Hmm. How do y'all feel about cities? I tend to like the smaller intermediate sized ones of like 50k to 100k people. Then again though, that is where I grew up, so I would feel that way. XD
@Angle I've only ever lived in or near Houston, though it has varied from within the city proper to the outskirts / unincorporated areas immediately outside city limits, with about one year in League City (suburb south of Houston). To be fair I have never had a real reason to move outside the area though I did come close to having a good reason a while back. Even if I had a reason then, though, I would not have had the resources.
@Angle 5.5 Million in Sydney.
for comparision I've lived in multiple towns with populations under 300.
Living in Sydney or another large city, it's much easier to get help of all varieties, psychs, doctors, misc. help, pharmacies, lawyers, hospitals, everything.
dealing with large population centres and public transport is interesting... its sometimes decent sometimes horrible, chances of running into the same person twice on PT are low which is nice.
@Angle but if you go to entertainment centres (pubs, bars cinemas etc) you may run into the same people, make friends etc.
people seem a lot more friendly and open in the city. and if not, there is generally a place to go to find the more open portion of the population
Living in a small town people are a LOT less open to change, getting access to things is a challenge, as much as I love the countryside I could not live there again
@Angle we were limited on doctors, had one hospital 40min drive away, nearest ambulance station was 1hr in the other direction.
I didn't like my doctor but had no choice everyone else the next town over was taken (the next town was 40min away, we had no doctors in our town)
Nobody was open to me being trans at all, we smoked the pub out of their tobacco me and my friend liked.
getting to town was either have a car, or pay $10 each way on the bus that only run once a day, it was also a school bus
@Angle getting scripts filled was take it to the one pump petrol station and they got it when they got stock in the morning.
the shop owner was married to the only police officer in the town who was seldom there as he worked in the next town mostly.
Police did work for the hospital and doctors, doing mental health outcalls as medical services were underfunded and understaffed.
in my 6 months living there, no one who lived outside of our house, spoke to me.
@Angle I was part of a project also where i was interviewed quarterly for 1.25 years to report my view on youth access to health services, I was told I was a rather valuable asset to them because I was the only interviewed kid who had lived in the city and extremely remotely in the 1.25yr span
I was told on my last contact that I had already been quoted a few times to the health board to prompt changes, I'm glad I could be of help to youth.
I should contact them to find the paper.
@Angle holy...shit "Sexuality and/
or gender diverse
-
Completers
were
less likely to be gender and/
or sexuality
diverse than non
-
completers
(30% vs 40%; p = 0.001)"
@LottieVixen@dev.glitch.5 million, geez. Even the state capitol here is only 600k. I do like it here though - we have it especially good, cause you can go pretty much straight from moderately dense city to country side if you want. Like, I can bike up to main street or straight up into the mountains. It's pretty great. XD
@Angle i like em
gimme one over 10 million; it's been too long
5m is good, 1m is good, below that i'm pretty meh on em i guess
@Angle I am a huge fan of Jane Jacobs, so in the abstract, I love cities. In practice, I uh, tend to find they smell bad. I grew up in a T-intersection where the post office was in what used to be a chicken coop, so, yeah.
@Angle I live in Tulsa. Big enough to have everything I need, not so big that it's an hour ordeal to do anything
@Angle I used to live in Chicago and I've been to NYC, São Paulo, and Dallas. All way too big for me.
@Angle Grew up in a town with 250k core / 500k regional right before I left? Not so great socially but I miss the physical layout terribly.
Living in a city with 700k core / 4mil regional now. I don't think I could tolerate smaller from a services/deviant-acceptance standpoint but the suburbs go on and on and on and on and on and I HATE that! Like, hour trip either direction to visit friends long. XP
I'd love to go 50-100k TBPH, but I have to be in a much bigger place to be myself/social.
@Angle I like big dense cities. i grew up just outside of New York City and love in L.A. now with some smaller cities in between. I think a metropolitan area of about 7 million is about right for me.
Oh cool, a topic I can actually contribute to! I grew up in tiny rural towns, then moved to a decently-sized city in the Midwestern US, and then moved to Chicago.
I'm not 100% sure, but I don't think I can live in a city without decent public transit anymore. I wouldn't even consider another city without a decent gay neighborhood, either. Being queer in rural US was pretty awful, and I'm never doing that again.
Also, the relative anonymity of living in a huge city is extremely comforting to me. I can do whatever I want and not only will most of my neighbors never find out, they probably won't care. It's a pretty large contrast to the strict unwritten social rules of small towns. I'm not very good at picking up on those unwritten rules, so I don't miss that at all.
I do, however, really miss seeing the stars at night, the forests, and the general quiet.
I like that I can walk to things in Chicago. Smaller cities and rural areas are so spread out that walking is just impractical. Everything has half a mile of parking lot wasteland to cross, and there just aren't sidewalks in a lot of places.
@Angle I grew up in New Jersey, so every city is about 50,000 people but it's also like two square miles. So what people in other states point to as "the city" look like, well, that's just town.
Anyway, I like cities and feel at home in them. The one foreign country I've lived in is Singapore, which is all city.
@Angle Oh, also, every town is immediately adjacent to another town of about the same size, so there's just not this ... big, empty space between cities. At least along the main strip of New York City-to-Philadelphia. There's some more nearly isolated municipalities, like Vineland and Atlantic City, but they're the exceptional cases.
@Angle 2-3 million, like Warsaw, Berlin and the like. Moscow too large.
@Angle Grew up and lived in London as well as a smaller town on the outskirts (which is where I'm back at now)
I loved London, but I have fallen a bit out of love with it - that's largely due to government-related things (pricing-out, etc.)
I tend to stay in mostly at the moment, partially because I'm broke, partially because there's little to do here, other than go to London. I quite like the quiet/isolation, but do miss the plethora of things to do!
@Angle also, I was saying to someone the other day that it's spoiled me somewhat, it's quite a diverse bubble in comparison to the rest of the England, which is considerably more racist etc.
(this has only been heightened by the huge divide in the country as of '16)
I think the only other UK town I'd consider living in is Brighton, which has a population of 289,200 but seems to have a lot to do/astonishingly friendly people.
@Angle I’m stuck in a town of presumably 100k people (including college students) and it’s insufferable. But I grew up in a town of 200k, and have lived both small cities (350k) and large metropolitan areas (DC, the Bay Area)
@deathmlem @Angle I USED TO LIVE IN A TOWN OF 200.
@Angle
I lived in tiny cities as a kid, visited tiny to moderate cities as an adult. I live in #Houston now, spent many years in the Atlanta area.
Wouldn't go back to tiny towns for all the PG Tips in Britain. Among other things, if I wanted to drive to a shop for some PG Tips, I could.
I really want massive, well-designed arcologies, though. And more high-speed rail.
@Angle I live in a small remote village (500 people) and I often get the urge to move to a really big city
But then I think about all the negatives it'd bring and I'm not so sure I want to anymore