This feels like there is TOO much emphasis on the entrepreneurial aspects of urbanism, and loses the other aspects that make it important; having a neighborhood, and chance encounters, and so on. It’s not enough to have thriving and varied businesses; you also need thriving communities when everyone goes home.
I do think that it matters when cars are used for every transportation need in a community. It's not just some philosophical idea that walkable communities are ideal. It's that automobile culture has obliterated all the other forms of transportation, AND it keeps people separated (physically and psychologically) and it makes places spread out & hard to navigate with seas of parking lots. Props to any suburb that has a train station going into the city or a local bus circulating route or a walkable downtown... because a lot of suburbs threw those ideas away (or never had them in the first place) in total pursuit of the car commuter lifestyle.
I think it's fine that strip malls exist where new tenants are bringing fresh ideas/culture to a community, but a successful niche business in a strip mall is really hard to sustain and it's far less ideal for being integrated into a community than to be present in a walkable downtown. It's not just snobbery that drives criticism in conversations about urbanism; some of us want to see future retail tenants succeed and thrive. The strip mall has openings for bootstrapped immigrant businesses in the first place because why? The old tenants were doing GREAT? There are so many dead strip malls out there. There is no rush from city dwellers to colonize strip malls in the suburban landscape on the cheap. So it is not "nonsense" to question building even more of them, unless some design alterations are considered. (Not even major ones! Just don't make suburbs SOLELY about local driving and city car commuting!)
This could almost be a preface to a hypothetical re-release of “The Great Inversion”—talking about the same phenomenon 10+ years down the road.
I’ve been thinking lately about how anachronistic the Strong Towns ideal sometimes feels. Is it really possible today for a city or town to implement a zoning/building code that builds “traditional” urbanism in a way that isn’t astronomically expensive? Are we actually willing to get out of our own way enough, with regulations and development charges and all that? Or is the 21st century version of a development pattern that enables adaptive re-use and scrappy entrepreneurship just going to have to be something entirely new?
Overwhelmingly, the way cities build more mixed-use “urbanism” these days is with these really large mixed-use buildings, rather than rows of smaller buildings that can be bought by smaller-scale business owners or landlords. What conceivable path is there to actually turning a neighborhood of detached buildings into a neighborhood of rowhouses with corner stores? It just seems like the window of opportunity for that kind of construction may be largely behind us.
Perhaps, rather than replicate forms that we associate with places we believe are desirable, we should distil the traits and characteristics of places we like, and see how they can be translated or encouraged elsewhere (in other places or in different forms).
What are the “really deeply human ways of doing things"? Do these things scale? What is the appropriate or optimal number of people for different activities? How importance is proximity? What does proximity mean (nearness, visibility, accessibility)? Can we list of the kinds of experiences we like, believe are important, and wish to encourage? Do we start with values and apply them, or do we start with specific examples and see what values (often unacknowledged or unconscious) they seem to embody?
I don't know the answers to these questions, but it seems we often copy the form, the outward appearance of things, without understanding the wishes, desires, values and processes and politics that they support or express.
We mimic things without understanding them. I can reproduce a phrase in Spanish without understanding a word of it. I can reproduce a pleasant postwar street, complete with front porches, picket fences, and shade trees without understanding the tiime, the culture, or the politics and policies that resulted in that 'original' street.
Is it wise, sensible, or even possible to copy and reproduce a desirable form (a particular expression of a complex set of culturally and temporally specific things)? Would we be better off trying to make explicit the values, principles, and politics we stand for, discuss and debate them, and then see how they might be encouraged, supported, and extended in whatever form?
This is a very interesting piece. The urban form wants to follow the urbanist place. If we get over our zoning controls it would happen more, but it does happen.
With the significant shift in the affordability of home ownership the cost of transit is important to both home ownership and the resources to eat and drink outside the home and be more social.
Cities have many challenges and you have outlined another where urban and urbanism compete over form.
Brightline recently opened their extension to MCO. They have stretch where they go 90mph, another where they go 125mph. This is very, very, very, very fast.
There's a group of foamers who react to every Brighline article that calls this High-Speed-Rail. It doesn't meet the foamers definition. Apparently not following their definition is an egregious sin. At least how they seem to react.
Who cares. It goes fast. It goes at high speeds.
I feel like this sort of thing goes on with urban vs suburban. It's a city with cool stuff. Who cares about the label.
In fact, it gets worse than the train thing. Mr. Del Mastro, you may have seen this. There's a subgroup of urbanists that insist that anything that doesn't look like midtown Manhattan isn't urban. I live downtown. I've had these urbanistas ( a more suitable name ) exclaim that where I live isn't urban.
I get the use of urban vs suburb in for those in the industry, so to speak. But for the rest of us let's call a city and city.
Oh I've definitely seen this - people who say New York City is just about the only true city in the United States. From a very strict, arcane land-use perspective you can make that argument. But before urban renewal we had hundreds of "true" cities in America, some of them very small and quite remote. There are real issues with car-oriented development, finance-wise and transportation-wise (esp. for people who can't drive or can't afford a car) but land use is only one element of what makes a place "urban" in my view.
This feels like there is TOO much emphasis on the entrepreneurial aspects of urbanism, and loses the other aspects that make it important; having a neighborhood, and chance encounters, and so on. It’s not enough to have thriving and varied businesses; you also need thriving communities when everyone goes home.
