4 ms·
The plan you're describing is "make a ton of money building shit and make sure all the right people get their piece of the action." I mean, yes, it's a plan. Bu
by sd_dev 7y ago
The plan you're describing is "make a ton of money building shit and make sure all the right people get their piece of the action." I mean, yes, it's a plan. But it's not really a plan for a city.
I think you're dramatically understating the extent to which pre-automobile city building was a negotiation between local and regional plans, rules, and regulations, just as it is today. And large civil plans and projects were enacted well before the automobile, too. New Haven, Connecticut was one of the first planned cities in the US, and predates the car by centuries. It has a modern grid system. Boston's largest neighborhood, the Back Bay, was created out of a massive land-filling project decades before the invention of the automobile. Much of Paris, France, was built in the 19th century according to modern civil planning principles.
The whole "the roads used to be cowpaths" thing with old cities is really only true when you're talking about really old cities that still have medieval quarters and things like that.
Indeed, some of the oldest cities in the world have been built and rebuilt on top of themselves a number of times over the course of their histories, often according to very complicated plans. That's because the oldest cities in the world today are more often than not several orders of magnitude larger than they have ever been at any point in their history.
- davidw 7y agoI guess there's planning and there's modern planning. Even the Romans did grids, which is a pretty good system. And it makes sense to keep really noxious things like tanneries or smelly factories or whatever away from, say, schools and places people live, where possible. But modern planning in the US is hyper-detailed to the point where it stifles the natural evolution of our cities. And developers? They build what they're allowed to build. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/29/upshot/developer-dirty-word-housing-shortage.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/29/upshot/developer-dirty-wo...
- wahern 7y ago> But modern planning in the US is hyper-detailed to the point where it stifles the natural evolution of our cities. That may be true, but as was pointed out by commenters to a recent Strong Towns article, planners are the least of our problems. It's zoning policies and NIMBYs--which through various public comment and challenge procedures effectively gives them veto power--which are far and away the greatest impediment to healthy, incremental growth. The days of Robert Moses are long gone. Almost all professional planners subscribe to the religion of Jane Jacobs[1], sometimes to a fault. We don't need to get into the philosophical weeds about top-down vs bottom-up evolution. Our most substantial problems lie along a different axis. [1] The tenets of the religion vary among the adherents, like any mature religion.
- davidw 7y ago> planners are the least of our problems. It's zoning policies and NIMBYs Sure, I agree with that. But a lot of that zoning and NIMBYism seems to use the idea that cities can be 'planned' as a crutch. "We have traffic because it's not 'well-planned'" - as opposed to realizing that you have traffic because the modern portion of your city is predicated on automobile ownership for pretty much every facet of your life.