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No, it's the same with urbanism for example. If I look at what was built in my country before, say, WW2, it all makes sense, even if we just consider private h
by wott 7y ago
No, it's the same with urbanism for example.
If I look at what was built in my country before, say, WW2, it all makes sense, even if we just consider private housing development: numerous streets around small blocks, which guarantee many communication options and no concentration of traffic on single exits, streets on the outside of the blocks, so that it can be used by outsiders too, and so that it allows future extension without compromising any communication. This could be made simply for working-class neighbourhoods or company towns, and yet it was well designed, and has aged well.
But in the last 40-50 years we have had gazillions of educated, graduate, certified, professional urbanists and architects, and those have produced all those closed or almost closed subdivisions, which are bad to almost everything related to communication by any mean (foot, bike, but also by car, because it unbalances the traffic between places), and forbid any kind of evolution (extension, inclusion, change of destination).
The same also have validated the opposite: totally un-organised subdivisions, which produce the exact same result: for each group of 2 or 3 lots, you have a lane to the main road, perpendicular to it, and of course making a dead end on their side. With the additional penalty of blocking the vision for anyone going along the road, by a never-ending streak of artificialisation. Example: https://www.google.fr/maps/@43.4593112,1.3756329,1321m/data=!3m1!1e3?hl=fr https://www.google.fr/maps/@43.4593112,1.3756329,1321m/data=...
And they kept on doing that despite the evidence that it has almost no pro and plenty of terrible cons (otherwise said, it is utterly stupid shit). And they keep on doing it everyday, still.
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In my opinion, those situations have a degree of similarity: the advent of a horde of graduate professionals, who do worse than what has already been done, despite having been exposed to more experiences and more results of those decades of experiences, and having studied them.
- pcurve 7y agodumb question... when there's a lot of space to spread out, what would be a better way to lay out subdivisions off of main road?
- barrkel 7y agoThere shouldn't be a lot of "space to spread out"; that's car culture, not human scale development.
- mixmastamyk 7y agoAlso avoid “stroads.”
- barrkel 7y agoEverything is turning into pop culture. Doing things because they're fashionable right now, because they're newer, because it's easier to convince someone that the old way looks old than it is to convince them that it's worse.