Originally Posted by
cooker
Our sprawl looks much nicer than a shanty town, but it's a hundred times more wasteful of farmland. How much food could be grown under the interchange of the 410 and 401? You don't see those dozens or hundreds of hectares of paving and sculpted berms and gravel shoulders around shantytowns. And each shack takes up a footprint of maybe 100 square feet, not 1000 like a suburban Canadian home, or much more counting the driveway, lawn and the street in front.
Well, I'd rather live in sprawl than in a Sao Paolo shanty town. But I'm sure your point is that we could have comfy big homes on generous lots, but still use a lot less land and resources than we do in current sprawl zones. Suburbs do not have to be sprawl zones. People can have lots of space, but put the homes on streets with a grid pattern, and include a centrally located business district instead of stores spread along miles of highway.