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Ive seen several attempts at master planned neighborhoods with little town center type things with the idea that youd rarely have to leave, around South Florida

Ive seen several attempts at master planned neighborhoods with little town center type things with the idea that youd rarely have to leave, around South Florida growing up, and even lived in one for a few years. They all failed miserably. I feel like ones that succeed are just lucky. These communities can have basic predetermined guidelines to how growth can happen but the actual growth needs to happen organically. You cant just plot and build every house in town at the start, and you cant expect that things wont change as things pan out. Otherwise youre forcing residents to live in this deterministic Truman Show world lacking real freedom, echoing the major failures of a lot of mid 20th century heavy-handed big-ego design that we still suffer the effects of today

notJim 5y ago
I’m skeptical that all planning is necessarily doomed to fail. Towns already do a considerable amount of planning via their zoning rules, and subdivisions are planned as well. The example here just seems like a subdivision, but planned for walkability rather requiring you to drive. Where did the place you lived in go wrong?
- ethanbond 5y ago
  Well… most towns/subdivisions with zealous planning suck. The best cities in the world appear to be very organically grown. Maybe this is an illusion?
  - notJim 5y ago
    How would you measure this? How do you differentiate "zealous planning" from "normal [?] planning?" This just feels like confirmation bias to me.
    - ethanbond 5y ago
      Totally ripe for confirmation bias, which is why my comment seemed very uncertain. I’m kind of going from a heuristic of older cities versus newer ones under the (potentially wrong!) assumption that zoning has tended toward more stringency over time.
  - Wowfunhappy 5y ago
    Well Manhattan, for example—obviously at first it developed organically, but the upper part of the island was largely planned, with a strict grid system of streets and avenues and a large park in the center! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QaIOfgz8FVY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QaIOfgz8FVY
    - harikb 5y ago
      Planning works great for public utilities- roads, libraries, parks etc. The moment we cross that are have a planned bank, grocer, retail I think it falls apart. The grocery shop needs guarantee on revenue to be setup, and then they will slack off because they won’t need to compete or innovate. People will realize once the HOA bill runs in to several hundred dollars and have to deal with shitty services. In the real world, depending on the area, one grocery chain will die and another will take its place.
      - caslon 5y ago
        Alternatively in the real world, one grocery store will die because a Wal*Mart opened an hour away and is replaced by an hour's drive instead of a brief walk to pick up groceries because people can't resist a dollar cheaper and ten more in gas.
        kortilla 5y ago
        No, that’s not how the real world works. People go to the Walmart and deal with that misery because groceries for the week cost $100 instead of $200. People on a budget absolutely pay attention to the cost of gas.
        caslon 5y ago
        That absolutely is how the real world works. I'm not well-off myself, I keep track of prices, and this recently happened in my own town.
        5y ago
  - drewr 5y ago
    I think it may indeed be an illusion. Paris, for example, was extremely planned. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haussmann%27s_renovation_of_Paris https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haussmann%27s_renovation_of_Pa...
    - ethanbond 5y ago
      This is fascinating! Thanks for sharing. It’s hard to tell what the specificity of the planning was… it seems to have included the street layouts and the below-ground infrastructure, but unclear on the facades and the shop/business distribution? I didn’t know about this but it makes a lot of sense. Those enormous boulevards are clearly not original nor unplanned.
      - laurencerowe 5y ago
        The 19th century equivalent of driving freeways through poor districts in American cities.
      - vidarh 5y ago
        Even the facades in Paris were planned to the point that there were regulations on color and material and design [1]. Regulations were eventually loosened up somewhat. [1] https://www.unjourdeplusaparis.com/en/paris-reportage/reconnaitre-immeuble-haussmannien https://www.unjourdeplusaparis.com/en/paris-reportage/reconn...
    - johncoltrane 5y ago
      You would have to consider Paris to be one of OP's "best cities in the world", though.
  - kolinko 5y ago
    Half of Polish cities were rebuilt using central urban planning and came up awesome (build quality aside). There were a few rules: - 5-10 min walk to kindergarden/school and local stores - 3-5 min walk to a bus stop - tons of green space - taller buildings but varied in size and angles so that there is both ample space and variety This is my place I lived in when studying: https://goo.gl/maps/VQqNEY8rcjScsGFg6 https://goo.gl/maps/VQqNEY8rcjScsGFg6 (not even the greenest one) And this is my place where I grew up (street view not available because cars not allowed) https://goo.gl/maps/Q3MwszTjQDqqNFS28 https://goo.gl/maps/Q3MwszTjQDqqNFS28 I literally had no streets to cross when I had to go to an elementary school, and literally 1000 other kids had 1-2 small streets to cross at most, walking 10-15 min or less.
    - TeMPOraL 5y ago
