The US owes it's "walkability" or lack of due to Blockbusting by property developers in the 50s that used racism to drive the middle classes out of the cities into the newly built suburbs. No such thing happened anywhere else.
I think that might've been a factor, but it's an overgeneralization. In Canada, we didn't those race relations problems to anywhere close to the same degree, and yet big Canadian cities are just as sprawled as their American counterparts.
For my money, the major problem with the US and Canada is for the most part, we got to start fresh. A lot of the expansion happened in the age of the automobile, and at the time, we built what we thought we wanted — large suburbs and big arteries to take us between them. This worked pretty well in the beginning, but the further we spread, the more obvious the realization that the design doesn't scale [1].
In Europe, a lot of cities were built pre-car, and although they've seen significant change in the interim, large parts of the original geography are left over. There are some places that consciously designed their infrastructure well even if it was against the grain for the time (e.g. anti-car protests in the Netherlands that led to modern bicycle-friendly Amsterdam; also, Copenhagen), but a lot of it is a historical accident which turns out to have led to better livability than anything our city planners have done on purpose in 100 years.
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[1] It's still not obvious to everyone, but as commute times continue to go up, I believe that broader consensus will form.
I'm sorry, but this is not fair.
For whatever reasons (and ironically, after major civil rights advances) - many urban areas on the US became massively violent.
Rates of violent crime increased 600% (robbery) [1] in America overall during the 1960-1980. That's quite a radical increase. And again - note that this was a time of ostensibly major civil rights progress.
To wit - the increase in violence was not so much in rural areas, it was urban, ergo, there was even more than an 600% increase in crime. This was an era of increasing literacy and access to education for all Americans, including those who were underpriveledged. And this was way before Regans+Clinton strategy of mass incarceration.
It's deeply unfair to suggest that a family - of any race - that decides to move to the relatively affordable, calm suburbs, where they can own a full home and have a backyard, and avoid the massive increase in crime - is somehow 'racist'.
If your neighbourhood violence increased by more than 600% over the span of 10 years, and you were having kids, you might just decided to move somewhere else.
[1] http://www.disastercenter.com/crime/uscrime.htm
I don't think 'walkability' is a thing in any US city other than the one's established before cars, sadly.
On the subject of the article - if the Government is banning the sale of private property, or worse, forcing property sales - this is a problem. Banning to international investors - sure. Buying up land, sure, if they want. But banning sales from Germans to other Germans, or forcing sales to the government - no way.
Do you suggest that sprawling suburbanised cities were too big to bomb effectively?
In Soviet Union, that kind of the most important members of society, lived in apartment blocks in city centers. And because Soviet Union did not have, and could not afford, mass automobilisation, they were stuck with that.
It made war clearly unwinnable for Commies.
So it is a misrepresentation of what the other side thinks they are saying, but a correct representation of what their argument actually turns out to mean.
The trouble with "designed" rather than "evolved" cities is that they tend to be a bit soulless, and inevitably the design reflects whatever the prejudices of the builders were at the time. Hence the famous roundabouts of Milton Keynes, one of the very few cities of the UK that really accommodates car culture.
Personally I think it would be simpler to try to distribute jobs across the existing cities a bit. The UK is over-focused on London and France over-focused on Paris. The US is larger so the effect is spread over the top 5 cities, but we still see that in order to start a tech business people think they "must" move to SF.
We've ended up with a city of 400,000 that's 40km from north to south and 15km east to west. Public transport is, as a result, highly problematic, and pushes by government to increase housing density (which I think is quite a sensible idea) meet with some resistance.
Planned cities aren't necessarily bad on the whole though - I will quite happily take "soulless" over "gridlocked" and "clean" over "gritty" any day. Canberra may be a bit "soulless", but the more organic cities around us have a very different set of problems with their own negative impacts on livability.
Pre-plan things like fiber to every home, smart measures to promote walking / biking, and promote reasonable density (3 to 5 storeys as the default height). Have cool things like a free regular bus to natural areas where people can swim or hike (cheaper than building olympic size pools, no?). Very strict building standards for things like building materials and sustainability. No suburbia or aboveground highways.
If this is in Canada, wouldn't the water be cold for most of the year? An indoor Olympic pool works year round.
Really, cities seem like a "necessary evil" to me and I hope they become less important and somewhat phased out as employers realize they can replace a lot of expensive city office space with telecommuting. I dread the thought I might have to move into one for a job soon until I have enough experience on paper to get steady remote jobs - I've been to a lot of cities for conventions or just passing through and I don't understand what possible appeal they have.
