starvation after

Let's not forget that the nigger wanted to reset the clock to year zero by killing all intellectuals, up to and including fucking everyone with glasses.

Why does the Imperium build Hive cities? I understand mega cities exist due to natural sprawl. But Hive cities are absolute lawless nightmares. That's just asking for chaos cults. Guilliman should outlaw building new ones.

The Midwest is only mostly empty. It does have cities, but besides them, it's basically nothing.

It's like Russia, except with farms instead of trees and wolves.

Yeah nothing's here. No need to relocate here. Please go to canada instead.

Because "muh grimdark" meme, things that make sense are often put aside for things that are edgy.

Since you're mentioning Canada anyway
>Scotland, but with even more poverty
>France, but with more snow
>[THE CURRENT YEAR]
>Wow, it's fucking nothing!
>Northern Texas
>Hongcouver

Easy. Make it so that in medieval times there was already a road infrastructure in place. With the free Flow of goods and ideas there wouldn’t be a need for everyone to congregate in one spot

So Sin from Final Fantasy X?

Every society reflects its social relations.

Make consolidation and monopolization undesirable. When the workers of a place are the owners of that place, hiring is the same thing as diluting your ownership, putting a disincentive on growth beyond strict necessity.

Urbanization grew from the industrial revolution. Factories require many many workers if they are produce enough goods to create a profit for the owners. Undo separate owners, undo the incentive for growth.

we don't want you in ohio unless you're looking to join us in shittalking indiana and kunttucky

The "miasma theory" of disease is true, and any sufficiently large city is beset by constant plague outbreaks.

Pretty accurate for most of the country.

I goddamn LOVE Ohio. Literally the best in the Midwest

Ohio is shit.

Love,

Iowa

Not like we have that much competition really. Michigan is hampered by Detroit and the powerhouse that is Chicago is split up between 3 states.

This is pretty good. Underrated post.

Feudalism can't exist with our tech level.

>HOLY SHIT LOOK AT ALL THIS FUCKING NOTHING

Yes, because food comes from the grocery store.

that's silly, food comes from magically transforming US taxpayer dollars into corn.

>Yes, because food comes from the grocery store.

Also, there is no agriculture on the coasts. Kansas and Nebraska feed the entire country.

Oh yea, the Economic-Bread Transference, or EBT. How could I forget?

Plague.

Not a bad idea honestly, make up some super contagious and seemingly incurable disease that has followed humans throughout all of history and would make a big city an absolute fucking disaster if so much as one person got sick. In small villages an outbreak would be way easier to control so it would make sense that population densities would never really expand past a couple thousand people per settlement at most.

Chicago's closer to a cross between poland and zimbabwe

Illinois too. And texas if you like beef. And Idaho if you're into spuds

The United States more or less feeds the planet. There's a lot to be said of places like California which produce most of the US's fruit as well when the water isn't literally being stolen by LA and other stupid entirely unsustainable cities. Arizona should've destroyed their dams in the 30s and let them place rot.

Imagine if they stopped wasting money subsidizing food for the entire world.
That'd be a fun apocalypse, or at least small collapse, scenario.

The entirety of Africa would completely fall apart in weeks

So would all of the US that depends on exporting that food for their income.

>someone who just moved here from the North East ask me what's up with all the lizards
>you guys don't have lizards running around?
>we've got squirrels and chipmunks
>Oh yeah the lizards and snakes ate most of the squirrels and I've never seen a chipmunk

I hope they listen to when I told them not to go by the canals

That's objectively wrong, my friend. The US certainly produces a large quantity of foodstuffs but not at all on the scale you're talking about.

Pretty much any country unfortunate enough to rely on foreign aid food would be absolutely fucked though

Eh, only vaguely.
Like, most of california's crops are non-subsidized.

California exports a shitload of it's crops though

I think, I have quite good headcanon for why Hive cities exist it all comes down to dark age of technolody
>dark age of technology
>scientific miracles better than magic
>create terraforming marvels
>machines that can create/purify food, water, clean air from almost anything
>building sized engines, electric plant with unparalel efficiency
>place all those things in your newly created bases on terraformed planets
>bases have huge surples of everything, basically allows for HUGE population growth
>in the course of centuries bases grow into hives
>noone understand how this marvel-machines work, how to build new ones
>every hive have archeotec as its fundation

Do you like it?

They're fortresses and arcologies, meant to contain populations and be defensible whenever aliens or heretics come knocking at the door.

Also, given 40k was built on ripping off ideas from just about everywhere, they're basically just scaled-down megacities form Judge Dredd.

jesus fuck /montreal/toronto/ottawa feels like the bastion of not fucked up.

also something like 90 percent of the population lives in the southern most parts of canada.

gif related

you aren't having creative block with this right?

>because you say so, then take/pick/abridge an idea from this thread. to explain it retroactively

thread already has tons of good answers, kinda derailed into /pol/ territory though.

yeah, and now they'd be exporting to the breadbasket for even more dosh, since the breadbasket functions on government handouts.

Scaled up, user.
Hives are generally as large as Mega City One (if not more) and completely enclosed and much taller, more populous.

While population density does start getting a bit sparser as you move westward towards Texas, all the fucking nothing mostly happens after you get past the eastern part of Texas, not before.

Pol Pot did that

...

You could have something like a prolonged Cold War doing it.

Since major cities were such obvious targets, as London learned in the Blitz and Japan learned from the A-Bombs, the resulting nuke arms race meant that everyone in cities felt like a target.
Perhaps in this alt universe, what was suggested was to spread the population out into lots of smaller villages and towns, where you could more easily build communal bunkers for everyone. Or hell, it's own mini anti missile battery if you want to go fancy enough.

Though the Cold War ended (or maybe it never did in this alt world) a couple of large scale terror attacks shortly after meant that people decided the small villages were just a better idea than putting so many people together in one place.

A single culture with less of a focus on having kids. See: Scandi countries. Still a few bigger cities, but even the big cities are pretty small, and there's lots of little villages.

Terror attacks are not meant to do as much damage as possible but to spread fear. So that point is meh.
But the cold war stuff is interesting.

Well yeah, and the fear is what kept people out from re-grouping in big cities.
Maybe something like the Tokyo Sarin gas attacks, but more severe.
Just something to go 'guess our fear of closely packed cities doesn't end with the cold war'

Make a second race of people they war with that nuke cities fairly often, you may have cities being hubs but more people will move away to villages

Easy: Plagues.

Some smart fucker figured out that horrible shit like The Black Plague can be avoided by not living in what are basically sprawling nests of pests of all kinds that tend to have a few centimeters of refuse covering the pavements at all times.

You can even involve some magical plagues, a pestilence god and nurgle-chaos tier cultists, plague doctors and all kind of good shit as fluff.

>Only one mention of Agriculture
>6 mentions of plagues

It's ALMOST like Veeky Forums understands how cities die, but not how they get big in the first place.

>Pretty much 90% of Canada is uninhabited
Is there any country with a higher concentration of "fucking nothing?"

Roman Europe had huge cities tho