I live in the suburbs now. I used to have a place in the NYC area. What I miss about urban living is that you have a real neighborhood community. You can always find people to talk to at the local bistro after work. You can walk to your bodega, pharmacy and cleaner. You don’t need a car.
The irony is, you really live in an outdoor environment… walking and climbing in the weather. Sloshing through icy streets. But you wear formal business clothes. In the suburbs, you live in an indoor environment… in your car and in air conditioned buildings. But you wear outdoor clothes.
I definitely vibe with the "playing an instrument" argument, tho I'm not sure I fully agree. I think, unlike learning a new skill, what makes urbanism hard is the switching costs.
When cars first came out, they made everywhere more accessible. Then we tried to accommodate them and not only blunted their utility, we made everywhere less pleasant. Then we made that reality less intolerable with big box stores. But now, with big box stores, it's hard for most people to imagine how to live without one, and without cars. If you do individually, you have to either pay thru the nose, eat your veggies (in time or sweat), or most likely, both. If society tries to make things slightly more urbanist with bus lanes or high rises, the now vast majority of people who are drivers first see it as eating veggies. These perspectives aren't wrong, but living in a place where the car is an accessory and Costco is unnecessary because each trip to the store is less frictionless wouldn't be eating your vegetables. But getting to that point is.
Mind you, some may still prefer to live in a bucolic, quiet street with a large expanse behind them - it IS a beautiful idea, easy to host, tho expensive for the city and the person to maintain. But convenient on the day to day? I don't believe so - when your kids have soccer or choir, driving them from an isolated castle to a parking lot with a venue inside it isn't convenient compared to having them walk. Planning out fortnightly Costco trips isn't convenient. Is sitting in traffic more convenient than sitting on a train? If it's shorter in duration, maybe. So in today's world it likely is, but not in yesterday's or hopefully tomorrow's. Is LA more convenient than Chicago, DC or NYC?
Other than biking (which is sort of a response to the lack of urbanism), so much of urbanism is just so much easier than driving around everywhere. The hardest part of it is that it doesn't really exist for the average income.
Urbanism is simply building beautiful walkable neighborhoods. Even flyover-red-state Americans think Rodeo Drive and "Main Street USA" are kind of cool, but nobody at any level has an accepted shorthand vocabulary to describe how or why.
It's only "eating your vegetables" in the sense that America is terrible at undertaking infrastructure projects of any sort which can't simply be outsourced wholesale to a corporation and plopped down on greenfield somewhere - and we do badly with plenty of those, as well. Sprawl is totally hands-off from the point of view of government, you just expand the local county road to six lanes and let developers buy the adjacent land, handle all the utility hookups and curb cuts, and build whatever they want on it. Maybe with some kind of minimum parking rules.
Beautiful walkable neighborhoods by contrast require a particular vision of how you want the place to look at various stages of the project. Architectural and aesthetic calls (about building heights, and the relationship with the street at a minimum) need to be made and enforced, which is controversial on both political wings (recall the frenzied reaction to Trump's order promoting Federal architecture in DC). Substantial planning is required and the local government needs to be closely involved, in a consistent way, over many years to ensure that a) the plan still makes sense, and b) everyone is sticking to it. None of this is looked upon favorably by developer capital which wants things modular, fast, easy, on the cheap, and at the most gigantic possible scale.
It's organizationally and politically a very tall order and even many European countries routinely fail to achieve it, where new developments are concerned: central Paris gives way to banlieue tower blocks then SFH sprawl straight from Southern California, the outskirts of Madrid look strikingly like the outskirts of Vegas. The Dutch manage it, as does the UK (generally), likely due to critical space constraints from the outset - in the latter case due to city-girdling "green belts" blocking sprawl, particularly around London.
I’ve been chewing for a while on how the wealth produced by the Industrial Revolution and by the US’s wealth and newness in particular has caused us to be a “junk food nation,” in that all the things we are programmed to have strong pleasure responses to precisely because they are so hard to achieve are now so incredibly easy to get that we gorge ourselves. Not just sugar and fat, but mobility, privacy, interpersonal connections (i.e. social media) you can surely think of more.
And the specific structure of corporate capitalism makes it easier and easier, and more and more profitable, to give us too much of we want.
Strong Towns is very much “Sprawl is junk food for city budgets.”
Eating your vegetables is not a bad analogy. Especially when you look at how vegetables used to be eaten, how they were prepared and the seasonality of them. We’ve lost the living memory of those tastes and techniques and they taste weird now. We look at fermentation revivalists like they’re weird hippies from another planet, and stick to our “fresh” industrially produced salads and cans of everything and figure that’s as good as it gets. It takes time and conscious effort to adjust your palate and when you have the canned peas… it’s just too easy.
