This piece isn't trying to contrast NYC to anywhere in the US, since there are essentially no traditional cities in the US. A more traditionally-built city, and one that's even larger than NYC, is Tokyo.

The couple clusters of traditional urban development in NYC are extremely valuable— the West Village comes closest: https://www.google.com/maps/@40.733584,-74.000469,3a,75y,44.... https://www.google.com/maps/@40.729827,-74.001507,3a,75y,76.... Most of the rest of NYC's oldest neighborhoods have been demolished (or rebuilt as nothing but skyscrapers, in the case of the Financial District).

Brooklyn Heights, DC's Georgetown & Boston's North End are also extremely desirable neighborhoods with narrow streets, at least by American standards. I personally don't spend much time in any of them, since they've become so desirable as to drive out anyone except the wealthy, but they generally absolutely ooze charm.

Well, you could build multi-million cities in a traditional style. You'd need subways, of course, as well as some mayor arteries to get goods close enough to their destination that the rest of the trek is short enough to be easy.

A simplistic solution would be a grid of mayor arteries, NY-style but bigger, and then have the "blocks" of the grid be traditional-style no-car zones with subway stations in the middle.

A great case study for his traditional city movement is Tokyo. Most "suburban" areas are like his future 'traditional' city: 1 car width wide streets, walking-centric. All you need is exceptional public transportation - subway, rail. Drop yourself pretty much anywhere in Tokyo suburbs in Google Street View and you can see how a city of many multi-millions lives this way, no grids or arteries required.

The problem with doing this in Manhattan is that you have pretty hard boundaries for where the city should end, forcing development upwards.

Could you be specific? Because:

>I don't see problems with any of the types of living, they all have their advantages and disadvantages.

could be said about anything. I don't understand your reasoning, and the only thing that I can figure out about your opinion is that you don't like think that there's anything wrong with places like New York because you live in New York(?), but I could definitely have that wrong.

Fellow new yorker here, I'll contribute my 2c:

The hypertrophic city is undoubtedly going to have advantages that suburbs and traditional cities don't (he touched on some of the disadvantages, so I won't repeat them here). The sheer scale ends up being a good thing and a bad thing.

As a random example, if you're really into wingsuit flying you can easily find a sizable group of people who are similarly interested (and then you can arrange trips, etc.) That's much harder (sometimes even just impossible) to do at smaller scales (traditional cities) or smaller densities (the suburbs). Finding a good social cohort obviously has a noticeable impact on quality of life.

I also heavily disagree with his assessment that mass transit discourages walking. The very nature of mass transit is that one must walk to specified stations, and it wouldn't shock me to learn that New Yorkers walk a few miles every day even with arguably the best mass transit system in America. Cities with mass transit systems regularly appear on lists of America's fittest cities (e.g. Seattle, SF).

It seems silly to be arguing that traditional cities are a panacea to all problems when they obviously carry their own drawbacks.

I object to the tone of the piece suggesting that one particular style of living is better as it is clearly preferential outside of any objective measurement (ie: GDP/person, CO2 emissions/person etc.).

You may still lay a metro under a traditional city to permit million inhabitants to get where they want. Occassional light rail on the boulevard.

Istanbul is 2nd largest city in Europe and they still have a huge traditional city core and outskirts are pretty close too. They have some subway and rail and ferries. I can't say I fully understand how they manage without collapsing, tho.

Istanbul is massively massively spread out, and because of that loses many of the economic benefits that non traditional cities have. You really can't have your cake and eat it too here...

Istanbul has some problems that has forced it to spread around... Being in between two seas with the Bosporus strait in the middle takes a lot of directions for growth away. And most of the "traditional city" areas are so full of archeological sites that you can't really build much there.

Those areas are quite lovely to live in, though. I really enjoyed Besiktas and Beyoglu back when I lived there

I disagree - it is very much worth reading. Even without a single word the pictures make a powerful statement. It presents a typology of built environments and makes the important point that human-scaled, walkable environments are found throughout the world and share some important advantages that the recent places we've built do not.

I don't think he says we need smaller cities, just more narrow streets.

I did some Google reverse image search on the example photos in the blog post. Some are from places like Eguisheim (population 1,548) and Kufstein (population 17,497). But others are from Paris, Tokyo, Kyoto, and Quebec City.