      There's also the classic - Nowa Huta, a former city and now part of Kraków, built next to Tadeusz Sędzimir Steelworks (formerly Vladimir Lenin Steelworks) - "nowa huta [stali]" translates to "new steelworks". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nowa_Huta https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nowa_Huta Here's how it looks: https://goo.gl/maps/5v8zZHpPtZ7Cik7b7 https://goo.gl/maps/5v8zZHpPtZ7Cik7b7 I'm linking to a traffic map, because it's best at highlighting the structure of the place. See the big roads forming straight lines, crossing to form distinct cells? This was intentional, top-down design. Zoom on a cell, see how it's made from apartment blocks surrounding shared, green communal areas. It's currently the greenest place in Kraków, and despite having a reputation of a dangerous place in late 90s[0], it's one of the nicest and most family-friendly areas in the city. The urban legend I grew up with goes, this cell-based design is partially for defensive purposes: during a ground conflict, spaces between outermost apartment blocks form choke points and could be barricaded to close off the sub-district. There's another, less happy story that I've heard - that the steelworks and the city of Nowa Huta were purposefully placed by the Soviets on the most fertile soil in the area, destroying it in the process, in order to get the Poles to urbanize more and generally to spite them. I haven't found a confirmation of this - it might be an urban legend, but it's one that's widely believed over here. -- [0] - Since taken by other districts; last I heard, Kurdwanów was the prime "hot zone". By "dangerous" I mean "you can get robbed at knife point" and "you can get beat up by hooligans". The joke goes, hooligans that lived in Nowa Huta have since grown up, started families, and don't have time for petty crime anymore.
  - TeMPOraL 5y ago
    > Maybe this is an illusion? It's a virulent meme. Planned towns are bad. Organic growth is good. Planning is tyranny, is oppression, is taxation. Please read "Seeing Like a State". Organic growth is freedom, is markets, is good. It's not entirely wrong, just extremely misleading. Urban planning doesn't have to create complete, inflexible designs, managing every tiny bit of life. And outside some failed experiments[0], it almost never is. Think of planning towns as growing gardens. You work with the forces of organic growth, not against them, but still nudge and direct them to create a result that's better[1] than what would be there on its own. -- [0] - Some planners got high on cybernetics/system thinking, in an era we could not computationally support designing complex systems - then others used this to push political ideologies; mix in power struggles and regular corruption, and of course it fails. What's annoying is that it gets painted as "planning bad", "cybernetics bad", "central bad", instead of recognizing the incentive failures in the mix. [1] - Better according to the gardener. Nature optimizes for its own thing. It's important to remember that natural, organic growth rarely optimizes for the benefit of individual units, whether plants or people.
    - AtlasBarfed 5y ago
      Maybe instead of urban planning, you need "urban philosophy". American urban philosophy is the car and the road and segregation. Everything else is secondary. American suburbia is just Conway's law on a massive scale.
  - HWR_14 5y ago
    > The best cities in the world appear to be very organically grown. Maybe this is an illusion? Which ones do you think were organically grown vs. which have zealous planning? (It would be nice if you used large enough examples that we could discuss them, as opposed to small towns known only to you.)
- Someone 5y ago
  One of the main reasons to make a plan should be that it allows you to realize when you are starting to deviate from it. That’s a time you have to do some thinking and either realize you’re about to make a mistake or adjust the plan/come up with a new one. If you do plans badly, you don’t do the thinking, but just declare any deviation from the plan a mistake.
bane 5y ago
One of the best examples I've seen in the U.S. is Reston, Virginia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reston,_Virginia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reston,_Virginia Rather than trying to plan it all out from the beginning, it has a planning philosophy that seems to have sustained it through the decades and my understanding is that the philosophy is used to this day to try to ensure a vibrant town. Not all of the early ideas and development worked either, but change seems to have been built in and the town is looking to grow in the coming years pretty significantly. I've been there a couple times and it reminds me of various mixed developments outside of city centers I've been at in Europe. The twist seems to be a gearing around walkability and abundant commercial/business zoning so people can live and work there.
deltasixeight 5y ago
A master plan doesn't hurt, they could get it wrong but it's not that much worse than haphazard randomness. The good cities you see aren't good because of early planning. They're good because of constant vigilance to improve and maintain. Subway systems for example aren't usually part of the master plan of the city at inception but are the result of constant vigilance to improve. Meanwhile western US suburbia is the result of unplanned urbanization reacting to the whims of corporate car culture. Totally unplanned and terrible. There's a software engineering analogy here.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- closeparen 5y ago
