Signal 1: Death Industry’s Adaptation to City Space
Cemeteries has always been a hindrance to city development and urbanization: With little land available in developing areas, cemeteries take up too much space, and are not profitable in city centers. For that reason, in the past, cities like New York and Paris moved bodies from their center to elsewhere, like Manhattan to Queens and from the surface to the catacombs fashioned from a quarry.
However, in recent years, with the rising senior population, combined with increasing urbanization and city migration rates, the result is a thriving demand for unconventional burials, cremations, and funerals adapted to recent technologies and ideas to curb the problem of city space (as well rising prices of cemetery plot burials due to said space)
One agreeable solution is instead of ground burials, is to create cemeteries several stories high, which are beginning to be established in urbanized countries like Italy, Norway, and Japan. A cemetery building run by a Buddhist association in Tokyo stores urns in warehouses with robotic retrieval, dependent on card scans. Combined with the cheap cost of storing in a warehouse, while taking up less plot in the city, it is a efficient technological solution.
The above seemed to gather positive reactions in the countries who established them. However, it should be said that these countries are religiously pragmatic. Therefore, they are more open to flexible funeral ideas than more religious countries. With a macabre subject like this, the culture and religious aspects should be taken into consideration: Catholics are hesitant in cremation, other monotheistic ones prefer ground burials, and so a more variety of solutions is needed.
