Sorry but this does not sound very convincing. If the car culture in California is causing Apple to produce large phones, why didn’t Apple start doing it earlier? It’s not like the sprawling suburbia of California only came into existence in the last few years.
Samsung, on the other hand, has been producing huge phones that no one is going to be able to use with a single hand since a long time ago, and has no problem selling them in places like Hong Kong. It doesn’t seem to me that it is suburban culture that is inflating the size of phones.
(Don’t get me wrong. I like dense urban environments, public transport, ability to use apps without internet connection, and, at the same time, smaller phones.)
The Central Line in London has some of its stations designed in this way, and you can certainly feel the slope when the train enters or leaves the station.
After riding the Central Line frequently for one year I got used to that feeling and start to think that there is something missing when I ride other lines...
I have seen platform doors arranged like what you described at an inter-city railway station. Unfortunately this is unlikely to work for hot and gross subway systems like the NYC subway, where platforms tend to be narrow and overcrowded.
Push the ‘impoliteness and efficiency’ to the extreme and you get the Australia Dairy Company in Hong Kong, a restaurant where the service is so bad that tourists come to experience it...
And I agree with how you feel about the Oriental Canteen. A really inexpensive place to get a quick meal. Can’t expect much more from it.
It seems to me (a native speaker of Mandarin) that the written Chinese is not closely tied to the phonetics or spoken Chinese. A person who could only speak Cantonese can write something that can be easily understood by someone who speaks only Wu. While an alphabetic writing system seems to be secondary to an underlying, spoken language, in which case the written language represents the way in which the language is spoken.
Such a perception might be the result of the divide between vernacular and written/literary Chinese that remained uncontested until a hundred years ago. An alphabetic writing system for Chinese would essentially unify spoken and written Chinese, which goes against the aforementioned perception. Hence the resistance against an alphabetic writing system.
Maybe ZUN himself is cool with people distributing his work on the internet, but I don’t think that all the doujin circles are cool with people distributing theirs.
If anyone is interested in how the layout of a city affects the way in which people perceive the city mentally, you may find the book The Image of the City by Kevin Lynch a nice read.
The book talks about how people create mental models of the cities in which they live, using certain abstract elements (paths, landmarks et cetra) that are present in their cities.
This is also what a lot of Simcity 4 players did. Some of them have spent years building highly realistic cities, taking care of all details the game would allow them, while some devoted their effort to the making of high quality models, MODs, and various plugins that helped the 2003 game to be still full of new contents a decade after its release.
Few games offer the same level of openness and depth as the (old) Simcity games does.
> That area probably has way above the average population density of the city.
Interestingly, Chiyoda, the Tokyo ward in which the street view you provided is located, has the lowest population (by which I mean the `resident' population density) among all wards in central Tokyo[1]. I believe that this strongly supports your point that the `suffocating' parts of a city does not really have many people living there.