5 ms·

Yes. European cities were, in general, well-developed before the car was invented. US cities are built around the car. This means more space dedicated to parki

Yes. European cities were, in general, well-developed before the car was invented. US cities are built around the car. This means more space dedicated to parking, which means less space for homes and businesses, which means things are farther apart, which means people need cars. It’s a negative feedback loop.

germinalphrase 4y ago
Wouldn’t that be a positive feedback loop that we feel negative about?
carschno 4y ago
You can observe this very well in Germany. You have many cities that were destroyed during World War 2, and rebuilt around the car. You can compare them to the cities that were built before, and not destroyed. Nowadays, the latter are typically those cities popular with tourists and inhabitants due to their lively and walkable city centers, while city centers of the further category are oftentimes abandoned and avoided areas during the evenings and weekends. Impressive to see how the car-based city concept has failed for the inhabitants, and how hard it is for those cities to adapt to the post-industrial era. Of course, failure is subjective: car-based cities have been essential for the car industry because many inhabitants are completely dependent on having a car.
- Someone 4y ago
  > You can observe this very well in Germany. You have many cities that were destroyed during World War 2, and rebuilt around the car. You can compare them to the cities that were built before, and not destroyed. I think that’s more likely “and rebuilt according to the old plan”. Very few German cities escaped with limited bombing damage. https://bigthink.com/strange-maps/air-war-germany-map/ https://bigthink.com/strange-maps/air-war-germany-map/: “Of the 54 largest cities (>100,000 inhabitants) in Germany, only four survived without significant damage: Lübeck, Wiesbaden, Halle and Erfurt.”
  - Dylan16807 3y ago
    There is a tremendous gap between "limited damage" and "destroyed", and in most of that range you wouldn't have much opportunity to change the layout despite the damage being "significant".
seadan83 4y ago
I don't think this is quite true. To nitpick. My knowledge is that European urban planning was very similar and car centric until the late 60s. At that time things diverged, US stayed the course with car centric split zoning where Europe shifted away from car centric design and heavily favored mixed zoning Eg, in many US cities, it is illegal to have a bakery on the ground floor of an apartment building. Though, bottom line, my point is US and EU cities were designed very similarly from 1940 until 1970
- unity1001 4y ago
  > My knowledge is that European urban planning was very similar and car centric until the late 60s There was and is scarce 'city planning' in Europe because there is scarce planning that can be done. The majority of cities have emerged in the middle ages at the latest, and there is nothing that can be done to 'plan' them. Even for the peripheries (as they are called) this is so: They formed around the villages or remote settlements in the peripheries of the cities, so there was no planning there at all. The closes that can be said to be built 'around cars' would be the urban construction of gated communities or high rises in the peripheries. But they still were not built around cars - those communities can still perfectly live within their own locale by having access to everything. The only difference that requires a car would be those people having jobs in the city and having to drive 20-30 minutes every day to the city and back. > Though, bottom line, my point is US and EU cities were designed very similarly from 1940 until 1970 That is patently false.
  - seadan83 3y ago
    I agree that most European (and many ancient) cities had no city planning and grew organically. Though, this is not what I'm talking about. Yet, there are still quibbles around this as many European cities were rebuilt many times. Sometimes this reconstruction was the result of war, sometimes it was sheer reconstruction out of Urban planning. "The city [Paris] is one of the most striking examples of rational urban planning, conducted in the middle of the nineteenth century during the “Second Empire” of Napoleon III to ease congestion in the dense network of medieval streets." [1] Though, the reason why 1940 - 1970 is so important is because it is post-war and a lot was rebuilt in Europe while at the same time there was a lot of growth in American cities (the baby boom; federal investment in roads, etc..), and both European and American Urban growth and reconstruction were heavily influenced by "Modernism" [2][3]. "European engineers were sent in flocks to the US to learn from the environments in which these revolutionary ideas were playing out, returning with tabula rasa development plans to realise their own modernist dreams." [4] Modernist Urban planning ideas started in the 1910's and on, but it wasn't until 1940 that there was the mass of opportunity for rebuilding and the funding to implement those ideas. "Modernist principles have shaped city-building since the beginning of the twentieth century. Numerous authors draw a connection between modernist discourse within planning practice and the rise of the Fordist paradigm (Irving 1993; Calthorpe and Fulton 2001; Sandercock 1998). In following these principles, the North American built environment has taken the form of low-density sprawl. This development pattern is characterized by a dominance of single-family housing, a reliance on automobile transportation and a strict separation of land uses." [5] A key difference is that US civil engineers still are quite influenced by Modernism. For example, US traffic engineers continue to optimize for the throughput of vehicles on city streets rather than the throughput of people [6]. On the other hand, around the 1970s affluent European urban planners pushed back on "Le Corbesier" style planning and "Modernist planning fell into decline. "By the late 1960s and early 1970s, many planners felt that modernism's clean lines and lack of human scale sapped vitality from the community, blaming them for high crime rates and social problems.