I like to take explore the living areas of most Euro cities I've been to--Paris, Glasgow, Rome, Florence, etc. I spent a semester abroad in Paris about ten year

I like to take explore the living areas of most Euro cities I've been to--Paris, Glasgow, Rome, Florence, etc. I spent a semester abroad in Paris about ten years ago and spent most of my time in one of the recently-built satellite towns, which was a mess of concrete and cheap modern buildings. The actual generic middle class areas are usually several steps above the American generic middle class areas, but I concur that most of the new builds are the same cheap, boring, new-right-now approach. It's quite depressing to me that so many people unthinkingly accept the premise that there's no time to build society to any standards that someone would be proud of or pleased about. It builds an apathy and almost a resentment to any sense of time or place within its residence. It's a lack of culture enforced by architecture. A good example is advertisements. They clutter every public space and make people simply ignore what they're seeing. "Just an ad." People will go hours through a city and never look up because they already know what's there.