  American suburbia is exactly as planning codes require it to be. It's just hard to imagine that they could be this bad.
  - deltasixeight 5y ago
    Those aren't "planning" codes, it's more rules and guidelines. Development is still largely free and left to the market so long as they stick within the guidelines.
    - brewdad 5y ago
      It's those rules and guidelines that make suburbia so miserable though. When you can't build retail without 1 off-street parking spot per 100 sq ft or new residential without 1.5 parking spaces per bedroom, then there is no possible outcome other than the car-dependence we see today. Parking requirements make building a walkable town impossible.
      - deltasixeight 5y ago
        Car dependence comes from the low density infrastructure. The rules are a consequence of that. Low density infrastructure exists because many cities were built during a time when car companies were trying to make the automobile mainstream.
SilverRed 5y ago
I just don't see the point of these kinds of things when you could just move to an existing city. I moved to the middle of an Australian city and I haven't left a 2km radius because there is just no need, everything exists within walking distance. My city is also great because it is surrounded by a ring of parklands so I could go on a 10km walk through nature without ever leaving the parklands (other than crossing a few roads).
porknubbins 5y ago
I wouldn’t say Seaside, the new urban community where the Truman Show was filmed failed really. It seems to have held on to some sense of year round community that is not completely overwhelmed by the vacation crowd. I always liked staying there before it got too popular because it felt like a tiny functioning city with book store, arts, year round jobs etc, not like a vacation spot that turns into a ghost town after September.
WalterBright 5y ago
Medieval European towns managed to do it.
- ClumsyPilot 5y ago
  And cavemen managed, but how well?
stainforth 5y ago
Which one/s in South Florida??
brnt 5y ago
99.99% of the Netherlands is planned construction, we seem to be doing allright.
- stefanve 5y ago
  while that is true, a lot of the house are for sale and people will make small changes. Also local governments ask for input from the people that live there. Shops can come and go as these are mostly rentel spaces. So while we do a lot of planning there is still room to make it your own. This village seems to be a Holliday park like experience. With only rentals and pre defined shops
  - brnt 5y ago
    That sounds like overplanning. I guess in the US for some reason people are not looking for a middle ground?
brailsafe 5y ago
I think you're right for two reasons. The first being that cities and communities should evolve organically to meet the changing needs of the people living there over time. The second reason is that all successful communities (arguably all successful anything) are so because they're lucky.
raffraffraff 5y ago
Better than no planning. I live in a part of Dublin (Ireland) that was rapidly developed back in the 1950s to house families that were being rehomed from condemned tenement buildings in the city. The design came from "garden cities", a design from England in the early 1900s. It wasn't very "organic". Entire housing estates were built. These were modest family homes with gardens, and the estates included ample green spaces. Roads still cope well enough with today's traffic. At several places within 10 minutes walk from my house, there are purpose-built shop-front buildings that housed butchers, grocers, maybe even a pub. This was the high watermark of planned development in Dublin. These houses fetch 450k today, and while building regulations were atrocious back then, I km wouldn't trade my old house for anything that's been built since the 2000s at double the asking price. Sincere those good old days, the government and local councils have basically stopped building entirely and leave it up to private building contractors to hoard land, wait for property prices to hit a profitable price and then apply for permission to build multi-story one-bedroom apartments with minimal parking or greenspace, and no thought given to other amenities whatsoever. Because "We have a housing crisis!!" permission is usually granted. There is a chasm between the Truman Show and a vertical hellhole. If I had to choose, I'd live in the Truman Show.
- dkdbejwi383 5y ago
  It's pretty much the same story in the UK. Early c20th slum clearances, followed by well planned council estates built around a community, later (late 60s or 70s) the estates started to fall out of favour with tower blocks taking their place, which was a disaster and led to the justification for the private development free-for-all that we've had to put up with since the 80s which has resulted in terrible American-style, car-dependent suburbs filled with poorly built and poorly designed houses with no services within walking distance.
- andrepd 5y ago
  Same thing in the UK, council housing was high-quality and affordable for new families. Blame Thatcher for selling off council housing (amid her many disastrous policies). It's amazing how many problems in the UK and the US today can be traced back to Thatcher and Reagan respectively.
tomaskafka 5y ago
> You cant just plot and build every house in town at the start, and you cant expect that things wont change as things pan out. I wonder if you have ever talked with actual urbanist, as I have, and this definitely not how they think. Urbanism can actually be very ‘agile’, with a difference that you have a vision for the outcome you want to reach (which good agile in sw development is adding as well).

