Poundbury in Dorchester (UK) was nothing but plain grass in the 1990'ies. Now Poundbury is a city that has generated more new jobs than new homes. The price for real estate is 30% higher than neighbouring cities. And they have yet to experience a traffic accident. Beautiful walkable cities is good for business.

An other interesting new urbanism project — though I'd have a hard time calling it "beautiful" — is Louvain-La-Neuve in Belgium: a completely planned city resulting from the split of the "Catholic University of Leuven" into the flemish KU Leuven and the walloon UCL the city was set up such that the city center is entirely pedestrian, cars within the city center travel below the giant concrete slab which makes up the city's ground.

I would say it's main fault in the beauty department is that the centre is for students, and so there naturally wasn't much spent on its decoration. Certainly the heavy wear of being a student town in a country with easy access to alcohol does work to bring down the beauty too.

But it manages to give a pretty cosy impression, and with a night life that punches much above the weight of its population otherwise would indicate. Also they gave some good crepes there.

Satellite: https://goo.gl/maps/36F1xKcz8EPPBwwu9

The last time we drove through Poundbury on a summer weekend, the town (it's not a city) was a ghost town. We tried to find somewhere pleasant to have lunch - i.e. open and not fast food - and utterly failed. It has a central town square with nothing going on. I'm sure the rest of Dorchester is interesting and full of life, but Poundbury wasn't.

What a strange town. It appears to have been built mimicking architectural styles from the 19th century, complete with bricked-up windows, mansard roofs, and use of old-fashioned materials and techniques. I do like the human-sized proportions (houses are generally 4 stories or less) and the use of softer-looking materials like brick and stone and rendered walls, but from the photos the town also seems subtly artificial, like a Disneyland version of England. You'd think there could be a middle ground here that didn't skip modernism entirely.

It's been a while since I've been there and I don't know what you're referring to, so could you expand on your criticism of Les Olympiades? Not everyone here can go out for that walk right now and notice all the things you in particular don't like.

Ah sure. So it's basically one of these concepts of what a modern city should be. You have cars and traffic completely underground, on top a relative open area with shops on different levels and high rise buildings for living (as to have public space). It seems like a great idea conceptually, because it affords much space to pedestrians, green spots and still allows accessibility.

But it failed to be attractive to the intended audience - well off young workers and families. It is not a slum and never was, but it did not turn out have the demand.

If you look at it now, it seems downright ugly. There's space, yes, but it's so much concrete, so many bleak looking high rises. It certainly isn't "beautiful" in the sense of the rest of Paris (except if you appreciate that sort of architecture, which I actually do).

Toronto built a complex for urban workers which was designed to be highly walkable “Towers in a Park” approach meant for 1950s young “swinging single” workers, the quintessential urban planning done by cities of the era, but before long it turned into an urban ghetto where drug dealers and petty crime thrived because there was poor access for police vehicles and other types of law enforcement with the towering buildings and narrow walkways shielding any bad behaviour.

Which is sad because it’s next to one of the nicest neighbourhoods in the city (Cabbagetown).

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._James_Town?wprov=sfti1

> drug dealers and petty crime thrived because there was poor access for police vehicles and other types of law enforcement

Interesting take, not supported by the Wikipedia article. Don't Canadian police have access to bikes, motorcycles, or (gasp) horses that might access areas where cars can't go?

What the Wikipedia article does say is this: "The apartments lacked appeal though, poorly constructed, and with a lack of amenities to support the density spike; many prospective tenants instead moved to suburban houses in the developing areas of Scarborough, Etobicoke and North York. The area quickly became much poorer. Four buildings were later built by the province to provide public housing."

Shoddy housing attracts those who can't afford better, and poverty breeds petty crime, that much is true. Blaming it on missing car access is original. Personally I would be more worried about access difficulties for firefighters.

I lived next to it for a number of years and often visited friends who lived there. I’m very familiar with it and the problems it has.

The idea of these concrete enclosed blocks of land being havens for crime and gangs is hardly controversial.

This isn’t the open walkable streets of some nice European city or even downtown Toronto. It’s isolated and poorly maintained. Basically what people have come to expect from city run and planned housing from the past generations.

I don't think they're disputing that it's crime-ridden, just that it's crime-ridden because police cars can't get in.

That's not the only reason why but it's a big one. It's about visual protection with lots of narrow dark alleys and enclosed spaces connecting to endless stairwells. Making surveillance far more difficult and easy for people to disappear into it the minute a watcher sees police enter.

Don't underestimate just how lazy and safety obsessed Cops, so they'd need a partner to go with them to enter on foot.