I'm half inclined to believe a lot of the people waxing romantic about cities have never been to one. You get harassed for money all the time and every time I go to a convention I hear stories of people getting assaulted for refusing, they don't look nice unless you're looking on from miles away at a few skylines like NYC's with the new WTC, you have to be a lot more on guard and pay more attention to your surroundings, everything is more expensive, and all the stores/restaurants are overcrowded a lot of the time.
It's a mystery to me why there's such an attitude against suburbs on HN. Sure, suburban town development is technically less resource-efficient than packing everything together like you're designing a circuit board to be mass-produced, but I don't think it's worth the cost.
I could say I don't understand why people don't live in cities. The countryside is boring - if you're not interested in the outdoors, there's nothing to do. Suburbs make some sense for people in middle adulthood to raise children in a safer environment without being too far from the city, but otherwise they're just a space / commute tradeoff, getting more space for your money than somewhere closer.
There are some more upsides to going a bit further into the country. No nearby neighbors means you can have an expectation of privacy doing whatever you want in the back yard and have no potential for noise complaints if you wanted to do something like an event with music or shoot guns, and on the flip side not hear any noise from neighbors. You'd also have more room to do home improvements if you wanted and have a much easier time getting zoned to build something like a fallout shelter if that kind of thing interests you or dig a pond.
I'm sure there's a notable group of people who want to live in a city all their lives, but I also don't think it's a coincidence that as people start to have kids, they seem to start wanting to move out of cities.
Also, suburban housing has the price of a decent school district built in, while in the city you need to pay private tuition for access to an institution which isn't completely non-functional (i.e. overwhelming majority of students are far below the extremely unambitious academic standards).
If urban schools were high quality and middle class families could afford family-sized apartments, things would be different.
Edit: No need to be so cryptic, right? Urban public schools are the top tier in my country. Affordability of housing in city centres is becoming more of an issue, but given the availability of jobs, I don't think it's a major driver of relocation.
In general, the situation here seems to be that a lot of families would prefer to live in a less urban environment, but cities make more economic sense still.
Cities are safer than rural areas or suburbs.
You're extrapolating too far from your own preferences. I don't like watermelon, but I don't generalize from that to a future where something replaces watermelon. I assume people are eating watermelon because they do like it.
Aren't you doing the same, but in the other direction?
Not everyone has to live in one of my cities. If you don't like population density, then you can live somewhere else. But the problem we have now is that there are a lot of people who want to live in densely populated places, but can't because the cost of living is too high.
Humans are generally social beings, they enjoy spending time with other humans. Life out in the suburbs is often (but not always) much more solitary. For most people, being alone in a big house with a lot of stuff doesn't make them happy. Having real experiences with those they're close with makes them happy.
You can replace the garage and the car by the fastest possible walk to the underground station, grumbling at slower people, and 30 minutes in the tube, avoiding any eye contact by looking at their smartphone/newspaper/book and avoiding any other interaction with headphone.
And on Friday afternoon or evening, they get out of the city as fast as possible, until Sunday evening.
That's "social beings enjoying spending time with other humans in cities". You don't even know 2 people in your own building, when you live in a city. You can lay on the side-walk having a cardiac arrest and people will walk by you, if not over you.
So this:
> And on Friday afternoon or evening, they get out of the city as fast as possible, until Sunday evening.
This isn't universal. Not even close.
Plus, you can't ignore the political aspect: Someone with progressive politics will be happier in a city than the country, at least in America, and that's been true a very long time.
The higher your degree of professional specialisation the more acute this problem is.
More recently, in the north we tried placing new cities, turns out that people don't go and live somewhere if there isn't work, and there isn't much work in the north. Those cities are now failures. Heck, the big established cities in the north are being drained by people moving towards the cities in the middle.
Cities grow organically because people want to live in that city.
That doesn't mean you can't stimulate that growth. You can take the initial steps to make an area a little more desirable and then let the rest happen organically. Nobody will randomly desire to live in an empty rural area.
It's a bootstrapping problem. Sometimes a single employer can make an area desirable, but that single employer may never move there because it's not a desirable area.
But of course they never heard of avocado toasts so big companies avoid moving there
My proposal for new cities involves strictly limiting the foot print to enable it to be completely walkable. That would mean you don't have any cars, which is good for many reasons. A lot of what local governments do is complicated by having to service so many different residences over a wide area (think sewage and water, mail, policing/fire protection, road maintenance, etc). If you mostly just build up, then that all becomes much easier, which means government can be much smaller and cheaper. And I think the city becomes much more livable, as a large area around the city is green space, and the streets can be taken over by open air restaurants/cafes/bars on weekends.