8 ms·

For thousands of years, people have seen the benefits of living in cities.What is really a city? Simply a place where people have a mutual interest in living cl

For thousands of years, people have seen the benefits of living in cities.What is really a city? Simply a place where people have a mutual interest in living close to each other. Urban sprawl and car centric society seems to be a really bad idea. Build better cities rather than self driving cars.

Schiendelman 4mo ago
You don't even have to tell anyone to "build better cities". All you have to do is get rid of the arbitrary restrictions on upward city growth. Zoning was a really bad idea.
- autoexec 4mo ago
  Zoning is useful for keeping people from building apartments right next to paper mills, pig farms, and superfund sites because those places tend to become slums. Building height restrictions and density limits provide people with the ability to see the sky and get sunlight. They improve air quality. They're pretty useful around places like airports. They can help improve safety and limit the damage resulting from disasters like fires and earthquakes. It's important to strike a balance between over-restrictive zoning and dystopian people-warehouses in perpetual shadow.
  - Schiendelman 4mo ago
    I strongly disagree - as do many scholars of land use law at this point. Zoning has nothing to do with separating uses. It never has. In Seattle, for instance, you absolutely can put an apartment building next to a pig farm. Nobody bothers because the market isn't interested in doing that. That also isn't atypical, zoning has never been used to pad uses away from each other like you see in Simcity. Seeing the sky and getting sunlight are also very suspect reasoning. It is darn near impossible to find real problems there that zoning prevents. Zoning also doesn't limit damage or impact earthquake survivability at all. Except - where zoning prevents you from building new buildings, it preserves old unsafe buildings. Without zoning, more of those buildings would be replaced with new structures that are safe. There's no dystopia zoning is preventing. Most of the comments I see like this have very little understanding of what it does.
    - pchristensen 4mo ago
      > It never has. Your point is much more valid in a car-centric (or car-enabled) world. Back when most industrial inputs and outputs moved by rail, and labor moved on foot, there were noxious and dangerous industries very close to housing. Just read up on Seattle's Skid Road. Pig farming wasn't in cities, but things like tanneries, slaughterhouses, sawmills, etc, were. Not to mention that at the time, almost everything was powered by coal. Now, with electrical transmission and flexible truck-based movement of goods, it's a much safer world to let the market decide. But cities during the industrial area were really, really rough.
      - Schiendelman 4mo ago
        And zoning didn't exist then. Zoning was created purely to keep black people out of neighborhoods. The first zoning attempts were entirely race based - SCOTUS overturned them in 1918. The same group came back and recreated zoning to keep apartment buildings out of white neighborhoods. The funny part? "Single family" zoning explicitly targeted black families, who didn't have the wealth for a house, and would buy larger houses as a two or three family collective. Industrial zoning came much later, as a post hoc justification, long after that was an issue. Zoning truly never has.
        goobatrooba 4mo ago
        Just to stress that the world is larger than the US. Zoning exists pretty much everywhere and the reasons for its introduction were diverse and mostly about quality yof life, citizen health, or city esthetics (keeping polluting businesses out).I have no view on whether what you're saying is true for the US, it is however definitely false for most other places.
        Schiendelman 4mo ago
        In the vast majority of the world, you can trace it to class and race. Feel free to give me an example location and I'll find you its history!
    - 4mo ago
- taffer 4mo ago
  It isn't that simple. The most important thing about a city is the streets and blocks. Manhattan and Barcelona are good examples of cities that have been designed in a way that make them walkable and high density.
  - Schiendelman 4mo ago
    The only places where you get non-walkable streets and blocks are the ones where you restrict density dramatically. Most cities aren't designed by some individual planning out where the streets should go. They evolved. If you allow an existing city to increase its density dramatically, people start demanding the streets improve to meet their needs.
    - pchristensen 4mo ago
      The more density that gets built, the harder it is to improve streets. Construction of the interstates, Haussman's remaking of Paris, etc were immensely destructive, even if they enabled much more legible and prosperous development afterwards. In the West at least, basically every street and block was laid out by planners from the early 1800s until post WWII. After that it's much more done by large scale private land developers (e.g. Levittown, Irvine).
