New England has counties and townships and cities, California and Texas only have counties and cities. Even a place that calls itself a town is still a city as far as their laws go, so advocating your position is going to run up against practical issues with people about why you’re saying their city isn’t a city.
We already have terms for this, and it’s called the suburbs.
Texan cities though, some of those cross into three counties.
Worse of both world in my book. Unless you want to raise your kid in isolation.
My friend is an urban activist and he always complained that his childhood neighborhood wasn't conductive for meeting people.
Recently I learned that we actually grew up just a few bus stops from each other. For me it was never an issue to hop into a bus/subway train and reach my friends - usually unannounced.
The only people my age in this new neighbourhood were bullies and/or juvenile delinquents, so I didn't make any friends there.
My closest circle currently is my class nerd group from middle school with one additional guy from a high school the two of those went together. The urban activist friend I met through another guy from this bunch, who introduced me into some extracurricular activities in his school which I could attend.
I also have college friends who, like me, didn't move cities to go there. One of them is actually a guy who my primary school friends met in their middle school and who went to my high school, but we only got to know each other better in college. We were all spread out over this 1.7mln city, but that was no problem since everyone had phones.
Idk, there are many cities outside the US where I wouldn't want to stay more than absolutely necessary, let alone raise children.
That said, US is a collection of regions with very different social setups and it is easy to move between them. It is common, as preferences change, for youngsters to live for a few years in one state, settle to raise children in another, then move as empty-nesters to third.
If safety is what one is after, one can find a place that is super safe, comparable on safety to anywhere in the world. Someone else would aim for nightlife instead. This flexibility is what makes US very livable for me. Just my 2c.
But I've got to admit that Maine looks pretty safe according to https://www.gunviolencearchive.org/charts-and-maps
Also, it sounds strange to me to look at guns as an inverse proxy for safety. I would, especially with kids, first look at drug prevalence and second at accidents on the roads (both cars and bikes). Which reinforces what I started with: the ability to select the place I want to live in based on my own preferences. Given a wide variety of options, both politically and socially, one can usually find a place they are happy in. My 2c.
The only barrier to buying a flat or house might be slightly reduced access to loans. I found in Denmark it is easier for a Dane to get a loan for 95% of the house value, but foreigners might only get 80%. EU citizens are somewhere in the middle, depending what the banks think.
Language is the main problem. If you aren't fluent in the new country's language, you can have problems with government bureaucracy, school/work, socialising, children's lives, doctors etc. If you speak English these are much reduced in countries with high English proficiency (IS/NO/SE/FI/DK/NL/LU/CY, obviously IE/MT). Or, if you are moving where there's already a significant community of people speaking your language.
Do kids from other countries tend to be accepted well in schools? I heard that at least in France schools can be very clique-ish and coming from the outside the kid can face significant hurdles. But I am just parroting what I heard elsewhere.
Not knowing/learning the language also works for some jobs like cleaning or agriculture, if so many workers are migrants that everyone speaks Romanian or English etc. Also postgraduate students.
Plenty of people from the north who move south when they retire (e.g. Netherlands to Spain, Germany to Greece) move before learning the language.
How quickly people learn the local language depends. Slowly in Denmark or the Netherlands where English is almost universal and work is often done in English, quickly in France or Italy where the opposite applies. Slowly if you're 65 and surrounded by other Dutch pensioners.
From what I know of France, a child from the other side of France can also be excluded, but this is from French emigrants teasing each other. I haven't heard of similar problems in Denmark.
Growing up in London I didn't even notice the European immigrants in my class and could hardly exclude the 40% of the class who were descendents of South Asian immigrants, but this varies significantly around the country.
I expect compared to the USA there's much more reluctance to move when a child is 14-18 years old, unless they can be certain of a place in the French school in Copenhagen etc. But this is primarily because of the difference in exams and language.
Some of us have family and friends here or simply can’t afford to live in the EU if we wanted to.
I do sympathize though. I do not have kids (yet) but our move from TN > Maine is definitely partially motivated by the fact that I said I would absolutely never raise a child in the south due to gun culture and archaic legislation in general. For example most states in the south still allow school teachers and administrators to hit children- most of this happens in Mississippi and TN, then basically other states where lots of poverty, christianity, or mormonism are.
What is it about cities outside of America that make them better? Do you any any examples? Do you have any suggestions what we could do in America to emulate that?
I grew up in a wonderful neighborhood in a nice suburban area, but I was the youngest kid by about four years so I never walked to a friend’s house.
I also never realized I was missing anything until I moved to a non-US city in my twenties and found out how different life could be in a human-scale environment.
