City living affects your brain, researchers find | Science | The Guardian

Another study that shows that the living in high density cities is not healthy...

Oh, well that's a great surprise there.

Still though, cities are the best way of storing our population in a reasonable area. If everyone went and built their own house and garden in rural areas, forests would be destroyed much faster, IMO.

I'd much rather live in a city than a rural area.
And like Advent says, it's the best way of storing a large population.

Time to start greening cities, then. Not just dinky little parks, either. It's time to find a way to bring wild nature/rural settings to cities. Not sure how, but we gotta do something to help Mama Nature get back into her concrete jungles.

Some of us like the concrete jungles. And I'd be willing to say that people living in rural areas or suburban areas deal with just as much stress as people living in cities.

We're biophilic creatures by nature, we find comfort in other living things. Stress is indeed everywhere (though I'd venture to guess that there is more in cities), but having other things around than glaring lights, cold steel, car exhaust, and the like helps people cope with it.

Could that be because they have jobs? I'm sure being isolated from people creates problems too.

Thank you HMN, plus, suburban areas tend to house richer people, which I'm sure have much more stress.

And guess where such isolation tends to occur? Cities! People in small towns/villages tend to have closer relationships with their neighbors and those around them. I'm in the suburbs (which are still pretty much governed by city trends of social interaction) and I barely know my neighbors.

Source.

I think I definitely agree on that cities are more about isolation than rural areas - though some people actually seem to like that because they do not really like the closer relationship in rural areas where "everybody knows everybody"...

On suburbs - they are part of the city - maybe more "green" in appearance, but overall they are also cities. And if all people decide to live in suburbs or suburbia-style homes, definitely that would take more room for the masses of people. BUT one should never forget that right now the "footprint" of the average person, including city dwellers is about 2.5 hektars, about 3-4 times more in the industrialized cities. So while a city dweller may need only 30 m² as living space, he needs several hektars of monoculture corn crops, timber forest farms, wheat fields, and so on. He also needs a part in water reservoirs, roads and trains to funnel all that resources into the city. Of course if you take that person and put it into suburbia or a rural area and he expects to have the same lifestyle, he will consume even more in commuting etc. But traditional rural villages do not really look like suburbia, which have mostly lawns (the "green deserts o the city") - they look more like fruit trees, chicken coops, private forests and meadows and so on. So while the people living there have some larger area they live on, that area partly fulfils their needs and reduces their need to import stuff from elsewhere.

Anyways - it seems that the population density is what makes people sick, so Putting more green into the city helps only partly...

Loneliness - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This also relates to Dunbar's Number, which is the number of people someone is able to forge a stable social relationship at one time, which is roughly between 100-230-something. Cities make it difficult for these relationships to emerge because of the vast number of shallow interactions people have in one day. To cite The Hangover, people have trouble making a "Wolf Pack" to call their own.

Dunbar's number - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Implying that living in cities makes you "sick"
Implying that city dwellers are more isolated than people in rural areas

well, its not about the "where" - it has to be done. Nature should always have a higher value as our ignorance.

This is out of Question.

I don't know about you but I'd much rather not have every single person in my neighborhood let alone city knwo who I am or what I do.