Places not worth caring about

[Mike Oxlong]

A video (20 min.) about suburban USA, but made me think of Japan...

http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/121

[Samurai_Jerk]

That perfectly summed up why I've always hated the suburbs.

[Choeki]

Actually, I would say that Japan is a totally different beast regarding "urban sprawl" since the non-city areas (as defined by Japanese as "inaka") are usually set up in the style that New Urbanists are trying to create in places like Celebration, Florida. The difference however, is that the country areas in Japan were set up in that fashion because they are agrarian and of high density, with the majority of people working locally. However, I don't see this as a good thing since the reason why things are they way they are in the countryside is because the people are essentially trapped here due to a variety of factors (educational and financial limits being a major problem). I'm not saying that New Urbanism is the idea of forcing people into becoming peasants on a fief, but it's the cheap energy economy that allowed the possibility of decentralizing cities in the first place. Unless the US and other developed countries are going to rebuild all of the manufacturing/primary resource development facilities that they outsourced to developing countries, it hardly seems realistic that jobs are going to return to a local economy. That is unless what Mr. Kunstler refers to as an agrarian economy means a return to late 19th/early 20th century living conditions (ex. haberdashers, iron mongerers, cobblers, watchmakers, etc. making a city operate).

[Buraku]

Condominium units sold in October in metropolitan Tokyo fell 9.1 percent to 5,731 from a year earlier after dropping 19.8 percent in September, Japan's Real Estate Economic Institute said Thursday.
http://www.forbes.com/markets/feeds/afx/2007/11/14/afx4341634.html
This was the second straight month of fall and the ninth decline in 10 months, the institute said.