Very neat. I love reading about cities and urban planning. I have "The Death and Life of American Cities" by Jane Jacobs laying around which I need to read and I read another book about architecture here in New York City and how it has evolved over time in response to things such as fires and 9/11. Really really very interesting stuff.
This was a great post. Mixed use cities are generally much more desirable in my eyes. The American suburbs are a blight on the land which make our nation so much more carcentric than it needs to be spreading the population out and reducing the efficacy of our now underfunded and sprawled out public transportation system.
Of course it's not a shocker that such a system evolved in a nation with such a staggering amount of land available to it's citizens who live and have lived in a nation with huge amounts of racial segregation.
The idea of a set of national guidelines makes sense from an engineering perspective because small towns can't afford engineers often (or may not even think to seek out their expertise) and in the end you have a group of individuals with no qualifications determining the fate of their town with arbitrarily decided rules.
And rating things by their nuisance (traffic plus noise) levels is a really neat way to quantify whether a building should exist in a given area.
Awesome! Lots of new things to entertain the mind.
> The American suburbs are a blight on the land which make our nation so much more carcentric than it needs to be spreading the population out and reducing the efficacy of our now underfunded and sprawled out public transportation system. Of course it's not a shocker that such a system evolved in a nation with such a staggering amount of land available to it's citizens.
Unfortunately the same system was later exported to other countries and adopted by their citizens, although these countries did not have the same 'free' space. As a consequence the drawbacks of the system are even more perceptible (and the individual benefits are lesser) in these places.
Talk about having an opinion that over half the U.S. population in behavior (and likely a hell of a lot more) simply don't share. The suburbs when done well, and especially now with the promise of solar and electric vehicles is a wonderful place to be. Wonderful even when done imperfectly. Why would you want urban if you could have greenery? Why would you want close quarters when you could have space? Why would you want loud and bright when you can have peace and quiet.
When I walk the urban downtown area, sure there are food vendor smells, but there is also inescapable rotting sewer smell in the streets. When I walk the suburbs, I smell fresh air. I see the greenery that was planted by the people who enjoy the extra space to have freedom to do so. Distribution of the population is a great thing for a lot of health reasons, even if it's supposedly less efficient for travel to work. The more companies get their head out of their ass, the less driving people will have to do anyway.
This was a great post. Mixed use cities are generally much more desirable in my eyes. The American suburbs are a blight on the land which make our nation so much more carcentric than it needs to be spreading the population out and reducing the efficacy of our now underfunded and sprawled out public transportation system.
Of course it's not a shocker that such a system evolved in a nation with such a staggering amount of land available to it's citizens who live and have lived in a nation with huge amounts of racial segregation.
The idea of a set of national guidelines makes sense from an engineering perspective because small towns can't afford engineers often (or may not even think to seek out their expertise) and in the end you have a group of individuals with no qualifications determining the fate of their town with arbitrarily decided rules.
And rating things by their nuisance (traffic plus noise) levels is a really neat way to quantify whether a building should exist in a given area.
Awesome! Lots of new things to entertain the mind.