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European cities that are not Paris do indeed have some density issues. It's nothing like the North American shit show, of course, but it still shows an issue.
by Ericson2314 5y ago
European cities that are not Paris do indeed have some density issues. It's nothing like the North American shit show, of course, but it still shows an issue.
Fine if you want to keep your historic downtown, but you should build a modern dense "La Défense".
UK fails, Anglosphere housing shortage issues too. London is not dense enough and has no strong CBD proportional to its size.
Germany fails, as Berlin should be bigger than Paris if it weren't for WWII and the division. Germany is full of bad austerity and the "polycentricity" is simply a failure to catch up after development was interrupted. (Consider if they properly developed Berlin maybe there would be fewer AFD issues in the former East.)
Not sure what the situation is with Milan.
- athrun 5y agoI know La Defense well and I don't think this is the solution. La Defense is not dense from a housing perspective. And it was built with a car-centric mindset. The Esplanade itself is public transport friendly (thank god) but the surrounding area is a shit show. Thankfully most of the recent developments in the area are trying to reverse past decisions, but it's hard. Also, it's obviously very subjective, but to me La Defense is an ugly concrete jungle and not a nice place to live. Fundamentally, my core issue with la Defense is that it was centrally designed and planned with an Ivory Tower type of thinking. Today, we recognize the design was deeply flawed. But for some reason, we think we can play the same game again and design a new place from scratch and not make awful mistakes. I'd much rather see us grow existing cities and areas organically, making them progressively denser, rather than pursuing more of these big money-type projects that don't end up creating places people want to live in.
- Ericson2314 5y agoI don't disagree with those specifics, but fundamentally marjor cities need dense high rise focal points. We should have less ugly architecture, and certainly not car-oriented development, but I will take ugly concrete density over no density.