[59] ... Modernist planning fell into decline in the 1970s when the construction of cheap, uniform tower blocks ended in most countries" [7] [1] https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20130722-revolution-in-paris-street-design https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20130722-revolution-in-pa... [2] https://www.archdaily.com/604056/north-america-s-radiant-city-le-corbusier-s-impact-on-new-york https://www.archdaily.com/604056/north-america-s-radiant-cit... [3] [How a Controversial European Architect Shaped New York](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/how-controversial-european-architect-shaped-new-york-180965073/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/how-controversial-...) [4] [Story of cities #36: how Copenhagen rejected 1960s modernist 'utopia'](https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/may/05/story-cities-copenhagen-denmark-modernist-utopia https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/may/05/story-cities-...) [5] http://www.etsav.upc.es/personals/iphs2004/pdf/003_p.pdf http://www.etsav.upc.es/personals/iphs2004/pdf/003_p.pdf (page 3) [6] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-09-30/a-swiss-lesson-in-enlightened-street-design https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-09-30/a-swiss-l... [7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_urban_planning#Modernism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_urban_planning#Mode... - "Reaction against modernism" ----------------------- Beyond the above, the more extended exerts below I believe make the same point I made. I would find it interesting where these are patently false and do not support the assertion I made earlier: > "Modernism: In the 1920s, the ideas of modernism began to surface in urban planning. The influential modernist architect Le Corbusier presented his scheme for a "Contemporary City" for three million inhabitants (Ville Contemporaine) in 1922. The centrepiece of this plan was the group of sixty-story cruciform skyscrapers, steel-framed office buildings encased in huge curtain walls of glass. [....] He segregated pedestrian circulation paths from the roadways and glorified the automobile as a means of transportation. " > "Reaction against modernism: By the late 1960s and early 1970s, many planners felt that modernism's clean lines and lack of human scale sapped vitality from the community, blaming them for high crime rates and social problems.[59] > Modernist planning fell into decline in the 1970s when the construction of cheap, uniform tower blocks ended in most countries, such as Britain and France. Since then many have been demolished and replaced by other housing types. Rather than attempting to eliminate all disorder, planning now concentrates on individualism and diversity in society and the economy; this is the post-modernist era.[59]" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_urban_planning#Modernism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_urban_planning#Mode... "Modernist principles have shaped city-building since the beginning of the twentieth century. Numerous authors draw a connection between modernist discourse within planning practice and the rise of the Fordist paradigm (Irving 1993; Calthorpe and Fulton 2001; Sandercock 1998). In following these principles, the North American built environment has taken the form of low-density sprawl. This development pattern is characterized by a dominance of single-family housing, a reliance on automobile transportation and a strict separation of land uses." (page 3) "A significant individual embracing these values was the Swiss architect Le Corbusier. Beginning his practice in the late ‘10s, he wanted to correct the ‘chaos’ of the city and create an ideal order. His impact on modernist planning thought is incalculable, and his ideas were widely applied in cities during the 1950s and ‘60s." (Page 4) "Following a 1926 US Supreme Court decision to safeguard property values from noxious land uses and neighbours, zoning became accepted as the principal planning tool (Hall 1988). The result was the strict separation of work, home, marketplace and social life. This move to create areas dedicated to specific purposes, and to remove uses that conflict produced single-use central business districts, uniform housing tracts, and dispersed shopping centres and recreational facilities." (Page 6) "Transportation policy during the 1950s and ‘60s focused primarily on increasing vehicle capacity on roads. Analytical tools considered highways and cars only, while ignoring community design and public transit considerations. Instead of deciding where development should go, engineers just looked at projected traffic trends and designed infrastructure in an attempt to accommodate them" (Page 7) "Inherent in the modernist project was a belief in the ‘tabula rasa.’ As a result, enormous areas were cleared with completely new environments inserted. Again, Le Corbusier led the drive with his unrealized 1925 proposal to demolish historic Paris north of the River Seine (except selected monuments that would be moved), and to replace it with eighteen 700-foot towers (Moe and Wilkie 1997)" (page 12) http://www.etsav.upc.es/personals/iphs2004/pdf/003_p.pdf http://www.etsav.upc.es/personals/iphs2004/pdf/003_p.pdf

germinalphrase 4y ago

Wouldn’t that be a positive feedback loop that we feel negative about?