      - AngryData 4mo ago
        It is harder but I also find that a poor excuse for not improving streets and infrastructure because it can be done and the taxes scale faster than costs. But people and politicians are short sighted and rather kick that can down the road either to make them look good from good financials or to leave enough money on the table for a bit of corruption.
      - Schiendelman 4mo ago
        It's not harder to improve streets in higher density, no. It's both politically easier when you have more pedestrians AND you have a higher tax base.
bluGill 4mo ago
People lived in cities because they couldn't find a farm. Anyone who had a farm didn't leave because you controlled your survival. 95% of the people (numbers varied but this is good enough) lived on a farm. Cities were full of diseases and they didn't have good jobs. Of course what you read in history is from the rich point of view. If you had wealth (slaves back on the farm) city life was really good.
- taffer 4mo ago
  You have it the wrong way round: In the US the slave owners lived on the farms. The bustling cities were in the free states.
  - bluGill 4mo ago
    By the time the US started the industrial revolution was starting and the rules were changing.
- Jensson 4mo ago
  Serfdom existed to prevent peasants from leaving those farms, people wanted to move to cities were wages and jobs were better but nobility wanted to force them to stay on those farms.
  - bluGill 4mo ago
    Serfdom existed as a step above slavery. The city may have been better for serfs but for the free farmer (if any) the farm was better. There is a lot of 'grass is greener' in the idea that the city was better for many farmers and so they may not have liked what the city was really like.
    - jollyllama 4mo ago
      Before the modern era, people died like flies in cities; they were population sinks.
- trgn 4mo ago
b112 4mo ago
For thousands of years, high-density living meant a 3 or 4 story apartment building. Certainly not sky-scrapers, they weren't even possible to build until the last century or two. What you state as "urban sprawl" would be "mostly normal" living density for a city like Rome. When I walk the streets of larger cities, its not like the downtown core has acres of land per house, or even a 1/4 acre. Now of course, there are some differences over time. But my point is that it's not as if the car has caused urban sprawl, in fact, downtown cities are far more dense than 500 years ago. Or 2000, or whatever. One 40 story apartment building, which is common not even just in downtown cores, is a lot more dense than anything 1000 years ago, land use would be 10x or 20x or even 40x. I know there's this fad to pretend the car caused every problem ever, but it's just not true.
- jltsiren 4mo ago
  Modern cities have a lot of buildings that are sparsely populated. 500 years ago, major Italian cities had ~15k people / square km, which is similar to Brooklyn. Paris had 35k to 50k people / square km, making it more densely populated than Manhattan. 2000 years ago, Rome had similar population density to Paris 500 years ago. Historically, urban people wanted to live inside city walls, if possible. When the population grew, most of the growth turned into higher density inside the walls. There was always some urban sprawl outside the walls, but that was mostly poor people and those who didn't have the right to live in the city proper. Major cities occasionally built a new set of walls surrounding a wider area, but that didn't happen every century.
- pchristensen 4mo ago
  You are mixing up a lot of different factors. 3-4 story apartment buildings gives a net residential density of 30-100 units per acre. Typical 20th century urban development is 3-10 units per acre, with suburban "urban sprawl" at the low end of that. See [1] for examples. Yes towers exist now, and downtown areas have much more intensity and square footage. But outside of NYC (861 of the top 1000 densest census tracts) and a very short list of other parts of other US cities[2], residential density is much lower almost everywhere than it was in 1950, including in cities. Units per acre and especially people per unit have steadily and dramatically dropped. The drop in NYC population density is dramatic even as built square footage has increased[3]. But for every 40 story tower out there, there are hundreds of square miles of car-centric suburban development. [1] https://mrsc.org/stay-informed/mrsc-insight/april-2017/visualizing-compatible-density https://mrsc.org/stay-informed/mrsc-insight/april-2017/visua... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zFB5YooSo5M&t=936s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zFB5YooSo5M&t=936s [3] https://urbanomnibus.net/2014/10/the-rise-and-fall-of-manhattans-density/ https://urbanomnibus.net/2014/10/the-rise-and-fall-of-manhat...
Am4TIfIsER0ppos 4mo ago
[flagged]

