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Americans are hungry for community. So why don't we have European-style squares?
- teeray 10mo agoBecause the American way is to put a big ol' parking lot where that square would go.
- ofalkaed 10mo agoTailgating is American and is community.
- WarOnPrivacy 10mo ago> and is community For some minutes during a few months, in a minuscule % of a massive number parking lots. It doesn't feel like an in-kind replacement for what we've lost.
- ofalkaed 10mo agoEvery parking lot is an opportunity for community. In my experience tailgating is considerably more than minutes and has a very strong community. Admittedly I do not have much experience with tailgating but my limited experience strongly suggests that it is a very tight knit community that goes beyond the actual event.
- vel0city 10mo agoParking lots are private spaces where the store management can ask you to leave at any time. That some don't is almost a happy accident. Compared to a public park where anyone is free to loiter and play. Plus parks are usually segregated from cars so you don't have to worry about a random car not paying attention killing you, the ground isn't hot pavement everywhere, there might be playground equipment and benches and picnic tables, etc.
- ofalkaed 10mo agoCities own parking lots but privately owned parking lots are generally easier to get access to for events, far less red tape and who ever owns it gets brownie points with the community.
- vel0city 10mo agoNot the reality around me. Almost all parking lots are privately owned. This is true for just about every US city I've ever lived in. Every Walmart, every Target, every big store has its own parking lot that is private property.
- ofalkaed 10mo agoWho said anything about big stores? Every big city I have lived in has had a stadium and parking lots owned by either the stadium or third parties which allow tailgating and I have been to/was involved in a good many events held in private parking lots. Big stores open 7 days a week if not 24 hours a day are obviously not going to sacrifice their parking lots but a good number of parking lots are mostly vacant on the weekends, they serve the 5 days a week, 9-5 buisness world and they are more willing to sacrifice their mostly empty weekend lots.
- vel0city 10mo ago> Every big city I have lived in has had a stadium and parking lots owned by either the stadium or third parties So not the city, the stadium corporation (which might have ties to the city, but usually a wholly separate organization) or private third parties. Like I said. > they are more willing to sacrifice their mostly empty weekend lots. Once again I've had a lot of very mixed experiences on this one. Some don't care, some see it as an insurance liability. I've spent a lot of my life adjacent to commerical property management, I can't imagine most of these groups being thoroughly OK with unknown groups using their lots for whatever. Seems like a good chance to get sued.
- hulitu 10mo ago> Tailgating is American Not when you own a BMW or Audi.
- almosthere 10mo agoWe're fairly business focused, so when someone goes man I wish there was a way to meet people, they create a .com to help people meet (filled with bots) instead of trying to actually meet people. At any rate, bars DO exist in the United States and last I heard they didn't all go out of business in the last week.
- AnimalMuppet 10mo agoBars. Gyms. Churches. Theater groups. Running clubs. Tech meetups. I'm sure I'm missing a few...
- WarOnPrivacy 10mo agoEach of these entities requires the work of creating and maintaining a specialized construct (often for profit) - which will then only attract a purposefully narrow audience. Contrast this with public spaces that are attended by diverse people, because their attendance isn't constrained by ability to pay or having a particular interest. The advantage of a public space is that it isn't an exclusionary club.
- AnimalMuppet 10mo agoI guess it depends on what you want. Do you want to meet people once, and never meet them again? Squares and parks are fine. But many people want community that is more than a series of one-off encounters. For them, they likely need something more than parks and squares.
- onetokeoverthe 10mo ago[dead]
- ofalkaed 10mo agoBecause we have mainstreets, buildings, blocks, community centers, parks, American-style squares, and so on. The sense of community that Americans are hungry for is ultimately the post war sort that has been dying out in recent decades; the ideal. We are a country in transition but the transition will probably not be shortened through planning, that is a bit too close to the dying post war ideal. Growing pains, we are still young.
- cheschire 10mo agoDepends on what you mean by "young". By some measures, the U.S. is one of the oldest nations in the world. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_modern_sovereign_states_by_date_of_formation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_modern_sovereign_state...
- vel0city 10mo agoThe city I live in practically didn't exist by most measures until the 1940s. Meanwhile many cities in Europe draw roots back a few thousand years BCE. The lot my house is on was barely even used as farmland in 1960, and got turned into a residential area finally in the 80s. But sure I'll trust you in telling me this is a much older civilization than Greece. Makes sense.