Police do bike through once in a while when it's summer, usually in groups of 4-6 but Toronto isn't always accessible by bike during winter. Plus I rarely saw bike cops at night like you do cars cruising around.

These isolated places with towering buildings, tons of concrete, and only roads deep outside on the edges creates an excellent environment for shootings, robberies, and drug dealing to take place.

Either way it increases the effort it takes and almost all of them have full time security on site as the problems are constant.

Down the road there are 3 large buildings one by one lined on a major road which are equally in disrepair and impoverished, and they dont have people constantly hanging out side against the walls next to rear stairwell entrances, while everyone else is scared to go there at night. The keep their business inside or out of view.

There's a hundred examples of these places that are set up like this in NYC and Chicago.

Cabrini Green had the same issue with too many enclosed areas where people hung around constantly. The design was counter to open and friendly:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cabrini%E2%80%93Green_Homes?ol...

Here in Germany we have a similar issue in some of these project areas.

They are called "Angsträume", translation is "spaces of fear". Dark, secluded spaces, staircases and so forth, where people feel unsafe.

Hm, what's the difference between St. James Town and Békásmegyer? (The latter is perfectly safe, yet looks the same. And it's not a fancy upscale area either.)

https://www.google.com/maps/place/St.+James+Town,+Toronto,+O...

https://www.google.com/maps/place/Budapest,+B%C3%A9k%C3%A1sm...

> These isolated places

How are they isolated? There are perfectly fine streets and parking lots there.

What do you mean roads only on the edges?

And where are the dark alleys? Are there no public street lights?

> and they dont have people constantly hanging out side against the walls next to rear stairwell entrances, while everyone else is scared to go there at night.

What? So what if people are hanging out somewhere? Are they disturbing the tenants? Do they do something illegal? Do people report them to law enforcement? Does law enforcement act on this?

How .. how can anyone believe police cars can't get in?

People use trucks to move their stuff/furniture there. There are proper paved streets, parking places and so on. You can check on any satellite view service.

That sounds almost exactly like the Eastern Pasila neighborhood of Helsinki. I'll just quote Wikipedia:

>In the ranking of the best places where to live in Helsinki ... Eastern Pasila is ranked 92nd, out of 94 different parts of Helsinki.

This is unrelated to the topic, but your comment is a good occasion to learn more about what seems to me to be weird (grammatical) article usages by English speakers.

Why did you call it _Les_ Olympiades, and not Olympiades (no article) or _the_ Olympiades (article in English), or _les_ Olympiades (no capitalization of the article) ?

For Porte d'Italie, you did not add any article, i.e. Porte d'Italie and not _La_ Porte d'Italie. Why the difference?

Honestly? Because I am not French and I just wrote very thoughtlessly. Sorry, no further reasoning behind it.

I see. Still, this is quite common. For instance the English Wikipedia article [0] use the "random French capitalized article" ("Though the proportions are more modest, _Les_ Olympiades are designed similarly to the esplanade of _La_ Défense.", emphasis mine) but not the French Wikipedia 0article [1], which uses "normal" (to me) grammatical articles.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Les_Olympiades

[1] https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olympiades_(quartier_parisien)

It's pretty typical to capitalize articles in English if those articles are part of a proper noun (esp. at the beginning of the term). So it seems likely that the article is seen as part of the name of the place. I'd guess there's a similar phenomenon with plurality in proper nouns.

The French article repeatedly refers to it as _Les_ Olympiades.

The article is capitalized only when it is the beginning of a sentence, or for the elementary school of the same name. The article behaves "normally" (eg switches to aux Olympiades when needed) while the English article stick to Les Olympiades with a capitalized "Les".

Interestingly, both articles first words are "Les Olympiades", but:

* "Les" is in bold in the English one, as if it was part of the name, while only "Olympiades" is in bold in French

* The French article says "the Olympiades are" while the English one say "the Olympiades is".

Ah now I get what you are saying. Okay so remember this was all subconcious, but I think I added the articles since "Les Olympiades" seems like a whole name. Just "Olympiades" makes less sense since that could have different meanings, like people perhaps. In that sense, I considered "Les" as part of the name. Therefore, it is capitalized.

Porte d'Italy on the other hand is clear, there's only one interpretation, and therefore the article is not part of the name.

I am not saying this is right, just my brain doing brain things. I apologize if correctness is important for you, I will try to be more precise going foward.

Just like you would say 'les miserables' or 'le big mac'

I think this comes down to the fact that English speakers don't consider their own articles very much because they're always the same. We don't have to put any effort into picking one, so selection is unconscious and automatic.

I recall Ukrainians objecting to the English-speaking world's fixation on calling their country "the Ukraine" instead of just "Ukraine." The propensity to just append articles to nouns to facilitate flow is hard to overcome.