Schiendelman 4mo ago

You don't even have to tell anyone to "build better cities". All you have to do is get rid of the arbitrary restrictions on upward city growth. Zoning was a really bad idea.

autoexec 4mo ago
Zoning is useful for keeping people from building apartments right next to paper mills, pig farms, and superfund sites because those places tend to become slums. Building height restrictions and density limits provide people with the ability to see the sky and get sunlight. They improve air quality. They're pretty useful around places like airports. They can help improve safety and limit the damage resulting from disasters like fires and earthquakes. It's important to strike a balance between over-restrictive zoning and dystopian people-warehouses in perpetual shadow.
- Schiendelman 4mo ago
  I strongly disagree - as do many scholars of land use law at this point. Zoning has nothing to do with separating uses. It never has. In Seattle, for instance, you absolutely can put an apartment building next to a pig farm. Nobody bothers because the market isn't interested in doing that. That also isn't atypical, zoning has never been used to pad uses away from each other like you see in Simcity. Seeing the sky and getting sunlight are also very suspect reasoning. It is darn near impossible to find real problems there that zoning prevents. Zoning also doesn't limit damage or impact earthquake survivability at all. Except - where zoning prevents you from building new buildings, it preserves old unsafe buildings. Without zoning, more of those buildings would be replaced with new structures that are safe. There's no dystopia zoning is preventing. Most of the comments I see like this have very little understanding of what it does.
  - pchristensen 4mo ago
    > It never has. Your point is much more valid in a car-centric (or car-enabled) world. Back when most industrial inputs and outputs moved by rail, and labor moved on foot, there were noxious and dangerous industries very close to housing. Just read up on Seattle's Skid Road. Pig farming wasn't in cities, but things like tanneries, slaughterhouses, sawmills, etc, were. Not to mention that at the time, almost everything was powered by coal. Now, with electrical transmission and flexible truck-based movement of goods, it's a much safer world to let the market decide. But cities during the industrial area were really, really rough.
    - Schiendelman 4mo ago
      And zoning didn't exist then. Zoning was created purely to keep black people out of neighborhoods. The first zoning attempts were entirely race based - SCOTUS overturned them in 1918. The same group came back and recreated zoning to keep apartment buildings out of white neighborhoods. The funny part? "Single family" zoning explicitly targeted black families, who didn't have the wealth for a house, and would buy larger houses as a two or three family collective. Industrial zoning came much later, as a post hoc justification, long after that was an issue. Zoning truly never has.
      - goobatrooba 4mo ago
        Just to stress that the world is larger than the US. Zoning exists pretty much everywhere and the reasons for its introduction were diverse and mostly about quality yof life, citizen health, or city esthetics (keeping polluting businesses out).I have no view on whether what you're saying is true for the US, it is however definitely false for most other places.
        Schiendelman 4mo ago
        In the vast majority of the world, you can trace it to class and race. Feel free to give me an example location and I'll find you its history!
  - 4mo ago
taffer 4mo ago
It isn't that simple. The most important thing about a city is the streets and blocks. Manhattan and Barcelona are good examples of cities that have been designed in a way that make them walkable and high density.
- Schiendelman 4mo ago
  The only places where you get non-walkable streets and blocks are the ones where you restrict density dramatically. Most cities aren't designed by some individual planning out where the streets should go. They evolved. If you allow an existing city to increase its density dramatically, people start demanding the streets improve to meet their needs.
  - pchristensen 4mo ago
    The more density that gets built, the harder it is to improve streets. Construction of the interstates, Haussman's remaking of Paris, etc were immensely destructive, even if they enabled much more legible and prosperous development afterwards. In the West at least, basically every street and block was laid out by planners from the early 1800s until post WWII. After that it's much more done by large scale private land developers (e.g. Levittown, Irvine).
    - AngryData 4mo ago
      It is harder but I also find that a poor excuse for not improving streets and infrastructure because it can be done and the taxes scale faster than costs. But people and politicians are short sighted and rather kick that can down the road either to make them look good from good financials or to leave enough money on the table for a bit of corruption.
    - Schiendelman 4mo ago
      It's not harder to improve streets in higher density, no. It's both politically easier when you have more pedestrians AND you have a higher tax base.

