Why is every major western city completely dead post COVID?
I'm walking through the streets in my city and everything is dead, shops and restaurants are empty, malls are deader than dead. Some stores have closed down or went bankrupt due to low traffic. Streets have barely any cars. At night it's generally the same, nightclubs are dead, bars are empty. Nothing is happening. The city feels vacant everywhere. im guessing people can't afford to live downtown anymore so they move in the outskirts but besides going to work and watching Netflix what the fuck do people even do? Is everyone just too obese to enjoy outdoor shit now?
>>2253596That is actually a normal occurence in any space with sufficient housing for all its residence. Just go to midtown tokyo and you'll see images like this frequently
Crowding and actvitiy is far more common in spaces that lack housing availability for both commercial (most important as they are mainly responsible for people walking outside in mass anyways) and residential space.
Also, very few adults go out to places like courtyards, parks, or museums frequently either over finances, time, or just plain disinterest.
>>2253599 >>2253596I think this is mostly an American or Canadian phenomenon where inner cities are just designed for offices and administration, not as buzzing pedestrian precincts with street cafes and market stands like in Europe.
Malls and restaurant are dead because prizes increased more than wages, I personally barely eat out anymore. I'd pay about 30 Euro for a meal just for myself in normal restaurant, not worth it. Was at McDonald's today, 14 Euros for a standard menu. Forget it.
>>2253596I've heard tourism has plummeted since border patrol agents started waterboarding white tourists recently. Are the areas you walk around usually frequented by tourists?
Also many people now work hybrid office vs work from home. So they commute less often. Could this also be a factor?
>>2253596 (OP)
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Blame the thots and the simps
This is the same question as to why people don't wear hats anymore. Technology. Cars and HVAC systems negated the need for hats and wool coats.
A historical dialectic analysis points to the reason we are here. Firstly the entire US economy is service industry based. Thanks to neoliberalism we don't make anything anymore and everyone works at a computer or in a hospital or in a restaurant or a shop. Thanks to covid all the people who worked at computers now work from home. Thanks to covid all the people who would go to shops and dine out, now get everything delivered (another service that replaces the old service). So now that everyone stays home, all the businesses that demanded you to be there suffered and folded. Who wants to eat out when you can uber eats? Who wants to go drink out when you can invite your 2 friends over? Who wants to go shop at target when you can amazon everything to your home? When you had to go out in person, the smaller mom and pop shops seemed like a better alternative, but now that the box stores all deliver, why bother leaving the house? The reason no one has taken up shelter in those vacant buildings is that the standard commercial lease is 3-5 years long. We are only now starting to really feel the pain of useless buildings. Why is everyone now talking about walkable cities? Because everyone stopped driving around. People don't go out, and when they do, they see dead cities. When it was full of vim and vigor of neoliberal bullshit, people talked about sidewalks and trees, but not the underlying foundational planning of it all. It is a corpse and everyone is doing a post mortum while thinking they are being critical. It's too late. The infrastructure is built, and the entire mode of cities profiting off development refuses to set aside budgets for renovation or maintained. The AAA rated bonds are all set aside for new sprawling development, it's the only way the major municipalities don't go bankrupt. The rot comes from the center and you've only noticed it now that no one goes down town at all. Until your city goes bankrupt, there's no way to really fix it on a systemic level. Notice all the abandoned giant office buildings built in the middle of suburbia? They are just another symptom of it all. They thought they could endlessly expand, but it's now all on the computer that was built by china.
>>2253619>very few adults go out to places like courtyards, parks, or museums frequently either over finances, time, or just plain disinterest.like David Harvey wrote about accumulation of privatized areas by dispossession of the public commons. You have to pay to play and do anything now
>>2255611>This is the same question as to why people don't wear hats anymore. Technology. Cars and HVAC systems negated the need for hats and wool coats. No I think workers have just been so proletarianized that they wander around getting solar radiation damage to their skin because they lack self respect. That's what a redneck is: someone who wears a t-shirt all day and doesn't give a fuck about skin damage, they are going to die at age 40 from opiates and that's fine 👍
>The AAA rated bonds are all set aside for new sprawling development, it's the only way the major municipalities don't go bankrupt. Neoliberal austerity budget cuts forcing people to build tumorous growths, literal cancer
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