7 ms·
"City leaders had poured money into a high-concept modernistic new culture center at the town’s edge. And the shopping mall had been built. Large grocery chains
by chrismealy 10y ago
"City leaders had poured money into a high-concept modernistic new culture center at the town’s edge. And the shopping mall had been built. Large grocery chains, called hypermarkets, had also been constructed outside the city, with free parking. It is not that Albi no longer had commerce, or activity. But the essence of the ancient city was being lost."
When you own a car it costs a lot of money whether you drive it or not. When you own a car you want free and convenient parking. When you own a car you want wide roads free of obstacles (that is, people). When you own a car then retailers can offload distribution costs onto you, which means buying in bulk at giant stores with giant parking lots. Widespread car ownership is fundamentally incompatible with dense, walkable towns.
- VLM 10y agoHow much human suffering is acceptable to imprison people in the dense walkable cities no one wants for themselves, but desperately want others to endure for them because it looks quaint? Most ethnic activities die out to the sound of "It sure would be nice if someone else would...".
- m1sta_ 10y agoI would prefer to live in the dense walkable town. I realise I'm a sample of one but don't assume there aren't people who don't prefer that model.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- ocschwar 10y agoFunny thing. The densest, most walkable city in Massachusetts, Somerville, is now the most sought after city in the Commonwealth, and among the most sought after in the country.
- gozur88 10y agoBy what measurement?
- ocschwar 10y agoHome prices. Rents.
- gozur88 10y agoI'm a Firefly fan. I was dying to see Serenity when it came out. Just dying. If the studio had limited the box office to 100 tickets I would have acquired one. I would have rolled my grandmother for a ticket. And there were a lot of people just like me, in absolute numbers. A few thousand, at least. Those 100 tickets would have sold for thousands of dollars. By your logic that would have made Serenity the most sought after movie ever. But there weren't enough people like me to make the movie's release successful by conventional measures. It barely broke even. There were enough die-hard fans to drive up the price of those theoretically limited 100 tickets, but most people aren't Firefly fans at all and didn't bother to buy tickets at the normal price.
- DanAndersen 10y agoIt's strange to me to consider traditional walkable cities as a cause of "human suffering" or to view such properties as holding others hostage -- or, of all things, to identify sprawling car-culture as the one that is in danger of dying out. If anything should be compared with endangered traditional culture practices, it wouldn't be the one that seems to have the forces of the Almighty Economy on its side.
- Altay- 10y agoAny cursory reading of history will reveal that cities are and always have been where humans go to die. In the past, this was because of disease caused by pre-sanitation density. Today, it is due to below-replacement fertility rates caused by impossible to afford living costs. So if you consider extinction a form of human suffering, 'traditional walkable cities' fit the bill.
- coldtea 10y agoNot even sure what you're going for here. Untold millions have lived in big cities since the time of Babylon and earlier.
- DanAndersen 10y agoHah, there's a good point there. Though I'd think there's a balance to be had: places like Albi, France, which has ~50000 people, may not require the skyrocketing living costs that our modern global megacities demand.
- germinalphrase 10y agoPeople have always moved to towns/cities for better opportunities. Cities may breed disease - but being a subsistence farmer is a rough life.
- FullMtlAlcoholc 10y ago> Any cursory reading of history will reveal that cities are and always have been where humans go to die. I don't know where you get that interpretation, but most historians will say that is exactly the opposite reason why cities were developed. Historically, people moved to cities so that they would NOT die. Living in a city amongst other people provides one with a greater defense against roving bandits and others who want to kill you and take your property/food. That is how cities came into existence. There is also the benefits of trade. With trade came specialization so that not everyone had to be a farmer to sustain themselves. One could become an artisan, a priest, or a warrior.
- JumpCrisscross 10y ago> dense walkable cities no one wants Using property prices as a proxy for demand, it seems the problem is more too many people wanting this.
