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The town I live in now, Bend, Oregon is barely over 100 years old, which is pretty new even for the US. And yet the downtown is still fairly walkable, if perha
by davidw 8y ago
The town I live in now, Bend, Oregon is barely over 100 years old, which is pretty new even for the US. And yet the downtown is still fairly walkable, if perhaps not quite as much as an Italian town.
The really bad stuff only really started coming out after we got zoning and then accelerated with post WWII development.
Can we make something just as walkable and nice as those Italian cities? Maybe not, but we can certainly walk back some of the worst excesses of the late 20th century.
This site has a lot of ideas and discussion: https://www.strongtowns.org/ https://www.strongtowns.org/
Oh, and it also turns out that much of suburbia is not very sustainable financially, and nor is it great for the environment.
- jonknee 8y ago> And yet the downtown is still fairly walkable, if perhaps not quite as much as an Italian town. But I bet almost everybody has a car.
- MR4D 8y agoYou give a great example - and raise an even better question: Can we "fix" cities to be more functional in a world dominated by autos? I wonder if we can. It seems like inertia has become so great that it will take many decades to overcome this. In Houston, I think this easily could take 1/2 a century or more.
- davidw 8y agoThe suburb I lived in, in Italy was mostly built out after widespread use of automobiles. And yes, it was walkable, because things were close to one another.