5 ms·

It sounds like the “high quality outdoor space” you are referring to is something to be found in typical North American suburbia, but I would argue that this i

It sounds like the “high quality outdoor space” you are referring to is something to be found in typical North American suburbia, but I would argue that this is typically a bleak crabgrass hell and not much higher quality or more alive than the road/parking-lot hell that surrounds it. But maybe you are instead imagining streets lined with elm trees (well elm was traditional but most died of Dutch elm disease—other species are used now). Occasionally one may find an undeveloped lot which has more native species growing there, but perhaps we just disagree on what a high-quality outdoor space is, and you have something much more human-focused than natural in mind. I would argue that these do exist in the dense parts of big American cities (think Central Park in New York, which has a lot of space but also serves a dense population and so can afford more gardeners, flower beds, and varied features in general; New York also manages to sustain two botanical gardens which have reasonable examples of natural habitat too.) Though I would imagine the typical US city with a hollowed-out downtown mightn’t have good parks or shared spaces.

techsupporter 5y ago
My view of a high-quality outdoor space is one where humans can be without the need to pay, with the ability to sit, and some space for play or leisure. We should also plan for pets being present because no matter how many signs you put asking people to not bring their dogs, cats, turtles, or ferrets, people will bring them. So let's not assume otherwise. A water fountain would be great, a public restroom (like a Portland Loo) even moreso in larger areas. This same space should also have as much of its volume as possible given over to natural surfaces. Grasses and hardy flowers, in particular. We don't need a rose garden. Most plant species native to an area look quite nice if not mowed down or stunted with pesticides. We should encourage property owners to give over some of the massive amounts of space currently used for automobile operation and storage to these public spaces. Eliminate parking minimums so that grocery and other big box stores in urban areas are able to rip up the artificial paving and return that space to natural use, for example. Make more planter box seating in movement rights-of-way. Unused parcels owned by governments should not be fenced off but have some furniture plopped down and an "everyone welcome" sign placed here. I also want people and their cities to think about more than just downtown. Comparatively few people live in "actual" downtowns. We need to deal with that, too, so that downtowns are not just clusters of tall office buildings that empty out at the end of a workday. Nothing says that Downtown cannot be a vibrant neighborhood of its own, arguably even easier than trying to kickstart other neighborhoods. But just saying "putting green space in downtown is difficult" misses the many, many other areas of most cities and towns. (I'm sure someone will come along and say "but you can't possibly do this because the homeless" so yes, this does mean we are addressing environmental concerns at the same time we are addressing human concerns.)
- jonahbenton 5y ago
  Every so often I come across the well-intentioned phrase "encourage property owners to <do something that sacrifices property rights>".... Quite literally the entire history of "rule of law" in human societies can be summed up as a less-expensive-than-violence program of defense of rights of property ownership. The only kind of encouragement property ownership will sacrifice rights to is that which comes from an army. Still, tho, good ideas, cheers.
  - JumpCrisscross 5y ago
    Tax breaks for land so converted would keep property owners in control while encouraging the desired behaviour.
  - dan-robertson 5y ago
    What is the difference between the current American urban planning system where certain property is restricted to certain purposes and eg developers must devote certain amounts of land to parking lots and the proposal of the GP where some land must be devoted to certain “green space”? (FWIW I mostly disagree and think the city or some trust should just own that green space.) It seems to me like you’re ranting against the status quo and not anything particular about the parent comment.
  - kyralis 5y ago
    This is fundamentally false. Witness the many conservation easement programs, or the agreements that have made possible many trail systems. There are absolutely systems of encouragement - many of which may not even be economic! - that cause property owners to accept restrictions on their rights. Not to mention the many laws that fundamentally restrict property rights, from zoning to noise ordinances.
  - adrianN 5y ago
    Property rights haven't been absolute in a long time. We have all kinds of laws and taxes that regulate and incentivize what exactly you can and can not do with your private property.
- 5y ago
ben_w 5y ago
As a non-American, American cities haven’t impressed me at all. However, you may find it interesting to explore the rest of the world via Google Street View: I grew up in the South Downs of the UK, did my degree in Aberystwyth, spent several years in Cambridge and roughly one each in Plymouth and Sheffield, and now live in Berlin. These all have a lot of greenery within and on their doorsteps, the worst among them (Sheffield and Plymouth) being roughly similar to my memories of Manhattan. Street View images of Spain, Greece, and Cyprus remind me a lot of rural California (when actually visiting, Spain and Greece felt accurate, Cyprus felt like the UK). Most of England, Wales, and North-West France reminds me of New England. The only places I’ve been to that were as bleak as Nevada/Salt Lake were literally beaches, and even there the bleakness didn’t stretch to the horizon. Rhine Valley has some colossal eyesores, but even then you get to fantastic countryside in a fairly short cycle ride. Everywhere in Switzerland, even the cities, is basically a paradise on par with Yosemite, with the occasional mistake present (e.g. Zürich motorway); and, with the caveat that I was 9 and this was multiple decades ago now, I have lots of green memories from when I visited Singapore, Bangkok, Adelaide, Sydney, Canberra, and Cairns. (Nairobi had a lot of green in a lot of places, but I really did not feel like I grokked any of the cities’ underlying patterns in the week I was there, so I can’t say if greenery implied rich places or poor places).
- dan-robertson 5y ago
  Did it occur to you that I mightn’t be American? I think it’s pretty silly to argue about the obvious failures of American urbanism and successes in Europe on every HN thread about cities. I think main reason these failures weren’t made in European cities is that those cities did not have the same kind of population growth or free space or money as American cities. One difference with America is that there is a little more hope of achieving something more like a natural environment. Above I wrote about how the “greenery” of American suburbia is in some sense inauthentic and dead. America does however have a lot of their natural environment still in a reasonably wild state (modulo invasive non-native species.) In places like the U.K., this inauthenticity extends across much of the countryside too. The fenland near Cambridge used to be wet and marshy before the fens were drained. Much of that habitat is now lost (though there are some efforts to recreate it.) Much of the landscape of the U.K. is not much more diverse or natural than an American lawn, and even bits that look more wild like the various moorlands have been significantly changed by humans to have more land for grazing (or fowling) rather than bogs or forests.