- VLM 10y agoYet if you sum the value of property its very unusual for the net worth of a city to exceed the net worth of its metro area suburbs. Lets explore the concept in detail with automobiles. Most people buy compact commuter cars, lets say. It really doesn't matter what kind of car is the most expensive car, that probably being sports cars. The price of a Ferrari being a large multiple of the price of a Honda Civic means surprisingly very little, or at least it should... In 2015 about 300K honda civics were sold for lets say $19K each vs 7664 Ferrari sales for $400K each in the USA. Yes I understand perfectly that the typical Ferrari sells for $400K and a Civic sells for $19K so apparently market clearing prices for Ferrari's dwarfs prices for Civics by a factor of almost exactly 21. Clearly we should socially engineer all our car laws to greatly encourage Ferrari ownership and all our social signalling memes should revolve around the superiority of Ferrari ownership. However... 300K Honda Civics at 19K is roughly $5.7B in sales. And Ferrari sales of 7664 cars at $400K is almost exactly $3B. Clearly the marketplace has spoken and Ferraris and Civics are roughly equal in the marketplace and should be equal in the world of memes and social signalling. But wait, there's 300K civic owners and 7664 ferrari owners. Clearly the socially engineered car laws should favor civics, not ferraris. The world of property is somewhere between the 2nd and 3rd examples. The first example is simply irrelevant. Cities have some expensive properties and proportionately no one lives there. I'm well aware that culturally its a huge social mistake to pretend anything or anyone matters other than the big cities, regardless how few live there. Most people want the suburb life that we must be convinced to socially engineer laws to destroy.
- Symbiote 10y agoI don't see how the analogy fits. Are people being forced to buy Ferraris? Most people would want the Ferrari, or a similarly expensive car in a different style (Rolls Royce, Tesla, whatever). In fact, both. But they can afford neither. Most people would also like a home in the city centre, or one in a village in the countryside, mountains or on the coast. Or both. Who would choose suburbia? It's a compromise, and in every respect the city centre or the village is better.
- Majestic121 10y agoWhat do you mean 'no one wants for themselves' ? Here (Paris) a lot of people love to be able to walk everywhere, and there are huge pressures to get cars out of the city : roads closing, lot of money invested in transports, etc... Some people with cars are complaining, but it is overall viewed as a good decision, as cars take up lot of space for walkable/bikable areas, parcs, etc... and they pollute really badly I do want a dense city with no car and more transport/the ability to walk to most places
- PeterisP 10y agoA dense city "works" if it has sufficient population, and Albi (<50k) apparently does not. This is what I seem to be seeing anywhere - urbanization as all or nothing, either megapolis or countryside, since the smaller towns seemingly can't sustain many things, everything (except real estate) is more expensive and with less options available; and it's even more so with education and jobs, with many professions simply not having any companies needing them in smaller towns.
- Majestic121 10y agoThat's a fair point, walkable city definitely have to reach a certain density/population to be succesful. However, I would argue that the number is not necessarily very high : for example Niort (110k inhabitants) is also pushing pretty heavily to get rid of cars in the city center [1], making tranports free [2], and having experiments to push people to get rid of their cars [3]. All those have a pretty positive feedback from the local population Albi might be to small for it, but not necessarily by much, and I think it is also important to have support from the municipality Sorry about the links in French, but it's pretty hard to find infos on Niort in English :) [1] : https://www.vivre-a-niort.com/cadre-de-vie/quartiers/centre-ville/centre-ville-pieton/index.html https://www.vivre-a-niort.com/cadre-de-vie/quartiers/centre-... [2] : https://www.vivre-a-niort.com/fr/actualites/dernieres-infos/index.html?tx_news_pi1%5Bnews%5D=5399&no_cache=1 https://www.vivre-a-niort.com/fr/actualites/dernieres-infos/... [3] : https://www.vivre-a-niort.com/fr/actualites/dernieres-infos/index.html?tx_news_pi1%5Bnews%5D=5373&no_cache=1 https://www.vivre-a-niort.com/fr/actualites/dernieres-infos/...
