Anonymous wrote:Odd post. Chinese cities are really bad. Public bathrooms are disgusting. In the US homeless make messes but in China it’s the average citizen. The smell, especially body odor and general lack of hygiene is quite bad as well. Chinese culture does not value cleanliness.

Cites in India have massive poverty but in areas that have the infrastructure, people are clean.

I’d agree that Tokyo and Singapore are cleaner with better services but the larger Asian countries are not.

Anonymous wrote:Not even gonna bring Europe into this since their “urbanism” is village/college campus vibes

I mean Shanghai, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Singapore, shenzen, Beijing, Seoul, Jakarta, Taipei, Bangkok etc

Asian cities are amazing

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Anonymous wrote:Sheesh you get arrested in Singapore for littering.

And this is fundamentally why many Asian cities are so nice, orderly and clean.

Severe punishment for even the tiniest infractions, along with a strong desire to not bring dishonor on your family.

If the US had these two elements, we’d be just as orderly, clean and safe as Shanghai. But we don’t. We have generations of people raised by single parents, and we coddle and revere our criminal class, and protest when the police hurt their feelings.

This country is a dumpster fire and it’s our own fault.

The parts of DC or NYC I frequent as commuter is nice and clean enough without punishment for small things. Totalitarian countries have you walk on egg shells your whole life, clean streets in exchange for artistic pursuits, personal empowerment and innovation, that’s why we have better design, better tech and better working conditions.

Creative innovation = better in the West
Execution = better in the East

is how I see it as an Asian.

This used to be true. But, not any more.

South Korea is leagues ahead of the US in terms of high tech gadgets. They were forced to be because of the lack of space. Those Asian countries that OP cited are much smaller and densely populated than American cities, so they've had to find creative ways to make living in tiny spaces easier.

In South Korea, you are limited to a small bin for rubbish. I have a huge trash can for my rubbish. So, they've had to come up with more creative ways to live.

Tiny ≠ better.

Anonymous wrote:https://unherd.com/2024/01/why-american-cities-are-squalid/

Others are observing the same

“ Ever since I began my project to walk around the world, it has always been jarring to come home to the US, often from much poorer countries — in this case Bulgaria — to find that our infrastructure is infinitely worse. ”

“ And what I see is that, in the US, larger cities are basically two-tiered. A wealthy downtown professional class relies on inexpensive labourers who can’t afford to live near their workplace or drive a car; who are forced into long commutes on public transport systems in terminal decline.”

“ For Americans, who have both a high-regulation and low-trust society, this is all rather depressing; it’s the combination that means we can’t have nice things.”

“ I like to live here, but the reality is we are rapidly falling behind the rest of the world in liveability, especially when you adjust for our wealth. Our cities are being frozen in time by an absurd, centralised regulatory mindset, which sees human flourishing as dirty and unsafe, and seems determined to wring out the last drops of any soul from our urban spaces. ”

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Anonymous wrote:Older relatives say that U.S. cities were very pleasant places decades ago. My grandmother has photos of herself and her friends having fun on the sidewalks of Detroit in the 1930s and the place looked prosperous with lots of nicely dressed people (white and black) patronizing the businesses. I blame lack of strong police work and deinstitutionalizing of crazies.

Yeah even pictures of breadlines during the Great Depression, people seemed put together more

Yes, American cities used to have dignity because people invested in them and we had a tax structure far more similar to what Singapore and others have now. We had terrible monopolies, but we didn’t have people hiding vast fortunes abroad or using corporations to extract wealth from entire economies.

One side of my grandparents mostly worked in factories and lived within walking or trolley distance. They could and did take a trolley downtown from a neighborhood that still had outhouses and could see affordable classical music performances, visit the main library, or go to live theater (fine arts theater, not vaudeville) on maid and factory worker wages. All of those things were underwritten by Rockefellers and Carnegies, and the trolleys and sidewalks paid for by taxes.

Those relatives who were older during the Great Depression always said that they would have never been seen without tidy and clean clothes, even if they were shabby. But those same relatives also lamented how much worse clothing was after the 1950s and how low quality everything became. A coat could last 20 years and be cheaply relined and last another 20. Good luck buying a coat on factory or maid wages that lasts 20 years now, let alone finding someone to re-line it. Their lives lacked opportunity, they were in poor health, and they didn’t have material wealth, but they had a much better community and lifestyle than people of similar socioeconomic standing would have today.

Anonymous wrote:Troll post. My guess is OP has only been to certain high-end parts of those Asian cities, including Shenzhen (spelling corrected).

OP, walk into a regular person apartment building (not the uber rich) in Chaoyang District in Beijing. Report back.

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Anonymous wrote:Sheesh you get arrested in Singapore for littering.

And this is fundamentally why many Asian cities are so nice, orderly and clean.

Severe punishment for even the tiniest infractions, along with a strong desire to not bring dishonor on your family.

If the US had these two elements, we’d be just as orderly, clean and safe as Shanghai. But we don’t. We have generations of people raised by single parents, and we coddle and revere our criminal class, and protest when the police hurt their feelings.

This country is a dumpster fire and it’s our own fault.

The parts of DC or NYC I frequent as commuter is nice and clean enough without punishment for small things. Totalitarian countries have you walk on egg shells your whole life, clean streets in exchange for artistic pursuits, personal empowerment and innovation, that’s why we have better design, better tech and better working conditions.

Creative innovation = better in the West
Execution = better in the East

is how I see it as an Asian.