notJim 5y ago

I’m skeptical that all planning is necessarily doomed to fail. Towns already do a considerable amount of planning via their zoning rules, and subdivisions are planned as well. The example here just seems like a subdivision, but planned for walkability rather requiring you to drive. Where did the place you lived in go wrong?

ethanbond 5y ago
Well… most towns/subdivisions with zealous planning suck. The best cities in the world appear to be very organically grown. Maybe this is an illusion?
- notJim 5y ago
  How would you measure this? How do you differentiate "zealous planning" from "normal [?] planning?" This just feels like confirmation bias to me.
  - ethanbond 5y ago
    Totally ripe for confirmation bias, which is why my comment seemed very uncertain. I’m kind of going from a heuristic of older cities versus newer ones under the (potentially wrong!) assumption that zoning has tended toward more stringency over time.
- Wowfunhappy 5y ago
  Well Manhattan, for example—obviously at first it developed organically, but the upper part of the island was largely planned, with a strict grid system of streets and avenues and a large park in the center! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QaIOfgz8FVY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QaIOfgz8FVY
  - harikb 5y ago
    Planning works great for public utilities- roads, libraries, parks etc. The moment we cross that are have a planned bank, grocer, retail I think it falls apart. The grocery shop needs guarantee on revenue to be setup, and then they will slack off because they won’t need to compete or innovate. People will realize once the HOA bill runs in to several hundred dollars and have to deal with shitty services. In the real world, depending on the area, one grocery chain will die and another will take its place.
    - caslon 5y ago
      Alternatively in the real world, one grocery store will die because a Wal*Mart opened an hour away and is replaced by an hour's drive instead of a brief walk to pick up groceries because people can't resist a dollar cheaper and ten more in gas.
      - kortilla 5y ago
        No, that’s not how the real world works. People go to the Walmart and deal with that misery because groceries for the week cost $100 instead of $200. People on a budget absolutely pay attention to the cost of gas.
        caslon 5y ago
        That absolutely is how the real world works. I'm not well-off myself, I keep track of prices, and this recently happened in my own town.
        5y ago
- drewr 5y ago
  I think it may indeed be an illusion. Paris, for example, was extremely planned. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haussmann%27s_renovation_of_Paris https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haussmann%27s_renovation_of_Pa...
  - ethanbond 5y ago
    This is fascinating! Thanks for sharing. It’s hard to tell what the specificity of the planning was… it seems to have included the street layouts and the below-ground infrastructure, but unclear on the facades and the shop/business distribution? I didn’t know about this but it makes a lot of sense. Those enormous boulevards are clearly not original nor unplanned.
    - laurencerowe 5y ago
      The 19th century equivalent of driving freeways through poor districts in American cities.
    - vidarh 5y ago
      Even the facades in Paris were planned to the point that there were regulations on color and material and design [1]. Regulations were eventually loosened up somewhat. [1] https://www.unjourdeplusaparis.com/en/paris-reportage/reconnaitre-immeuble-haussmannien https://www.unjourdeplusaparis.com/en/paris-reportage/reconn...
  - johncoltrane 5y ago
    You would have to consider Paris to be one of OP's "best cities in the world", though.
- kolinko 5y ago
  Half of Polish cities were rebuilt using central urban planning and came up awesome (build quality aside). There were a few rules: - 5-10 min walk to kindergarden/school and local stores - 3-5 min walk to a bus stop - tons of green space - taller buildings but varied in size and angles so that there is both ample space and variety This is my place I lived in when studying: https://goo.gl/maps/VQqNEY8rcjScsGFg6 https://goo.gl/maps/VQqNEY8rcjScsGFg6 (not even the greenest one) And this is my place where I grew up (street view not available because cars not allowed) https://goo.gl/maps/Q3MwszTjQDqqNFS28 https://goo.gl/maps/Q3MwszTjQDqqNFS28 I literally had no streets to cross when I had to go to an elementary school, and literally 1000 other kids had 1-2 small streets to cross at most, walking 10-15 min or less.
