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There ARE ALREADY CITIES!!! WHY is everyone ignoring this fact! There are REAL WALKABLE CITIES in America - the very same ones that were abandoned for the suburbs in the post war period.
It is beyond wasteful and arrogant to ignore these EXISTING CITIES that hold beautiful architecture, gorgeous older homes, and history! Character? Does that need to be manufactured?
Check out a rust belt city - chances are it's on the cusp of a rebound!
I can walk to my church, I can walk to the park - called public square. Every Thursday from Memorial Day through October, there is a wonderful farmer's market right here in Wilkes-Barre!
Last night we walked to the River Common and enjoyed fireworks and the sound of the North East PA Philharmonic. We have an active Art League and a Historic District.
Check out Wilkes-Barre on city data!
But I am not just shamelessly promoting my own adopted city - there are many other wonderful cities out there just waiting to be discovered! No one has answered my question - WHY BUILD MORE!
I have two possible answers 1. Snobism/ racism. You don't get to choose your neighbors.
2. Profit motive for those in the construction industry.
I grew up in Chicago, actually a small subarb, Kenilworth, on the North shore. Chicago was the city, with definite small towns around the city.
I went back there last year, and instead of pretty towns, and fields separating the small towns, there is row upon row of strip malls, apartment buildings.
New Urbanism is designed mostly to make money for the developer. We had a family discussion about this last night, on our way to the fireworks. Stapleton, that highly vaunted NU development in Denver, built over the old Denver Stapleton airport, is full of cookie cutter houses and has lots of internal traffic.
They are building these NU communities because there is a real demand in the US for high quality walkable communities because people are sick and tired of endless sprawl. What do you think the developers of sprawl are trying to do if not make money? They're just doing it out of the goodness of their hearts? How do you pretend to know the motives of the developers anyway? For some developers their motives are more than financial. They want to make money but they also want to contribute something more meaningful to society than just cranking out more ugly and wasteful suburban development. Any monkey can do that. To build a quality NU community actually requires some talent and skill in the civic arts, something this country has forgotten how to do.
Last edited by cisco kid; 07-05-2011 at 10:10 PM..
I do not understand New Urbanism. So you are admitting that perfectly good, historc American cities are being left to crumble because of The Profit Motive?
Fcae it. AS these new urban whatever you call them become really urban ;poeple will ove further out . Poeple who choose to lvie away from the urban density will. With Bomers retiringmore and mor esmall country towns are being revived with people live outside the old boundries.The towns actaully most have tourist who stay in the town areas but residents live outside a distance away.Most of these town arract alot of tourist threu out the eyar to make local businesses thrive altho like businesses of old in the towns.
New urbanist communities have their utility in cities where there isn't enough existing urban fabric left (or wasn't built in the first place in sufficient quantity) to justify the kind of urban repair that is a lot easier, a lot greener, and probably more economical in old-core cities. In some cases, miniature versions of "new urbanist" communities get built on infill sites in existing cities. These can actually be very beneficial, as they help connect neighborhoods where urban renewal cleared out buildings for parking lots etcetera. There are a few examples where I live that have worked really well, others that kind of faltered after the boom but still at least fill formerly blank spaces.
Adaptive reuse of historic buildings and historic neighborhoods is a far better idea than continued greenfield development, and is a component of New Urbanist thinking that kind of gets forgotten sometimes--perhaps because it isn't as "sexy" (profitable) to traditional home builders. In the same way, rehabbing an existing house is "greener" than a new "green" construction house, since it requires far less materials, construction energy, and landfill waste.
There ARE ALREADY CITIES!!! WHY is everyone ignoring this fact! There are REAL WALKABLE CITIES in America - the very same ones that were abandoned for the suburbs in the post war period.
It is beyond wasteful and arrogant to ignore these EXISTING CITIES that hold beautiful architecture, gorgeous older homes, and history! Character? Does that need to be manufactured?
Check out a rust belt city - chances are it's on the cusp of a rebound!
I can walk to my church, I can walk to the park - called public square. Every Thursday from Memorial Day through October, there is a wonderful farmer's market right here in Wilkes-Barre!
Last night we walked to the River Common and enjoyed fireworks and the sound of the North East PA Philharmonic. We have an active Art League and a Historic District.
Check out Wilkes-Barre on city data!
But I am not just shamelessly promoting my own adopted city - there are many other wonderful cities out there just waiting to be discovered! No one has answered my question - WHY BUILD MORE!
I have two possible answers 1. Snobism/ racism. You don't get to choose your neighbors.
2. Profit motive for those in the construction industry.
If you have better answers, I am all ears.
Population growth + desire by some (obviously a lot) to not live in the types of cities you described + profit motive for developers and landowners.
I do not understand New Urbanism. So you are admitting that perfectly good, historc American cities are being left to crumble because of The Profit Motive?
So Interrobang2rd, if they had to start somewhere in this quest for walkability - WHY NOT START WITH WHAT EXISTS???
To expand upon wburg, Chicago finished demolishing all the high-rises of the Cabrini-Green housing project in May, leaving a big empty space. This is what "exists." Should it be left there to do nothing, or should developers take advantage of the nearby affluent neighborhoods to create even more of a community that you describe?
Also, sprawl is inevitable, what with population growth and other societal factors. It can be done intelligently. The extent of walkability for shopping near my home is traversing across subdivisions, grass fields, and incomplete construction sites to get to a chain drug store. Anything else is cutting it in terms of safety and convenience. NU, or that?
Breathing cities hold neither infinite space nor infinite demand. There is a (large) segment of the population that prefers suburban life, but what is provided for them in many cases is far from ideal.
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