Drew Lawson wrote:
....
Accepting wikipedia's numbers for the sake of debate, New York City
(proper) has an area of 304.8 square miles and a population of
8,405,837. According to my calculator, that works out to about
1010 square feet per person. Take out the space used by roads,
walkways, parks and non-flattop buildings. How well do you think
they will eat if they put in a few hours each, but you take away
the farm influx?

why is it valid to say there will be no
farm inflow from the surrounding area?

if it doesn't happen that we can transport
food into large cities then for sure people
will be moving out. there are vast areas of
the surrounds that could be used again for
mixed agriculture. they are fallow in large
part now because most people are happy with
processed packaged chemfoods (derived from
corn, soy, wheat and rice).


And at ~27k/sqmi, NYC doesn't even come close to getting on wikipedia's
list of top sities by population density. Looks like Manila works
out to about 250 sqft/person.

What you say can be done, but it cannot be done for the current
global population.

assuming people stay in place. as you probably
know, when shit hits the fan, people start to
migrate. when the sea levels increase we'll
already have huge movements of people and will be
forced to rebuild large chunks of infrastructure,
wouldn't it be great if we actually built them
with sustainability, efficiency and better land
use policies for people who will walk, garden
and have green spaces?


songbird