techsupporter 5y ago

My view of a high-quality outdoor space is one where humans can be without the need to pay, with the ability to sit, and some space for play or leisure. We should also plan for pets being present because no matter how many signs you put asking people to not bring their dogs, cats, turtles, or ferrets, people will bring them. So let's not assume otherwise. A water fountain would be great, a public restroom (like a Portland Loo) even moreso in larger areas. This same space should also have as much of its volume as possible given over to natural surfaces. Grasses and hardy flowers, in particular. We don't need a rose garden. Most plant species native to an area look quite nice if not mowed down or stunted with pesticides. We should encourage property owners to give over some of the massive amounts of space currently used for automobile operation and storage to these public spaces. Eliminate parking minimums so that grocery and other big box stores in urban areas are able to rip up the artificial paving and return that space to natural use, for example. Make more planter box seating in movement rights-of-way. Unused parcels owned by governments should not be fenced off but have some furniture plopped down and an "everyone welcome" sign placed here. I also want people and their cities to think about more than just downtown. Comparatively few people live in "actual" downtowns. We need to deal with that, too, so that downtowns are not just clusters of tall office buildings that empty out at the end of a workday. Nothing says that Downtown cannot be a vibrant neighborhood of its own, arguably even easier than trying to kickstart other neighborhoods. But just saying "putting green space in downtown is difficult" misses the many, many other areas of most cities and towns. (I'm sure someone will come along and say "but you can't possibly do this because the homeless" so yes, this does mean we are addressing environmental concerns at the same time we are addressing human concerns.)

jonahbenton 5y ago
Every so often I come across the well-intentioned phrase "encourage property owners to <do something that sacrifices property rights>".... Quite literally the entire history of "rule of law" in human societies can be summed up as a less-expensive-than-violence program of defense of rights of property ownership. The only kind of encouragement property ownership will sacrifice rights to is that which comes from an army. Still, tho, good ideas, cheers.
- JumpCrisscross 5y ago
  Tax breaks for land so converted would keep property owners in control while encouraging the desired behaviour.
- dan-robertson 5y ago
  What is the difference between the current American urban planning system where certain property is restricted to certain purposes and eg developers must devote certain amounts of land to parking lots and the proposal of the GP where some land must be devoted to certain “green space”? (FWIW I mostly disagree and think the city or some trust should just own that green space.) It seems to me like you’re ranting against the status quo and not anything particular about the parent comment.
- kyralis 5y ago
  This is fundamentally false. Witness the many conservation easement programs, or the agreements that have made possible many trail systems. There are absolutely systems of encouragement - many of which may not even be economic! - that cause property owners to accept restrictions on their rights. Not to mention the many laws that fundamentally restrict property rights, from zoning to noise ordinances.
- adrianN 5y ago
  Property rights haven't been absolute in a long time. We have all kinds of laws and taxes that regulate and incentivize what exactly you can and can not do with your private property.
5y ago

ben_w 5y ago

As a non-American, American cities haven’t impressed me at all. However, you may find it interesting to explore the rest of the world via Google Street View: I grew up in the South Downs of the UK, did my degree in Aberystwyth, spent several years in Cambridge and roughly one each in Plymouth and Sheffield, and now live in Berlin. These all have a lot of greenery within and on their doorsteps, the worst among them (Sheffield and Plymouth) being roughly similar to my memories of Manhattan. Street View images of Spain, Greece, and Cyprus remind me a lot of rural California (when actually visiting, Spain and Greece felt accurate, Cyprus felt like the UK). Most of England, Wales, and North-West France reminds me of New England. The only places I’ve been to that were as bleak as Nevada/Salt Lake were literally beaches, and even there the bleakness didn’t stretch to the horizon. Rhine Valley has some colossal eyesores, but even then you get to fantastic countryside in a fairly short cycle ride. Everywhere in Switzerland, even the cities, is basically a paradise on par with Yosemite, with the occasional mistake present (e.g. Zürich motorway); and, with the caveat that I was 9 and this was multiple decades ago now, I have lots of green memories from when I visited Singapore, Bangkok, Adelaide, Sydney, Canberra, and Cairns. (Nairobi had a lot of green in a lot of places, but I really did not feel like I grokked any of the cities’ underlying patterns in the week I was there, so I can’t say if greenery implied rich places or poor places).

dan-robertson 5y ago
Did it occur to you that I mightn’t be American? I think it’s pretty silly to argue about the obvious failures of American urbanism and successes in Europe on every HN thread about cities. I think main reason these failures weren’t made in European cities is that those cities did not have the same kind of population growth or free space or money as American cities. One difference with America is that there is a little more hope of achieving something more like a natural environment. Above I wrote about how the “greenery” of American suburbia is in some sense inauthentic and dead. America does however have a lot of their natural environment still in a reasonably wild state (modulo invasive non-native species.) In places like the U.K., this inauthenticity extends across much of the countryside too. The fenland near Cambridge used to be wet and marshy before the fens were drained. Much of that habitat is now lost (though there are some efforts to recreate it.) Much of the landscape of the U.K. is not much more diverse or natural than an American lawn, and even bits that look more wild like the various moorlands have been significantly changed by humans to have more land for grazing (or fowling) rather than bogs or forests.