  - TeMPOraL 5y ago
    There's also the classic - Nowa Huta, a former city and now part of Kraków, built next to Tadeusz Sędzimir Steelworks (formerly Vladimir Lenin Steelworks) - "nowa huta [stali]" translates to "new steelworks". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nowa_Huta https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nowa_Huta Here's how it looks: https://goo.gl/maps/5v8zZHpPtZ7Cik7b7 https://goo.gl/maps/5v8zZHpPtZ7Cik7b7 I'm linking to a traffic map, because it's best at highlighting the structure of the place. See the big roads forming straight lines, crossing to form distinct cells? This was intentional, top-down design. Zoom on a cell, see how it's made from apartment blocks surrounding shared, green communal areas. It's currently the greenest place in Kraków, and despite having a reputation of a dangerous place in late 90s[0], it's one of the nicest and most family-friendly areas in the city. The urban legend I grew up with goes, this cell-based design is partially for defensive purposes: during a ground conflict, spaces between outermost apartment blocks form choke points and could be barricaded to close off the sub-district. There's another, less happy story that I've heard - that the steelworks and the city of Nowa Huta were purposefully placed by the Soviets on the most fertile soil in the area, destroying it in the process, in order to get the Poles to urbanize more and generally to spite them. I haven't found a confirmation of this - it might be an urban legend, but it's one that's widely believed over here. -- [0] - Since taken by other districts; last I heard, Kurdwanów was the prime "hot zone". By "dangerous" I mean "you can get robbed at knife point" and "you can get beat up by hooligans". The joke goes, hooligans that lived in Nowa Huta have since grown up, started families, and don't have time for petty crime anymore.
- TeMPOraL 5y ago
  > Maybe this is an illusion? It's a virulent meme. Planned towns are bad. Organic growth is good. Planning is tyranny, is oppression, is taxation. Please read "Seeing Like a State". Organic growth is freedom, is markets, is good. It's not entirely wrong, just extremely misleading. Urban planning doesn't have to create complete, inflexible designs, managing every tiny bit of life. And outside some failed experiments[0], it almost never is. Think of planning towns as growing gardens. You work with the forces of organic growth, not against them, but still nudge and direct them to create a result that's better[1] than what would be there on its own. -- [0] - Some planners got high on cybernetics/system thinking, in an era we could not computationally support designing complex systems - then others used this to push political ideologies; mix in power struggles and regular corruption, and of course it fails. What's annoying is that it gets painted as "planning bad", "cybernetics bad", "central bad", instead of recognizing the incentive failures in the mix. [1] - Better according to the gardener. Nature optimizes for its own thing. It's important to remember that natural, organic growth rarely optimizes for the benefit of individual units, whether plants or people.
  - AtlasBarfed 5y ago
    Maybe instead of urban planning, you need "urban philosophy". American urban philosophy is the car and the road and segregation. Everything else is secondary. American suburbia is just Conway's law on a massive scale.
- HWR_14 5y ago
  > The best cities in the world appear to be very organically grown. Maybe this is an illusion? Which ones do you think were organically grown vs. which have zealous planning? (It would be nice if you used large enough examples that we could discuss them, as opposed to small towns known only to you.)
Someone 5y ago
One of the main reasons to make a plan should be that it allows you to realize when you are starting to deviate from it. That’s a time you have to do some thinking and either realize you’re about to make a mistake or adjust the plan/come up with a new one. If you do plans badly, you don’t do the thinking, but just declare any deviation from the plan a mistake.