That's not specific to cities. My wife grew up on a farm, where neighbours lived a hundred meters away, and her brother had an entire chunk bitten out of his leg by a neighbour's dog. I grew up in a village, and I was terrified of some of the dogs there.
We live in a city now, and although we live in a street with a lot of dogs (to the dismay of my cynophobic kids), all dogs are very well behaved.
> The American suburbs are an excellent place to raise children.
I guess it varies. I've heard stories of American parents having CPS called on them merely for having their children play outside. Many American suburbs don't have the bike paths or even sidewalks necessary for kids to get around.
Then she lost her job and had to move away, which I definitely didn’t feel any sense of schadenfreude from. We ended up buying her an Apple Watch with cell service and the complaints stopped.
I think us letting our daughter roam free has changed the general mood of the neighborhood and I’ve noticed far more children playing outside. We’ve been the catalyst to get everyone to just chill out. Be the change you want to see in the world and all that.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2019/06/04/fewer-kids-...
It may be social, in that letting kids roam on their own is not as acceptable and could get you in trouble with courts. Also, "cars" are more dangerous these days, ans they shift into more trucks and SUVs with massive blind spots and distracted drivers, and there have been many efforts to eliminate penalties for speeding, and the difference between 20mph and 30mph is literally a ton of death.
The number 1 thing I would love for my child is to live in a place where I was not in constant fear of cars when on the sidewalk or street. It wasn't like that when I was a kid in the suburbs in the 80s. And I will likely have to leave the US to find what I want.
Yep, that's exactly what I did. I'm in Tokyo now, and it's mostly what the "NotJustBikes" crowd is asking for: great public transit, walkability, lots of bike-riding, etc. I see kids walking or riding bikes by themselves all the time. I finally realized I was never going to be able to live in this kind of society in the US, so I found a place that had the lifestyle I wanted and moved there.
The helmet safety panic really crushed a lot of my enjoyment of life. Made riding a bike utterly miserable for me - both socially with my peer group at the time, as well as it being massively uncomfortable to wear. Not to mention getting in trouble dozens of times for leaving it at whatever location.
I usually would end up biking outside sight distance of the parents and ditch it under a bush for later retrieval. But once this rule was enforced on me, my biking was severely curtailed as it didn't have the same simple joy of freedom it had beforehand.
* Proximity to (non-farm) work * Available public/private schools * Municipal amenities like parks and libraries * Basic retail services - groceries, clothing stores, etc. * Social activities/clubs
In short, other than needing a car to get around both places, they don’t have much in common at all.
Instead people have to get into their 7-11 -sized trucks and drive to a store with a parking lot that's larger than many European neighbourhoods.
As a pre-teen, I could go to any of my friend's houses to do tabletop roleplaying all by myself. If my mother needed a break from parenting, she had three different siblings living within a quarter mile. When your average building is 6 stories tall, and your typical street is 30 feet wide building to building, a quarter mile circle holds a lot of families! In comparison, my neighbor from across the street in the US suburbs is 60 feet away, door to door, and a quarter mile circle won't get me to 300 front doors, total.
Even just townhouses which are still "single family" buildings on their own land are roughly 4x denser than detached houses.
Someone walking through a six-story downtown is, by such a measurement, traveling faster than a car traveling at ~90 mph through suburbia.
(Of course, a car can't travel that quickly through suburbia.)
In the worst flat in these terms I ever had in a city over here was 10 minutes walk to the next grocery shop and this was a dirt cheap flat on a loud main road.
Even parts of the town where you have mostly residential housing will have the occasional small shop, grocery store, gas station or similar. If I understood zoning in the US correctly this kind of mixing is at times even forbidden?
To be fair this exists in many of areas in the US as well.
From my suburban single family home in a small town in California I can easily walk to all those things in a few minutes, including 24x7 supermarket, another nicer supermarket, plenty of restaurants, movies, stores of nearly all kinds, playgrounds, sports fields, etc.
People definitely call Ventura, CA “the city” and its 100k.
In the UK “city” status is conferred by being on the government’s list of cities and isn’t automatic based on size or presence of a Cathedral or anything else.
See: Tom Scott on YouTube “the town which forgot to be a city” - https://youtube.com/watch?v=kBaLb1C4WAg
The province of Friesland famously has 11 cities, but many of those are tiny, and it doesn't include several of the largest towns that are not technically cities.
> In Sweden, the concept of "city" was removed in 1971. Everything became just municipalities.
> This annoyed Stockholm, so in 1983, Stockholm municipality simply renamed itself "Stockholm Stad" (Stockholm City). That pissed Malmö and Göteborg off, and they also promptly renamed themselves to be cities. Today 14 municipalities n Sweden claim to be cities.
It has more to do with what services the city provides vs the size (cities provide trash pickup, etc).