- defrost 10mo agoMesolithic Greece, starting in 13,000 BC is more or less on par with civilisation in North Texas: https://www.thestoryoftexas.com/discover/campfire-stories/american-indians https://www.thestoryoftexas.com/discover/campfire-stories/am... Where Greece has it over your region is Paleolithic Greek history which stretches back further.
- vel0city 10mo agoRevisionist history you're pushing here. I'm well versed about the native tribes in the area, definitely more than the average North Texan. A very interesting history, don't get me wrong. They didn't develop cities like anything you'd think of as a city today. Small roaming developments of maybe a few hundred people tops mostly. So when we're discussing "urban design" it's pretty irrelevant. That some branch of a nomadic tribe might have used my neighborhood as a hunting ground 15,000 years ago has little impact to the discussion of it's urban development. The Caddos would be the closest to making cities in the area, but the people living around there date back over a thousand years these larger communities we might call towns were still mostly small enclaves that didn't last more than a few hundred years at the longest mostly. And they were mostly a pretty recent, being a few thousand years newer of a civilization than Greece et. al., as they appeared well after 1,000CE Meanwhile Athens and what not can easily be seen as an actual city even 2000BCE.
- WarOnPrivacy 10mo agoBecause we can and do sacrifice everything for car culture - starting with childhood.
- Bluescreenbuddy 10mo agoWe have something similar in major cities. We have them here in Chicago.
- vel0city 10mo agoPeople will say they want these things and then move to some far flung enclave of a suburb neighborhood, vote against transit and bike lanes, vote to widen highways, and fight removing parking minimums.
- WentFullRetard 10mo ago[dead]
- pyuser583 10mo agoIn America big cities “squares” are associated with crime and homelessness. Times Square (NYC) and Union Square (SF) being two examples. The crime wave of the 80s and 90s really messed up urban architecture. Parks got a similar reputation- even now there’s still a “good park”/“bad park” mentality. Mass surveillance has its downsides, but safer public spaces is not one.
- veeti 10mo ago> In America big cities “squares” are associated with crime and homelessness. Times Square (NYC) and Union Square (SF) being two examples. Oh, that's what the main train station in any western European city exists for.
- archagon 10mo ago> Mass surveillance has its downsides, but safer public spaces is not one. Citation needed.
- fragmede 10mo agoMere blocks from Union Square is http://frontier tower.io, a 16 story commercial building that was almost a we work. These German investors bought the building and turned it into a vertical village, a community. If you're in San Francisco and looking for community, look there!
- smurda 10mo agoSquares don’t create activity — activity creates squares. In other words, “People do not use city parks and squares because they are parks and squares, but because of the uses to which adjoining streets put them.” -The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs I love this book, and it is used in many Urban Planning courses. She notes that Rockefeller Plaza works because it borrows life from the city. It is surrounded by offices, shops, restaurants, transit and used all day by different groups (workers, tourists, skaters, diners). Rockefeller Plaza succeeds because it is intensely connected to daily life and fed by continuous pedestrian traffic.
- maininformer 10mo agoAlso, the timeless way of building
- rawgabbit 10mo agoMy question is being cognizant we don’t have money to throw away, what policies should we support towards better urban design.
- atoav 10mo agoA good square is a place where a human being can be. That means if you want it to be vibrant the connecting streets also have to be places where humans want/need to be. And I specifically mean humans who walk and not cars. But how do they get there if you need to keep cars out? Other reasons my european mind can think of why this doesn't work in the US: - weird car-centric zoning regulations that lead to weirdly unorganic space use. Where I have my grocery store, my gym, my record shop and my doctor all within walking distance of my home that would be often utopian in the US. Good spaces are mixed spaces, and for that mixing has to be allowed - generally an egoistic cut-throat society, where some would rather burn the money, than risk the chance of having someone else profit from it. But good public spaces thrive from the surrounding owners caring about the public spaces and the people within it as well. - commercial interest trumps everything. In Europe many nice places are surounded by shops/redtaurants that are family owned for generations. And while economics do play a role also in Europe, they are not the be-all and end-all, when it comes to decisions. If your business has meaning to your whole family, you decide differently than a faceless megacorp that looks to extract value like a leech from everything that makes life worth living
- b3ing 10mo agoPart of the country doesn’t even like many of the others. Let’s fix that. Sometimes I wonder if having all the US teams play against each other with fake cities or states attached to them (because the players aren’t even from that area) hurts more than helps.