Don't try and ascribe a single reason here. Architecture, urban planning, the rise of the creative class, high-speed internet, remote work and America's burgeoning reckoning with it's awful racial history are all at play here. The life and death of an American city can have no single story, because a city is only a composite of American stories
Surprised this article doesn't talk at depth about the one obvious reason why American cities are shaped like something a deranged computer spat out.
Racial segregation, obviously, is the biggest reason and perhaps the source of all other reasons. City planners in the early 19th and 20th centuries had racial segregation as their overriding goal to the detriment of common sense or logic.
There's a limit to how much you can build out a city before you've permanently disfigured it.
Imagine taking your typical European mid-sized city and starting to allow multiple high rises taller that historical landmarks; or adding purely residential sprawl neighborhoods that distort residents' lifestyle due to long commutes and lack of attractor points outside of downtown.
You've just made a suburban hell out of a human-tailored environment, with the added sin of having destroyed the "experience continuity" which used to be core to community identity. A loss that is permanent and impossible to revert in later generations
I've lived in Rome and Amsterdam, and I know the feeling
A part of what it is, yes. But that's the beauty of it: cities are constantly changing and building upon what came before. It's what makes them cities and not forgotten backwaters.
Tucked away in the middle of any urban planning article is a reference to Jane Jacob's "The Death and Life of Great American Cities". It's a great book that puts into words why certain neighborhoods cities feel alive and fit for humans. From mixed-use buildings to small blocks to sidewalks to parks to landmarks.
I'm not going to say her insights are universal for everyone, but it might help you understand why you like that grid you like.
You can't have the cleaniless of Tokyo in a US city unless you're willing to harshly punish people - Singapore style - for transgressions. That won't stand up legally in terms of civil rights. You have to entirely remake the culture to get that outcome, and that's not going to happen. Urban US culture is largely mediocre. The last thing the US needs is another Las Vegas, building another major US city in the desert is moronic.
In general the US does not need more cities. The US can't operate its existing cities properly. It's embarrassing how disgusting and violent most US cities are. Culturally the US should figure out how to run the cities it has before building new ones. To say nothing of the fact that the US has no need of new mega cities from a practical standpoint, we're facing population decline or stagnation, not a population boom.
Cities are cultural extensions of the nations they reside in, along with regional influences. It's highly predictable what you'll get out of another city built in the US. Let's focus $400 billion on public transportation improvements for our existing cities, including rail and a lot more electric buses.
Every square inch of America is governed according to the philosophy that what makes it valuable is having not too many people. Save for a few dozen blocks of half a dozen cities. And even then we’re suspicious. Our most iconic and beloved streetscapes are mostly non-conforming with postwar codes. But we obviously - obviously! - love these places. They are our travel destinations, our movie settings, our identity and sense of place. Superheroes defending the American way of life don’t defend Developer Model #4 on Pleasant View Court or the Denny’s in the strip mall, they defend fucking Manhattan. Yet our entire planning and zoning regime - including Manhattan’s own, to a surprising degree, treats it like like some kind of nuclear accident.
I would like proper urbanism to be be on a few hundred more blocks, or a few thousand blocks, maybe even a few hundred thousand blocks. Still nowhere near 10% of the developable or inhabited land area.
But no, not only does “not everyone want to live stacked on top of each other,” we must make sure walkable communities are kept so rare that one of those little hell boxes “nobody wants” costs $3 million. Every single unit permitted is its own little bloodbath, because no place, not even the heart of a city, is allowed to grow as a city anymore. All sprawl, all the time, exclusively.
That's bleak. And in the American context unnecessarily dystopian. US has no need for soul crushing housing towers since our cities do not have to handle a tidal wave of new incomers from the countryside. US needs smart infill. So many metros are so dispersed, depopulated even.
The vision that we need to paint is one of density and verdancy, at the same time. Of single family homes, but maybe with smaller yards, but impeccably maintained. Single family homes with a granny flat in the back, for granny when she's infirm, or for uncle joe who failed to launch. 4-5 story apartment buildings everywhere. More rail, for sure, but also more biking and walking. Space efficient housing for vagrants and students housing with with small rooms and common areas. Mansions for the C-level suite, but shotguns for their personal assistants. Back-to-back, in the same neighborhood.
The vision of the american city of the future is not Beijing, it's the lush verdancy of Charleston, Savannah, New Orleans. But not only for tourists. For everybody. That is the future, even better (yes, better!), than what we have now.
I used to think most American cities were ugly because nobody cared enough to make them beautiful. Reading this almost makes me think it's intentional. Very sad indeed.
> We are also a culture obsessed by image and impression. Look at the image at the top of this article. Images of futurist cities like this drive me nuts, am I looking at a pimped up motherboard or a city where people actually live? What if a sustainable and livable city doesn't look very exciting on picture?
Jane Jacobs addresses this topic at length in Chapter 19 of The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Here are the first few paragraphs (the whole book is a worthwhile read if you have the chance):
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When we deal with cities we are dealing with life at its most complex and intense. Because this is so, there is a basic esthetic limitation on what can be done with cities. A city cannot be a work of art.
We need art, in the arrangements of cities as well as in the other realms of life, to help explain life to us, to show us meaning, to illuminate the relationship between the life that each of us embodies and the life outside us. We need art most, perhaps, to reassure us of our own humanity. However, although art and life are interwoven, they are not the same things. Confusion between them is, in part, why efforts at city design are so disappointing. It is important, in arriving at better design strategies and tactics, to clear up this confusion.
Art has its own peculiar forms of order, and they are rigorous. Artists, whatever their medium, make selections from the abounding materials of life, and organize these selections into works that are under the control of the artist. To be sure, the artist has a sense that the demands of the work (i.e., of the selections of material he has made) control him. The rather miraculous result of this process—if the selectivity, the organization and the control are consistent within themselves—can be art. But the essence of this process is disciplined, highly discriminatory selectivity from life. In relation to the inclusiveness and the literally endless intricacy of life, art is arbitrary, symbolic and abstracted. That is its value and the source of its own kind of order and coherence.
To approach a city, or even a city neighborhood, as if it were a larger architectural problem, capable of being given order by converting it into a disciplined work of art, is to make the mistake of attempting to substitute art for life.
The results of such profound confusion between art and life are neither life nor art. They are taxidermy. In its place, taxidermy can be a useful and decent craft. However, it goes too far when the specimens put on display are exhibitions of dead, stuffed cities.
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