I live in a small town of around 2000. Within 5-10 minutes walking I got: a restaurant, a cafe, a grocery store, pizzeria and kindergarten. Within 5-10 minutes of biking I have: public library, another grocery store, two bars and a restaurant. Public transport is readily available to take me to the neighbouring hustle-bustle (pop. 600'000) within 35 minutes. So my town is 50 times smaller than your Spanish example but it is perfectly possible to have all these services at this scale as well!
I live in a "mid sized" european city (500k), about 2km from the center, and the _only_ think I use my car for is getting out of the city. Within 10m walking I have pretty much everything I need, and within 20m of public transport (ironically, walking can be quicker for the short distances), I have pretty much everything I _want_!
It's right in the middle, close to the central district. It's got everything. From barbers to art galleries, from Portuguese cuisine to folklore shops, from luthiers to really good schools. A bustling art scene, clean streets. A huge shopping centre a nice park and an international transportation hub are all in in walking distance (<10 min), while the district itself manages to stay cozy and friendly.
I have friends who haven't left the borders of this "village" during Covid, it's really got everything. Part of a big city while being not part of it at the same time.
Also, I come from a 20k small town (so right between the two examples above) and had a very similar experience there, apart from everything the world has to offer being easily accessible once you decide to hop on a tram or your bike.
In the village I grew up in (then 40k, now 100k), every neighbourhood had a shopping mall with one or two supermarkets, a Chinese restaurant, a few other shops, surrounded by 3 primary schools (one public, one protestant, one catholic). The same everywhere. Don't expect any bars, though. Or restaurants other than Chinese. I believe the town had one disco that served several neighbouring towns as well.
I also live in a small town of around 2000 in rural Massachusetts. Within the same walking distance I have: full elementary school (kindergarten through 6th grade), public tennis and basketball courts, a public indoor gym, a grocery store, several restaurants, several bookstores, several banks, a pharmacy, a bowling alley and a few more misc stores. We also have public transport to the nearest big town but it is only a few times a day.
The only reason my town is dense and walkable is due to geography. It was settled 250 years ago and it is nestled on a river between two "mountains" (really just big hills) so once all the available space filled up 100 years ago it just stopped growing (my house is on the outskirts of town and was built 115 years ago).
In comparison I grew up in a sprawling small town in the US midwest which has embraced even more sprawl since I moved 30+ years ago and I hate going back. Its just souless and unwalkable as it has endless land to expand into and no plan to keep it human scale.
I went to school out there and have friends from the surrounding areas, it's nice if you're wanting something more rural but still near things. The key to it is a lot of the towns were built 100-200 or so years ago, when it actually was necessary to build close to each other in community.
Aye, but I bet GP's home town in Spain is much more pleasant to walk in from November to March ;-)
That aside, there are some real gems among Western Mass towns! I wonder, with all the empty land in this country (even in places very hospitable to human life), if it's possible to found new towns built in the "European" model of a central plaza surrounded by multifamily, mixed-use developments within walking distance? Were I a billionaire, this is the sort of stuff I would explore.
It's not geography, it's history. The only nice places in the US are places that were built before cars.
I guess to me, the real difference is density and how much there is to do. A city has a bar on almost every street corner, a village, no matter how big, does not.
In North Carolina there is a "city" called Brevard with a population of just under 8,000 but you also have the "town" of Cary with population 170,000.
Of course there is still the issue of how the words are commonly used vs their actual legal definition but if you ask 100 different people the difference between a city and town, you'll get 100 slightly different definitions. Someone that grew up in New York City will have a very different definition than someone that grew up in Wyoming 50 miles from the nearest gas station. At the end of the day, there's just some vague notion that cities are bigger than towns.
Although we can't trust the cognates, as 'stad' is related to English 'stead', which meant a settlement of any size.
... I suppose the modern equivalent is a CBD.
From the front door I can throw rocks at 2 more cafes, another restaurant, a launderette, a playground and a car dealer. There is a basket ball court out the back.
Nothing special about my 7 storey block, but when a certain density is reached things start to work really well
I def don't want my kids riding their bikes along the strode to the "corner" store.
Now. for playing. We have a 60km road, and a river. I can tell my kids to stay inside those and know that most cars traveling in there are local, so driving a bit slower.
I wish we had a community center/library around here. I'd love to meet my neighbours.
Transportation is for rural areas. If there is support for transporting people around beyond the capacity of their legs, I'm not sure that is really a city either. The hallmark of a city is the density for having everything you need to live out life right there, never, ever, needing to step into some kind of vehicle. Density but scattering life around over tens of miles or more, requiring travel to live out life, is just rural with nearby neighbours.