There's a preservationist guy in my neighborhood who was always lamenting the loss of buildings that just seemed old and boring to me. But what I finally figured out is that it's inevitable that buildings (and probably many other things) go through an awkward period where they are just shabby and out of fashion before they get old enough to be historic. So we really need people who champion the shabby unfashionable stuff so that enough of it survives to get old and charming and historic and obviously valuable. I think that kind of person is always going to be a minority, and one who everyone else thinks are weirdos and cranks - I find it hard to believe that it will ever be a widespread way of being - but we really need those weirdos and cranks.
One critical historic/economic difference is that the US made its decisive turn toward the car in the 1950s, the decade in which American prosperity greatly exceeded the rest of the world. This is a time when Europe was recovering from WW II, physically and economically, with a strong nostalgic need to rebuild things the way they had been. OTOH, Asia had not yet experienced its economic boom. Consequently, neither Europe nor Asia had the money to buy everyone a car as we did in the 1950s.
Another factor is the large distances that exist in the United States, which make a car a great solution for long distance travel and an adequate solution for short distance travel. It was only later that the downside of its use for short distance travel became apparent.
I'm an economist and I don't want to lose sight of _policies_ that shaped urban as suburban development. The big one are:
1. Those that discourage density/require low density in relation to what profit-making developers selling to consumers would have chosen. More generally, that do not allow use of urban space to constantly evolve as supply and demand change.
2. Policies that do not charge fees for road and street use (including tame and place differentiated street parking fees) or congestion.
3. Today we could add the failure to tax net emissions of CO2 as ot affects both design and location of structures, but that was not a historical mistake.
There's a preservationist guy in my neighborhood who was always lamenting the loss of buildings that just seemed old and boring to me. But what I finally figured out is that it's inevitable that buildings (and probably many other things) go through an awkward period where they are just shabby and out of fashion before they get old enough to be historic. So we really need people who champion the shabby unfashionable stuff so that enough of it survives to get old and charming and historic and obviously valuable. I think that kind of person is always going to be a minority, and one who everyone else thinks are weirdos and cranks - I find it hard to believe that it will ever be a widespread way of being - but we really need those weirdos and cranks.
Interesting! The people sort of behind the bell curve end up being the ones leading. I guess one bell curve leads to another . . .
One critical historic/economic difference is that the US made its decisive turn toward the car in the 1950s, the decade in which American prosperity greatly exceeded the rest of the world. This is a time when Europe was recovering from WW II, physically and economically, with a strong nostalgic need to rebuild things the way they had been. OTOH, Asia had not yet experienced its economic boom. Consequently, neither Europe nor Asia had the money to buy everyone a car as we did in the 1950s.
Another factor is the large distances that exist in the United States, which make a car a great solution for long distance travel and an adequate solution for short distance travel. It was only later that the downside of its use for short distance travel became apparent.
I'm an economist and I don't want to lose sight of _policies_ that shaped urban as suburban development. The big one are:
1. Those that discourage density/require low density in relation to what profit-making developers selling to consumers would have chosen. More generally, that do not allow use of urban space to constantly evolve as supply and demand change.
2. Policies that do not charge fees for road and street use (including tame and place differentiated street parking fees) or congestion.
3. Today we could add the failure to tax net emissions of CO2 as ot affects both design and location of structures, but that was not a historical mistake.