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This trend (moving back into city centres) has been around for a long time, and is well documented. The USA is slower than most of Europe on this (although they

This trend (moving back into city centres) has been around for a long time, and is well documented. The USA is slower than most of Europe on this (although they generally did not desert the city centre quite so much). Its worth also noting that a lot of this is down to government and planning laws, which in the 1950s (generally when they were introduced on a wide scale) hugely subsidised suburban development and road building, to the expense of existing urban areas (which were largely unfunded). 60 years of cumulative common sense has led to a re-emergence of city centres as nice places to live (and cost-effective for governments) rather than the 'slums' of the early century.

philwelch 15y ago
In the US, the migration to the suburbs was also motivated by racism. Europe, at the time, didn't have the same conflicts. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_flight http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_flight Another part of the governmental subsidy problem is that governments by design tend to redistribute wealth out of cities and into rural and suburban areas. It even happens at multiple scales; Seattle pays taxes to the Washington State government which are then redistributed to outlying towns, but Washington pays taxes to the US federal government which are then redistributed to Wyoming and Alaska. Until governments are redesigned along the principle that human beings, and not parcels of land, are the true stakeholders, this will be a systemic problem.