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> Basically America is bad because we had space for cars when they were invented? I think you did an admirable job of expressing my source of dissatisfaction w
by arkades 11y ago
> Basically America is bad because we had space for cars when they were invented?
I think you did an admirable job of expressing my source of dissatisfaction with the article.
That, and the author interjecting his personal preferences as architectural dogma - his passage about "No Street Enclosure" was very much of "I grew up in the tight spaces of old European cities, therefore preferring the tight spaces of old European cities is a psychological default universal in humankind".
I actually find it amusing that he thinks "parking in the rear" is some sort of architectural grand achievement, rather than the historical reality: it was something that emerged from streets strewn with mud and horse shit, allowing people to emerge from carriages on a clean, usually paved, surface. It was a practical solution to a problem that doesn't exist today.
Additionally, he seems to think the resultant alleys are "safe" (and, I don't know, maybe they are - I really don't know, and won't speculate), but in every European and Euro-style city where I've seen such "parking and garden in the back", the walls are all 10' high and topped with home-made barbed wire (usually shards of glass). It doesn't seem like the natives believe too firmly in the safety of these sorts of hidden-from-the-public-eye spaces.
Beyond that, there's plenty of false dichotomies.
Many of his other points are valid. They all just blend together in this general mash of "American cities suck because they're not like European cities; European cities are the epitome of human psychology and architecture."
Damn, Europe can be fucking beautiful. Just achingly beautiful (oh, so much of London). At other times, you can walk through street after street of 10' gates, marred only by graffiti and the occasional heavily-barred window (thinking of you here, huge swaths of Spain and Portugal). Then again, I can say the same of suburbia (see almost any part of Staten Island, New York developed pre-2000 or so if you want to see fantastic suburbs).
- _delirium 11y agoI think he's also looking at European cities with quite rose-colored glasses. There are nice European cites, and (perhaps more to the point) nice areas of European cities. I lived in central Copenhagen for years, and I really liked it! But they're far from universal, and European development models also produce vast swathes of neighborhoods and housing that suck. In different ways than American suburbia, but still not somewhere you'd want to live, given the choice. Example of the European equivalent of suburbia, which I'd argue is overall a less nice place to live than American suburbia: the more affordable London suburbs, or even worse, the more affordable Paris suburbs. They aren't vibrant, quaint, walkable cities, but just huge expanses of low-quality commuter housing, with bad commutes. Realistically for many people, the European equivalent to a lower-middle-class Houston suburban house with freeway commute isn't a nice apartment in a vibrant city center, but a small, somewhat shabby terrace house way out near Luton with a 75-minute bus+rail+tube commute into London. Compared to that version of Europe, the Houston suburbs don't look all that bad.
- takno 11y agoLondon is three times the size of Houston. If you did the same comparison for, say, Birmingham you could easily afford to live in a good suburb within a 30 minute commute of central Birmingham
- tormeh 11y agoSaying London is Europe is like saying NYC or SF is the US. These cities are extreme exceptions to the rules.
- abalashov 11y agovery much of "I grew up in the tight spaces of old European cities, therefore preferring the tight spaces of old European cities is a psychological default universal in humankind". Except I grew up mostly in suburban northern Indiana, suburban Houston, and suburban northeast Georgia. :-)
- nikdaheratik 11y agoI disagree with pretty much every conclusion made by the author, and yet agree that there is some truth there as well. The bottom line is that all of this suburban sprawl is a result of the extra land available in the U.S. combined with the automobile and combined with the growing middle class. The lack of municipal support for public transport is the other biggy. You can't build dense if everyone has to have a car to get around, and if the best you can do is a mediocre bus service that caters to the old and poor, you're not going to choose to build dense. t may not have been the best idea long term, but the choice for developers at the time wasn't "build a nice Euro model town square" vs. "Build a sprawling suburban mess". It was "build in this empty field" or "pay alot more money to tear down these old buildings and put up apartments to replace them". And the biggest money to be made wasn't in building up. The only good news is that mostly people have gotten to the point where they're not willing to travel any further out, and so more new development is happening by building up instead.