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Not all small towns had these features. Most of the smallest did not have much more than a grocery store; the residents and the outlying farmers both went to a larger city for clothes, etc, or they ordered from the Sears catalogue. Nor did the smallest have transit. In the steel mill town area outside of Pittsburgha where I grew up, shortly after WW II before gigantic malls, etc, there were a couple of towns in that had nice downtown shopping areas and the rest just had groceries, drug stores, and maybe a dime store store, something like that.
Sure; it's all about scale. The center of a town of 500 wasn't going to offer the same services in "downtown" as a town of 2,000.
Full of chickens, cows, pigs, and fields of wheat, corn, soybeans, sorghum, etc, right?
You can grow vegetables and maybe some fruits (though most come from trees) in a tower, but not much else! And talk about artificial! Not to mention, that produce would be quite expensive. Are you familar with the term "hot house tomato"? All produce out of season is expensive, be it shipped in from Mexico or grown in a greenhouse.
I read the post. I don't think the author has much of an idea of "how a cow becomes a quart of milk", or a hamburger, or much of any other knowledge about farming. Fruits and veggies are one thing, but you cannot grow grains in that manner. Nor can you grow animals that way. I have lived in ag country; those old Illinois farmers would have a big laugh at this article.
It's funny quite funny that sophisticated city slickers are far more dependent on the uncouth farmers' crops and livestock than the farmers are on the city slickers' advertising portfolios and legal briefs. Wall Street's complete demise would be bad for farmers. The Ag industry's complete demise, otoh, would mean certain physical death for Wall Street.
When I first read to OP, I thought it was assumed that the people in rural areas would stay put, and only either those living in suburbs or cities would move. Are we now talking about a scenario where people living in rural AND suburban areas would move to the city vs city dwellers moving to the suburbs AND rural areas?
^^I can't give out any more rep today (!), so I'll rep you publicly. Some of you urbanists need to get out into the country. For nykiddo718718, I'd recommend a trip to Ohio farm country, since that's probably the closest true "ag state". Even a trip upstate to a dairy farm would be enlightening.
Full of chickens, cows, pigs, and fields of wheat, corn, soybeans, sorghum, etc, right?
Sure hope the livestock is on the bottom ...
Quote:
Originally Posted by CairoCanadian
The OP required imagination, but all I'm envisioning at this point is pedestrians terrorized by heffers falling from thirty stories up.
LMAO! That would hurt ...
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Originally Posted by wburg
look at pictures of small-town American downtowns prior to World War II, and you see public squares, mixed-use buildings, walkable neighborhoods, and public transit.
Or, you could look at any small town that was settled and developed before World War II, and the answer is ... not always. I've lived in a half dozen small Midwestern towns -- that's what being a newspaper reporter will do to you over the years -- and none had public transit, except maybe one or two taxis. Why would they? You can walk from one end of town to the other in less than =30 minutes.
The downtowns did indeed have mixed-use buildings. I can think of only one that had an honest-to-goodness town square, and that was in northeastern Ohio, whose small towns are very New England-y. Otherwise, the parks were all tucked away in residential neighborhoods, or on the outskirts of downtown.
Walkable neighborhoods, yes, but strictly residential, with an occasional pocket of neighborhood businesses in the larger towns, usually along the main drag.
Even in the 19th century people wanted their living and commercial areas to be separate.
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