bane 5y ago

One of the best examples I've seen in the U.S. is Reston, Virginia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reston,_Virginia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reston,_Virginia Rather than trying to plan it all out from the beginning, it has a planning philosophy that seems to have sustained it through the decades and my understanding is that the philosophy is used to this day to try to ensure a vibrant town. Not all of the early ideas and development worked either, but change seems to have been built in and the town is looking to grow in the coming years pretty significantly. I've been there a couple times and it reminds me of various mixed developments outside of city centers I've been at in Europe. The twist seems to be a gearing around walkability and abundant commercial/business zoning so people can live and work there.

deltasixeight 5y ago

A master plan doesn't hurt, they could get it wrong but it's not that much worse than haphazard randomness. The good cities you see aren't good because of early planning. They're good because of constant vigilance to improve and maintain. Subway systems for example aren't usually part of the master plan of the city at inception but are the result of constant vigilance to improve. Meanwhile western US suburbia is the result of unplanned urbanization reacting to the whims of corporate car culture. Totally unplanned and terrible. There's a software engineering analogy here.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
closeparen 5y ago
American suburbia is exactly as planning codes require it to be. It's just hard to imagine that they could be this bad.
- deltasixeight 5y ago
  Those aren't "planning" codes, it's more rules and guidelines. Development is still largely free and left to the market so long as they stick within the guidelines.
  - brewdad 5y ago
    It's those rules and guidelines that make suburbia so miserable though. When you can't build retail without 1 off-street parking spot per 100 sq ft or new residential without 1.5 parking spaces per bedroom, then there is no possible outcome other than the car-dependence we see today. Parking requirements make building a walkable town impossible.
    - deltasixeight 5y ago
      Car dependence comes from the low density infrastructure. The rules are a consequence of that. Low density infrastructure exists because many cities were built during a time when car companies were trying to make the automobile mainstream.

SilverRed 5y ago

I just don't see the point of these kinds of things when you could just move to an existing city. I moved to the middle of an Australian city and I haven't left a 2km radius because there is just no need, everything exists within walking distance. My city is also great because it is surrounded by a ring of parklands so I could go on a 10km walk through nature without ever leaving the parklands (other than crossing a few roads).

porknubbins 5y ago

I wouldn’t say Seaside, the new urban community where the Truman Show was filmed failed really. It seems to have held on to some sense of year round community that is not completely overwhelmed by the vacation crowd. I always liked staying there before it got too popular because it felt like a tiny functioning city with book store, arts, year round jobs etc, not like a vacation spot that turns into a ghost town after September.

WalterBright 5y ago

Medieval European towns managed to do it.

ClumsyPilot 5y ago
And cavemen managed, but how well?

stainforth 5y ago

Which one/s in South Florida??

brnt 5y ago

99.99% of the Netherlands is planned construction, we seem to be doing allright.

stefanve 5y ago
while that is true, a lot of the house are for sale and people will make small changes. Also local governments ask for input from the people that live there. Shops can come and go as these are mostly rentel spaces. So while we do a lot of planning there is still room to make it your own. This village seems to be a Holliday park like experience. With only rentals and pre defined shops
- brnt 5y ago
  That sounds like overplanning. I guess in the US for some reason people are not looking for a middle ground?

brailsafe 5y ago

I think you're right for two reasons. The first being that cities and communities should evolve organically to meet the changing needs of the people living there over time. The second reason is that all successful communities (arguably all successful anything) are so because they're lucky.

raffraffraff 5y ago

Better than no planning. I live in a part of Dublin (Ireland) that was rapidly developed back in the 1950s to house families that were being rehomed from condemned tenement buildings in the city. The design came from "garden cities", a design from England in the early 1900s. It wasn't very "organic". Entire housing estates were built. These were modest family homes with gardens, and the estates included ample green spaces. Roads still cope well enough with today's traffic. At several places within 10 minutes walk from my house, there are purpose-built shop-front buildings that housed butchers, grocers, maybe even a pub. This was the high watermark of planned development in Dublin. These houses fetch 450k today, and while building regulations were atrocious back then, I km wouldn't trade my old house for anything that's been built since the 2000s at double the asking price. Sincere those good old days, the government and local councils have basically stopped building entirely and leave it up to private building contractors to hoard land, wait for property prices to hit a profitable price and then apply for permission to build multi-story one-bedroom apartments with minimal parking or greenspace, and no thought given to other amenities whatsoever. Because "We have a housing crisis!!" permission is usually granted. There is a chasm between the Truman Show and a vertical hellhole. If I had to choose, I'd live in the Truman Show.

dkdbejwi383 5y ago
It's pretty much the same story in the UK. Early c20th slum clearances, followed by well planned council estates built around a community, later (late 60s or 70s) the estates started to fall out of favour with tower blocks taking their place, which was a disaster and led to the justification for the private development free-for-all that we've had to put up with since the 80s which has resulted in terrible American-style, car-dependent suburbs filled with poorly built and poorly designed houses with no services within walking distance.
andrepd 5y ago
Same thing in the UK, council housing was high-quality and affordable for new families. Blame Thatcher for selling off council housing (amid her many disastrous policies). It's amazing how many problems in the UK and the US today can be traced back to Thatcher and Reagan respectively.

tomaskafka 5y ago

> You cant just plot and build every house in town at the start, and you cant expect that things wont change as things pan out. I wonder if you have ever talked with actual urbanist, as I have, and this definitely not how they think. Urbanism can actually be very ‘agile’, with a difference that you have a vision for the outcome you want to reach (which good agile in sw development is adding as well).