I live in the suburbs now. I used to have a place in the NYC area. What I miss about urban living is that you have a real neighborhood community. You can always find people to talk to at the local bistro after work. You can walk to your bodega, pharmacy and cleaner. You don’t need a car.
The irony is, you really live in an outdoor environment… walking and climbing in the weather. Sloshing through icy streets. But you wear formal business clothes. In the suburbs, you live in an indoor environment… in your car and in air conditioned buildings. But you wear outdoor clothes.
I definitely vibe with the "playing an instrument" argument, tho I'm not sure I fully agree. I think, unlike learning a new skill, what makes urbanism hard is the switching costs.
When cars first came out, they made everywhere more accessible. Then we tried to accommodate them and not only blunted their utility, we made everywhere less pleasant. Then we made that reality less intolerable with big box stores. But now, with big box stores, it's hard for most people to imagine how to live without one, and without cars. If you do individually, you have to either pay thru the nose, eat your veggies (in time or sweat), or most likely, both. If society tries to make things slightly more urbanist with bus lanes or high rises, the now vast majority of people who are drivers first see it as eating veggies. These perspectives aren't wrong, but living in a place where the car is an accessory and Costco is unnecessary because each trip to the store is less frictionless wouldn't be eating your vegetables. But getting to that point is.
Mind you, some may still prefer to live in a bucolic, quiet street with a large expanse behind them - it IS a beautiful idea, easy to host, tho expensive for the city and the person to maintain. But convenient on the day to day? I don't believe so - when your kids have soccer or choir, driving them from an isolated castle to a parking lot with a venue inside it isn't convenient compared to having them walk. Planning out fortnightly Costco trips isn't convenient. Is sitting in traffic more convenient than sitting on a train? If it's shorter in duration, maybe. So in today's world it likely is, but not in yesterday's or hopefully tomorrow's. Is LA more convenient than Chicago, DC or NYC?
Other than biking (which is sort of a response to the lack of urbanism), so much of urbanism is just so much easier than driving around everywhere. The hardest part of it is that it doesn't really exist for the average income.
Urbanism is simply building beautiful walkable neighborhoods. Even flyover-red-state Americans think Rodeo Drive and "Main Street USA" are kind of cool, but nobody at any level has an accepted shorthand vocabulary to describe how or why.
It's only "eating your vegetables" in the sense that America is terrible at undertaking infrastructure projects of any sort which can't simply be outsourced wholesale to a corporation and plopped down on greenfield somewhere - and we do badly with plenty of those, as well. Sprawl is totally hands-off from the point of view of government, you just expand the local county road to six lanes and let developers buy the adjacent land, handle all the utility hookups and curb cuts, and build whatever they want on it. Maybe with some kind of minimum parking rules.
Beautiful walkable neighborhoods by contrast require a particular vision of how you want the place to look at various stages of the project. Architectural and aesthetic calls (about building heights, and the relationship with the street at a minimum) need to be made and enforced, which is controversial on both political wings (recall the frenzied reaction to Trump's order promoting Federal architecture in DC). Substantial planning is required and the local government needs to be closely involved, in a consistent way, over many years to ensure that a) the plan still makes sense, and b) everyone is sticking to it. None of this is looked upon favorably by developer capital which wants things modular, fast, easy, on the cheap, and at the most gigantic possible scale.
It's organizationally and politically a very tall order and even many European countries routinely fail to achieve it, where new developments are concerned: central Paris gives way to banlieue tower blocks then SFH sprawl straight from Southern California, the outskirts of Madrid look strikingly like the outskirts of Vegas. The Dutch manage it, as does the UK (generally), likely due to critical space constraints from the outset - in the latter case due to city-girdling "green belts" blocking sprawl, particularly around London.
I’ve been chewing for a while on how the wealth produced by the Industrial Revolution and by the US’s wealth and newness in particular has caused us to be a “junk food nation,” in that all the things we are programmed to have strong pleasure responses to precisely because they are so hard to achieve are now so incredibly easy to get that we gorge ourselves. Not just sugar and fat, but mobility, privacy, interpersonal connections (i.e. social media) you can surely think of more.
And the specific structure of corporate capitalism makes it easier and easier, and more and more profitable, to give us too much of we want.
Strong Towns is very much “Sprawl is junk food for city budgets.”
It’s a great paradigm to use.
If it's eating vegetables, it's eating delicious vegetables, because urban living is enjoyable!
Eating your vegetables is not a bad analogy. Especially when you look at how vegetables used to be eaten, how they were prepared and the seasonality of them. We’ve lost the living memory of those tastes and techniques and they taste weird now. We look at fermentation revivalists like they’re weird hippies from another planet, and stick to our “fresh” industrially produced salads and cans of everything and figure that’s as good as it gets. It takes time and conscious effort to adjust your palate and when you have the canned peas… it’s just too easy.