- Symbiote 10y agoI pay a premium to live in the centre of a European city, along with many others -- there are families, couples, single, working and retired people. The quaint building that stood on this site was demolished in the 1950s, but about half the street still qualifies. Possibly this is the first time any part of my behaviour has been described as "ethnic".
- coldtea 10y ago>in the dense walkable cities no one wants for themselves Well, that's like, your opinion, man. Millions living in NY and other "dense" cities would like to disagree.
- white-flame 10y agoWhat's the total population of people living in such dense cities vs elsewhere? According to older statistics I was able to find, it's 58% living in cities of over 200k people in the USA, but that's way more inclusive of a measurement than what would reflect cities that are dense to the point where, for instance, walking becomes more desirable than car ownership. For instance, the Phoenix metro area has over 5 million people, but it has no really "dense" areas in the walkable sense. It's sprawling desert that was able to be built up recently and spaciously. In the USA, there's likely a couple dozen million people max living in the too-dense-for-cars cities, and there's hundreds of millions in the population at large. We have the most mobile population on the planet, thus we can "vote" where to live far easier, and the vast majority lives outside those areas. Sure, most are still urban and suburban, but certainly not living in NYC/SF style density.
- gozur88 10y ago>We have the most mobile population on the planet, thus we can "vote" where to live far easier, and the vast majority lives outside those areas. Well, sort of. Don't most people move to whereever their next job is? I would love to live somewhere like Montana or Idaho where population density is low, but I don't know how I'd pay the bills when I got there.
- clock_tower 10y agoMost people in the US don't live in walkable areas, but just how many walkable areas are there in the US? Look up New World Economics on really narrow streets and 19th-century hypertrophism: the answer might be as low as three or four. No wonder it's so expensive to live in them!
- skewart 10y agoWell, by this logic one could say that nobody wants interplanetary travel. I mean, heck, only a few people have ever been to outer space - the vast majority have spent their entire lives here on Earth - so, therefore nobody must be interested. You're forgetting that it's illegal to build dense walkable cities in much of the country. And, like others have pointed out, few people are actually free to move to exactly the kind of place where they would ideally like to live. Past and current behavior is not always a good indicator of underlying desires.
- clock_tower 10y agoHave you ever lived in a dense, walkable city, especially one with decent mass transit and possibly bike sharing? If you live in downtown Boston (North End, South End, Beacon Hill, Back Bay, Cambridge) and have to move away, you'll miss it for the rest of your life. And Boston is nothing special compared to Europe...
- jacquesm 10y agoI've lived in Amsterdam, which definitely satisfies the 'dense, walkable city' bit and I don't miss it one bit. Cities have advantages and disadvantages, just like everything else and just like not everything is great in the countryside so not everything is great in the city.
- clock_tower 10y agoWhat did you dislike about it? (My first guesses would be too many drugs, too much of the legacy of Calvinism, and possibly aggressive bicyclists...)
- jacquesm 10y ago- noise - too little green - dogshit all over the place - traffic - price of accomodation - impossible to get in or out of the city at certain times of the day - measurably increasing street violence / drug trade while I lived there (28 years give or take) - not knowing your neighbors even after years of living next to each other My 'sweet spot' is just outside a major city. That way I get all the advantages without the disadvantages.
- clock_tower 10y agoI'm not sure how to respond, but thanks for posting. I can't complain about moving away to avoid violence, nor moving away to avoid dog dung -- although I've always liked not knowing my neighbors. (If I wanted lifestyle police breathing down my neck, I'd move to Saudi Arabia where at least they're regulated!)
- xapata 10y agoThe article's descriptions of Albi remind me of coral bleaching at barrier reefs. It's possible to recover until a certain point.
- ocschwar 10y ago"City leaders had poured money into a high-concept modernistic new culture center at the town’s edge. And the shopping mall had been built. Large grocery chains, called hypermarkets, had also been constructed outside the city, with free parking. It is not that Albi no longer had commerce, or activity. But the essence of the ancient city was being lost." Then maybe, they should not have done that. Manhattan Kansas gutted itself the same way.