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Because we have mainstreets, buildings, blocks, community centers, parks, American-style squares, and so on. The sense of community that Americans are hungry fo
by ofalkaed 10mo ago
Because 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.
- defrost 10mo ago> Revisionist history you're pushing here. Which part of the Texas history link is incorrect? Civilisation is civilisation . it comes with and without attributes such as cities and agriculture .. the point made is that the timelines in Texas strecth back 13,000 years. > has little impact to the discussion of it's urban development. Their urban development consisted of light footprints, seasonal migration in worn patterns, walking, etc. That can be contrasted with how contemporary US citizens live, how the Dutch live, how varies other people still live today.
- vel0city 10mo agoThis is a discussion about urbanism, not just broadly "civilization". Nomadic tribes didn't live in urban environments. The city I live in practically didn't exist until very modern times. The fact some people used to to hunt around here 16,000 years ago has little impact to the modern way the city was laid out and designed or the people who mostly live here today. There's practically zero way to draw the roots of this town back to some group that camped here 16,000 years ago. Any form of lineage of civilization was lost a looooong time ago. Extremely few people would even draw their roots back to the Caddo, who are far more recent than anyone you're suggesting here.
- defrost 10mo agoThis is a discussion about community - See thread title. Some communities move - Not a hard concept for most.
- vel0city 10mo agoYeah, they moved. Away from here, for many reasons, often under bad situations. And most no longer exist, and are thus irrelevant to the discussion of lineage of current towns. Insane you're really arguing a suburb of North Texas is older or at least as old as Rome or Athens. So yeah, as an identity, this area is extremely young in comparison. It absolutely does not draw its roots back 16,000 years. We are not an extention of the Caddo people, they were not an extension of the first peoples who were here. > Because we have mainstreets, buildings, blocks, community centers, parks, American-style squares... Seems to me we're talking urban design here! That's kind of the whole point of the article, looking at urbanism in Europe to the US. Maybe you're imagining some other topic, but urbanism is deep in the discussion overall. I don't think nomadic groups had a lot of thought to how wide their highways were or planning our their parking lots.
- ofalkaed 10mo agoI am not talking about political borders. The countries of the new world are completely separated from the culture of the land, uncharted territory.
- pyuser583 10mo agoYou’re absolutely right about this. The Republic of Venice, Holy Roman Empire, and Poland-Lithuania Commonwealth were all still around when America was founded. Malta was still under the control of the Crusaders. Mongols still occupied Crimea. The modern European map really comes from the 19th and 20th centuries. Many European memories of nationhood are quite fake, and often deliberately so.
- cheschire 10mo agoYeah, but it doesn’t fit into the American mythos, I guess.
- fragmede 10mo ago> The sense of community that Americans are hungry for But also, we only hear the loud, lonely voices yelling online. The people that aren't terminally online, and have great offline community aren't going to go find places where people are being depressing lonely and try and get everyone to touch grass. In science, that'd be a sampling bias.