The hypertrophic city is undoubtedly going to have advantages that suburbs and traditional cities don't (he touched on some of the disadvantages, so I won't repeat them here). The sheer scale ends up being a good thing and a bad thing.
As a random example, if you're really into wingsuit flying you can easily find a sizable group of people who are similarly interested (and then you can arrange trips, etc.) That's much harder (sometimes even just impossible) to do at smaller scales (traditional cities) or smaller densities (the suburbs). Finding a good social cohort obviously has a noticeable impact on quality of life.
I also heavily disagree with his assessment that mass transit discourages walking. The very nature of mass transit is that one must walk to specified stations, and it wouldn't shock me to learn that New Yorkers walk a few miles every day even with arguably the best mass transit system in America. Cities with mass transit systems regularly appear on lists of America's fittest cities (e.g. Seattle, SF).
It seems silly to be arguing that traditional cities are a panacea to all problems when they obviously carry their own drawbacks.
The hypertrophic city is undoubtedly going to have advantages that suburbs and traditional cities don't (he touched on some of the disadvantages, so I won't repeat them here). The sheer scale ends up being a good thing and a bad thing.
As a random example, if you're really into wingsuit flying you can easily find a sizable group of people who are similarly interested (and then you can arrange trips, etc.) That's much harder (sometimes even just impossible) to do at smaller scales (traditional cities) or smaller densities (the suburbs). Finding a good social cohort obviously has a noticeable impact on quality of life.
I also heavily disagree with his assessment that mass transit discourages walking. The very nature of mass transit is that one must walk to specified stations, and it wouldn't shock me to learn that New Yorkers walk a few miles every day even with arguably the best mass transit system in America. Cities with mass transit systems regularly appear on lists of America's fittest cities (e.g. Seattle, SF).
It seems silly to be arguing that traditional cities are a panacea to all problems when they obviously carry their own drawbacks.