bluGill 4mo ago

People lived in cities because they couldn't find a farm. Anyone who had a farm didn't leave because you controlled your survival. 95% of the people (numbers varied but this is good enough) lived on a farm. Cities were full of diseases and they didn't have good jobs. Of course what you read in history is from the rich point of view. If you had wealth (slaves back on the farm) city life was really good.

taffer 4mo ago
You have it the wrong way round: In the US the slave owners lived on the farms. The bustling cities were in the free states.
- bluGill 4mo ago
  By the time the US started the industrial revolution was starting and the rules were changing.
Jensson 4mo ago
Serfdom existed to prevent peasants from leaving those farms, people wanted to move to cities were wages and jobs were better but nobility wanted to force them to stay on those farms.
- bluGill 4mo ago
  Serfdom existed as a step above slavery. The city may have been better for serfs but for the free farmer (if any) the farm was better. There is a lot of 'grass is greener' in the idea that the city was better for many farmers and so they may not have liked what the city was really like.
  - jollyllama 4mo ago
    Before the modern era, people died like flies in cities; they were population sinks.
trgn 4mo ago

b112 4mo ago

For thousands of years, high-density living meant a 3 or 4 story apartment building. Certainly not sky-scrapers, they weren't even possible to build until the last century or two. What you state as "urban sprawl" would be "mostly normal" living density for a city like Rome. When I walk the streets of larger cities, its not like the downtown core has acres of land per house, or even a 1/4 acre. Now of course, there are some differences over time. But my point is that it's not as if the car has caused urban sprawl, in fact, downtown cities are far more dense than 500 years ago. Or 2000, or whatever. One 40 story apartment building, which is common not even just in downtown cores, is a lot more dense than anything 1000 years ago, land use would be 10x or 20x or even 40x. I know there's this fad to pretend the car caused every problem ever, but it's just not true.

jltsiren 4mo ago
Modern cities have a lot of buildings that are sparsely populated. 500 years ago, major Italian cities had ~15k people / square km, which is similar to Brooklyn. Paris had 35k to 50k people / square km, making it more densely populated than Manhattan. 2000 years ago, Rome had similar population density to Paris 500 years ago. Historically, urban people wanted to live inside city walls, if possible. When the population grew, most of the growth turned into higher density inside the walls. There was always some urban sprawl outside the walls, but that was mostly poor people and those who didn't have the right to live in the city proper. Major cities occasionally built a new set of walls surrounding a wider area, but that didn't happen every century.
pchristensen 4mo ago
You are mixing up a lot of different factors. 3-4 story apartment buildings gives a net residential density of 30-100 units per acre. Typical 20th century urban development is 3-10 units per acre, with suburban "urban sprawl" at the low end of that. See [1] for examples. Yes towers exist now, and downtown areas have much more intensity and square footage. But outside of NYC (861 of the top 1000 densest census tracts) and a very short list of other parts of other US cities[2], residential density is much lower almost everywhere than it was in 1950, including in cities. Units per acre and especially people per unit have steadily and dramatically dropped. The drop in NYC population density is dramatic even as built square footage has increased[3]. But for every 40 story tower out there, there are hundreds of square miles of car-centric suburban development. [1] https://mrsc.org/stay-informed/mrsc-insight/april-2017/visualizing-compatible-density https://mrsc.org/stay-informed/mrsc-insight/april-2017/visua... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zFB5YooSo5M&t=936s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zFB5YooSo5M&t=936s [3] https://urbanomnibus.net/2014/10/the-rise-and-fall-of-manhattans-density/ https://urbanomnibus.net/2014/10/the-rise-and-fall-of-manhat...

Am4TIfIsER0ppos 4mo ago

[flagged]