carschno 4y ago

You can observe this very well in Germany. You have many cities that were destroyed during World War 2, and rebuilt around the car. You can compare them to the cities that were built before, and not destroyed. Nowadays, the latter are typically those cities popular with tourists and inhabitants due to their lively and walkable city centers, while city centers of the further category are oftentimes abandoned and avoided areas during the evenings and weekends. Impressive to see how the car-based city concept has failed for the inhabitants, and how hard it is for those cities to adapt to the post-industrial era. Of course, failure is subjective: car-based cities have been essential for the car industry because many inhabitants are completely dependent on having a car.

Someone 4y ago
> You can observe this very well in Germany. You have many cities that were destroyed during World War 2, and rebuilt around the car. You can compare them to the cities that were built before, and not destroyed. I think that’s more likely “and rebuilt according to the old plan”. Very few German cities escaped with limited bombing damage. https://bigthink.com/strange-maps/air-war-germany-map/ https://bigthink.com/strange-maps/air-war-germany-map/: “Of the 54 largest cities (>100,000 inhabitants) in Germany, only four survived without significant damage: Lübeck, Wiesbaden, Halle and Erfurt.”
- Dylan16807 3y ago
  There is a tremendous gap between "limited damage" and "destroyed", and in most of that range you wouldn't have much opportunity to change the layout despite the damage being "significant".

seadan83 4y ago

I don't think this is quite true. To nitpick. My knowledge is that European urban planning was very similar and car centric until the late 60s. At that time things diverged, US stayed the course with car centric split zoning where Europe shifted away from car centric design and heavily favored mixed zoning Eg, in many US cities, it is illegal to have a bakery on the ground floor of an apartment building. Though, bottom line, my point is US and EU cities were designed very similarly from 1940 until 1970