I do think that it matters when cars are used for every transportation need in a community. It's not just some philosophical idea that walkable communities are ideal. It's that automobile culture has obliterated all the other forms of transportation, AND it keeps people separated (physically and psychologically) and it makes places spread out & hard to navigate with seas of parking lots. Props to any suburb that has a train station going into the city or a local bus circulating route or a walkable downtown... because a lot of suburbs threw those ideas away (or never had them in the first place) in total pursuit of the car commuter lifestyle.
I think it's fine that strip malls exist where new tenants are bringing fresh ideas/culture to a community, but a successful niche business in a strip mall is really hard to sustain and it's far less ideal for being integrated into a community than to be present in a walkable downtown. It's not just snobbery that drives criticism in conversations about urbanism; some of us want to see future retail tenants succeed and thrive. The strip mall has openings for bootstrapped immigrant businesses in the first place because why? The old tenants were doing GREAT? There are so many dead strip malls out there. There is no rush from city dwellers to colonize strip malls in the suburban landscape on the cheap. So it is not "nonsense" to question building even more of them, unless some design alterations are considered. (Not even major ones! Just don't make suburbs SOLELY about local driving and city car commuting!)
This could almost be a preface to a hypothetical re-release of “The Great Inversion”—talking about the same phenomenon 10+ years down the road.
I’ve been thinking lately about how anachronistic the Strong Towns ideal sometimes feels. Is it really possible today for a city or town to implement a zoning/building code that builds “traditional” urbanism in a way that isn’t astronomically expensive? Are we actually willing to get out of our own way enough, with regulations and development charges and all that? Or is the 21st century version of a development pattern that enables adaptive re-use and scrappy entrepreneurship just going to have to be something entirely new?
Overwhelmingly, the way cities build more mixed-use “urbanism” these days is with these really large mixed-use buildings, rather than rows of smaller buildings that can be bought by smaller-scale business owners or landlords. What conceivable path is there to actually turning a neighborhood of detached buildings into a neighborhood of rowhouses with corner stores? It just seems like the window of opportunity for that kind of construction may be largely behind us.
"
What conceivable path is there to actually turning a neighborhood of detached buildings into a neighborhood of rowhouses with corner stores?
"
The path is greenfield development. Existing stuff rarely pencils out, even if everyone's willing to sell.
https://maps.app.goo.gl/oUz4cmTRW8KRfk7X7
Perhaps, rather than replicate forms that we associate with places we believe are desirable, we should distil the traits and characteristics of places we like, and see how they can be translated or encouraged elsewhere (in other places or in different forms).
What are the “really deeply human ways of doing things"? Do these things scale? What is the appropriate or optimal number of people for different activities? How importance is proximity? What does proximity mean (nearness, visibility, accessibility)? Can we list of the kinds of experiences we like, believe are important, and wish to encourage? Do we start with values and apply them, or do we start with specific examples and see what values (often unacknowledged or unconscious) they seem to embody?
I don't know the answers to these questions, but it seems we often copy the form, the outward appearance of things, without understanding the wishes, desires, values and processes and politics that they support or express.
We mimic things without understanding them. I can reproduce a phrase in Spanish without understanding a word of it. I can reproduce a pleasant postwar street, complete with front porches, picket fences, and shade trees without understanding the tiime, the culture, or the politics and policies that resulted in that 'original' street.
Is it wise, sensible, or even possible to copy and reproduce a desirable form (a particular expression of a complex set of culturally and temporally specific things)? Would we be better off trying to make explicit the values, principles, and politics we stand for, discuss and debate them, and then see how they might be encouraged, supported, and extended in whatever form?
This is a very interesting piece. The urban form wants to follow the urbanist place. If we get over our zoning controls it would happen more, but it does happen.
With the significant shift in the affordability of home ownership the cost of transit is important to both home ownership and the resources to eat and drink outside the home and be more social.
Cities have many challenges and you have outlined another where urban and urbanism compete over form.
Brightline recently opened their extension to MCO. They have stretch where they go 90mph, another where they go 125mph. This is very, very, very, very fast.
There's a group of foamers who react to every Brighline article that calls this High-Speed-Rail. It doesn't meet the foamers definition. Apparently not following their definition is an egregious sin. At least how they seem to react.
Who cares. It goes fast. It goes at high speeds.
I feel like this sort of thing goes on with urban vs suburban. It's a city with cool stuff. Who cares about the label.
In fact, it gets worse than the train thing. Mr. Del Mastro, you may have seen this. There's a subgroup of urbanists that insist that anything that doesn't look like midtown Manhattan isn't urban. I live downtown. I've had these urbanistas ( a more suitable name ) exclaim that where I live isn't urban.
I get the use of urban vs suburb in for those in the industry, so to speak. But for the rest of us let's call a city and city.
Oh I've definitely seen this - people who say New York City is just about the only true city in the United States. From a very strict, arcane land-use perspective you can make that argument. But before urban renewal we had hundreds of "true" cities in America, some of them very small and quite remote. There are real issues with car-oriented development, finance-wise and transportation-wise (esp. for people who can't drive or can't afford a car) but land use is only one element of what makes a place "urban" in my view.
Thanks for the article! And I love to see Buford Highway get a shout out. So much good food over there.