>I think this comes down to the fact that English speakers don't consider their own articles very much because they're always the same.

It's a little bit like how native English speakers tend to regard accent marks as largely optional decoration.

Not so weird, its use is governed by convention. Country names derived from geographical feature take a definite article.

Country Names and 'The': The Ukraine or Ukraine https://www.quickanddirtytips.com/education/grammar/country-...

The definite article makes sense in this case, since it's a specific place and not a category, "les" because that's how you'd probably see it written if mentioned out of context elsewhere[0], and capitalized (against French convention) because proper names are typically capitalized in English, including articles.

And also because people who speak about Les Olympiades in English call it Les Olympiades, in a deliberate effort to distinguish it from the Métro station.

https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italie_13#Les_Olympiades

This does not explain why "Les" is considered a part of the name, i.e. English speakers could call it "_the_ Olympiades", to distinguish it from the Métro station.

I'd say the same reason the Spanish Wikipedia article for Alhambra uses La in front of Alhambra even though Al is the article in Arabic.

https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alhambra

Native speakers usualllly ignore the articles from another language unless there was a cultural reason not to. It also just sounds better to my native ear.

There isn't a rule about that sort of thing, but a convention you get used to over time.

Adding the Les gives Olympiades more context. The extra word provides clues that this is a straight foreign word that should be treated differently. Port d'Italie is already two words, so extra context isn't necessarily needed.

Like many things in English, it's up to the speaker/writer, and the context.

> I wonder if there are contemporary developments that will, some day, be considered truly beautiful.

Do we still build buildings that will withstand the times to just get to our great-grandchildren though ? Or are we just biased because only the good ones remain from the 19 century ?

(The neighborhood around Olympiades is from the 60s though).

Here is a Twitter account to follow if you're interested in "good urbanism": https://twitter.com/wrathofgnon

Tel Aviv has many examples of good 20th century urbanism. London Barbican is also a great example. I'm sure there are more but we'll see which ones will be true classics over time.

< I wonder if there are contemporary developments that will, some day, be considered truly beautiful.

By whom? It's a matter of perspective. If you're into architecture and design you'll care more about the practicality and function of the building than it's exterior appearance. A sterile exterior then becomes an indicator that the budget went into what matters most.

In my personal opinion, the exterior of buildings (excluding windows) should all be considered public space, they should be open for decoration, like street art, mural paintings etc., so this problem would be solved by the people who live there and take action.

>By whom?

By those who live in them and by those that visit them.

Those who design them and those who write design critiques don't matter at all, and should not even have a voice (at least not one anybody should care about). The best buildings, people take pride living in, and coming from abroad to admire, were built that people we don't even know their name, many even designed and built by craftsmen (as opposed to university-studied architects).

>If you're into architecture and design you'll care more about the practicality and function of the building than it's exterior appearance

The exterior appearance is part of the practicality and function of the building. A bleak appearance can crush the soul, destroy any community pride, and even make people physically ill. Humans are not cattle (though even cattle deserve better).

Is it because of the structural complexity of individual buildings (e.g. kitsch ornamentation) or could it be just the color and texture (e.g. people hating flat grey walls)?

A painted and decorated facade could change the exterior impression completely.

The problem is more the large scale uniformity and a lack of variance, like housing complexes that all look the same, not individual buildings.

Here's an extreme kitsch example: https://www.dezeen.com/2019/01/18/drone-abandoned-turkish-ch...

At a high level, people enjoy "information" and tune out areas that don't have any. It doesn't have to be useful information - a blank brick wall is more interesting than a blank concrete wall, and older hand-laid bricks with more variation and mortar thickness is more interesting still. Small modifications on a repetition (e.g. https://www.curbed.com/2016/6/2/11833698/brownstone-greyston...) add a sense of life, even if it's in the window screens, handrails, landscaping, etc. Central Paris is full of 5-7 story buildings with stone facades and Juliet balconies, but they're all different enough that it's interesting to walk block after block.

It matters what scale you experience it - you can notice cool individual trees when you're hiking, but not when you're driving. As more travel became motorized vs pedestrian/horse, there was less and less reason to prioritize street-level beauty. Also, cars opened up so much land that there was less redevelopment, so a lot of buildings are the first buildings ever built on that site.

I think in two senses.

First, reception by audiences such as tourists. What is on their vacation photographs? Boulevards, or high rises of Italie 13?

Second, by the people who live there. The Olympiades never attracted the successful young professionals they were intended for, and in that sense, were not successful in their design. It may indeed often be the case that some modernist areas are in fact quite nice and comfortable to live in - I do not know. But at the very least they did not turn out to be as desirable as they were planned.