unity1001 4y ago
> My knowledge is that European urban planning was very similar and car centric until the late 60s There was and is scarce 'city planning' in Europe because there is scarce planning that can be done. The majority of cities have emerged in the middle ages at the latest, and there is nothing that can be done to 'plan' them. Even for the peripheries (as they are called) this is so: They formed around the villages or remote settlements in the peripheries of the cities, so there was no planning there at all. The closes that can be said to be built 'around cars' would be the urban construction of gated communities or high rises in the peripheries. But they still were not built around cars - those communities can still perfectly live within their own locale by having access to everything. The only difference that requires a car would be those people having jobs in the city and having to drive 20-30 minutes every day to the city and back. > Though, bottom line, my point is US and EU cities were designed very similarly from 1940 until 1970 That is patently false.
- seadan83 3y ago
  I agree that most European (and many ancient) cities had no city planning and grew organically. Though, this is not what I'm talking about. Yet, there are still quibbles around this as many European cities were rebuilt many times. Sometimes this reconstruction was the result of war, sometimes it was sheer reconstruction out of Urban planning. "The city [Paris] is one of the most striking examples of rational urban planning, conducted in the middle of the nineteenth century during the “Second Empire” of Napoleon III to ease congestion in the dense network of medieval streets." [1] Though, the reason why 1940 - 1970 is so important is because it is post-war and a lot was rebuilt in Europe while at the same time there was a lot of growth in American cities (the baby boom; federal investment in roads, etc..), and both European and American Urban growth and reconstruction were heavily influenced by "Modernism" [2][3]. "European engineers were sent in flocks to the US to learn from the environments in which these revolutionary ideas were playing out, returning with tabula rasa development plans to realise their own modernist dreams." [4] Modernist Urban planning ideas started in the 1910's and on, but it wasn't until 1940 that there was the mass of opportunity for rebuilding and the funding to implement those ideas. "Modernist principles have shaped city-building since the beginning of the twentieth century. Numerous authors draw a connection between modernist discourse within planning practice and the rise of the Fordist paradigm (Irving 1993; Calthorpe and Fulton 2001; Sandercock 1998). In following these principles, the North American built environment has taken the form of low-density sprawl. This development pattern is characterized by a dominance of single-family housing, a reliance on automobile transportation and a strict separation of land uses." [5] A key difference is that US civil engineers still are quite influenced by Modernism. For example, US traffic engineers continue to optimize for the throughput of vehicles on city streets rather than the throughput of people [6]. On the other hand, around the 1970s affluent European urban planners pushed back on "Le Corbesier" style planning and "Modernist planning fell into decline. "By the late 1960s and early 1970s, many planners felt that modernism's clean lines and lack of human scale sapped vitality from the community, blaming them for high crime rates and social problems.[59] ... Modernist planning fell into decline in the 1970s when the construction of cheap, uniform tower blocks ended in most countries" [7] [1] https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20130722-revolution-in-paris-street-design https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20130722-revolution-in-pa... [2] https://www.archdaily.com/604056/north-america-s-radiant-city-le-corbusier-s-impact-on-new-york https://www.archdaily.com/604056/north-america-s-radiant-cit... [3] [How a Controversial European Architect Shaped New York](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/how-controversial-european-architect-shaped-new-york-180965073/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/how-controversial-...) [4] [Story of cities #36: how Copenhagen rejected 1960s modernist 'utopia'](https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/may/05/story-cities-copenhagen-denmark-modernist-utopia https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/may/05/story-cities-...) [5] http://www.etsav.upc.es/personals/iphs2004/pdf/003_p.pdf http://www.etsav.upc.es/personals/iphs2004/pdf/003_p.pdf (page 3) [6] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-09-30/a-swiss-lesson-in-enlightened-street-design https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-09-30/a-swiss-l... [7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_urban_planning#Modernism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_urban_planning#Mode... - "Reaction against modernism" ----------------------- Beyond the above, the more extended exerts below I believe make the same point I made. I would find it interesting where these are patently false and do not support the assertion I made earlier: > "Modernism: In the 1920s, the ideas of modernism began to surface in urban planning. The influential modernist architect Le Corbusier presented his scheme for a "Contemporary City" for three million inhabitants (Ville Contemporaine) in 1922. The centrepiece of this plan was the group of sixty-story cruciform skyscrapers, steel-framed office buildings encased in huge curtain walls of glass. [....] He segregated pedestrian circulation paths from the roadways and glorified the automobile as a means of transportation. " > "Reaction against modernism: By the late 1960s and early 1970s, many planners felt that modernism's clean lines and lack of human scale sapped vitality from the community, blaming them for high crime rates and social problems.[59] > Modernist planning fell into decline in the 1970s when the construction of cheap, uniform tower blocks ended in most countries, such as Britain and France. Since then many have been demolished and replaced by other housing types. Rather than attempting to eliminate all disorder, planning now concentrates on individualism and diversity in society and the economy; this is the post-modernist era.[59]" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_urban_planning#Modernism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_urban_planning#Mode... "Modernist principles have shaped city-building since the beginning of the twentieth century. Numerous authors draw a connection between modernist discourse within planning practice and the rise of the Fordist paradigm (Irving 1993; Calthorpe and Fulton 2001; Sandercock 1998). In following these principles, the North American built environment has taken the form of low-density sprawl. This development pattern is characterized by a dominance of single-family housing, a reliance on automobile transportation and a strict separation of land uses." (page 3) "A significant individual embracing these values was the Swiss architect Le Corbusier. Beginning his practice in the late ‘10s, he wanted to correct the ‘chaos’ of the city and create an ideal order. His impact on modernist planning thought is incalculable, and his ideas were widely applied in cities during the 1950s and ‘60s." (Page 4) "Following a 1926 US Supreme Court decision to safeguard property values from noxious land uses and neighbours, zoning became accepted as the principal planning tool (Hall 1988). The result was the strict separation of work, home, marketplace and social life. This move to create areas dedicated to specific purposes, and to remove uses that conflict produced single-use central business districts, uniform housing tracts, and dispersed shopping centres and recreational facilities." (Page 6) "Transportation policy during the 1950s and ‘60s focused primarily on increasing vehicle capacity on roads. Analytical tools considered highways and cars only, while ignoring community design and public transit considerations. Instead of deciding where development should go, engineers just looked at projected traffic trends and designed infrastructure in an attempt to accommodate them" (Page 7) "Inherent in the modernist project was a belief in the ‘tabula rasa.’ As a result, enormous areas were cleared with completely new environments inserted. Again, Le Corbusier led the drive with his unrealized 1925 proposal to demolish historic Paris north of the River Seine (except selected monuments that would be moved), and to replace it with eighteen 700-foot towers (Moe and Wilkie 1997)" (page 12) http://www.etsav.upc.es/personals/iphs2004/pdf/003_p.pdf http://www.etsav.upc.es/personals/iphs2004/pdf/003_p.pdf