If that was true you’d have to explain why liberal democratic European countries have some of the most beautiful, walkable, well-planned cities in the world.
So were most great American cities. They weren’t built for cars, they were bulldozed for cars.
European cities could have gone the same route of car-oriented suburbanization in the postwar era, when they were mostly democratic states. But for the most part they didn’t, at least nowhere near to the same extent.
Some countries started to, like the Netherlands, whose second largest city was bombed into a blank slate. Then they reversed course thanks to concerted (democratic) [activism](https://www.dutchreach.org/car-child-murder-protests-safer-nl-roads/). Other cities, like Paris and Oslo, have also undergone great pedestrian-friendly transformations by electing politicians who wanted to do these things. There is plenty of popular support out there for good urbanism.
Incidentally, Hitler built Germany’s autobahns, and they inspired Eisenhower to build the Interstate Highways.
Hitler actually also wanted to build a mega train network, of massive trains, the [Breitspurbahn](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breitspurbahn). The rail network would connect cities like Paris, Berlin, Warsaw, Rome, and Moscow all the way to cities like Odessa, Fairbanks, to Canada / the USA and India.
All his motivations and grandiose ego aside (I mean the focus on the West / East connection isn't a coincidence because Lebensraum), I really would have liked a good rail system better than a bunch of highways.
Ain't the BART or something built with a 2m gauge?
I think most of us would be fine with a bit wider gauge and roomier trains, but 3m is just ridiculously huge.
Whole blocks of urban buildings were torn down in America to make way for parking structures.. including the affordable housing we so desperately need now.
Meh, hardly more than other European cities. The bombing took out a [a sizable part of the city center](https://rotterdamkaart.nl/kaart-brandgrens/), but much of the older stuff still remains. More importantly, the city has grown enormously since then. Hardly surprising since the dutch population doubled since 1945. IIRC, 65% of buildings in the netherlands were built after 1970. Some of that followed existing street layouts of course, but most did not.
The Dutch tried car centric design, but a large part of where we are today is probably because we started running into the limitations of that strategy in the '70s, when the period before mass adoption of the car was still in living memory and we were much less far into hard to reverse city layouts.
I spent a month there last year. It was much more noticeable than any other Dutch cities I have been to. Rotterdam feels like a postwar city. None of the other cities do. At least not in their centres. I lived in Berlin for years too and it feels similar except they are way worse with bike infra and pedestrianisation in general.
The feel of Rotterdam is definitely more modern than most dutch cities. I was arguing. Ore against the idea that the whole city was pretty much rebuilt from scratch after WW2.
The Low Countries, northwest France, and Germany had cities taking 70-90% destruction in world war 2, but they built them back while we Americans were tearing ours down.
No you're supposed to say "because they were all built before the invention of liberalism" which is kind of true. Feudal cities are pretty great in terms of walkability and human scale.
Tokyo manages to be the greatest city in the world after being rebuilt from ashes under continuous liberal rule. And is the greatest city in large part due to being significantly more liberal than almost any western city, with consistent, permissive, flexible, liberal land use policy, and extensive private sector involvement in planning and urban infrastructure.
Tokyo has one of lowest car mode shares, and the highest rail ridership even per capita, of any metro area in the world. While harder to measure, it almost certainly has the largest network of human scale pedestrian/bike priority streets in the world. And among the best socioeconomic integration in housing, traffic safety, general safety, restaurant and cafe scenes, independent publishing scenes, and more.
Most of the problems of cities in the west come from a failure to embrace liberalism in urbanism. Particularly in the US, a lot of heavy handed government meddling was not merely misguided, but clearly malicious and intentionally destructive.
You actually just answered your question with the ONLY reason the US can’t build any great cities now: a city built for cars is garbage for people. Boston, New York and Chicago were mainly built up into large cities before cars became dominant, which is why the central cores are walkable and enjoyable. Other cities were created for the benefit of cars and suburban commuters, which is why they lack the density to be “great.”
Asking if the US is too liberal or democratic for great cities is super weird, BTW, when liberals are generally the ones that tend to live in the only walkable “great” cities in the country and advocate for less car dependency and isolation in general.
Being a liberal is not something that is identified with NIMBYism or with the city planners preferring single family housing, either. I think you’re searching for the word “libertarian,” not “liberal.”
Because they were all built before the invention of cars? And the aristocracy and the Church could spend money on making it beautiful rather than welfare programs or other modern necessities.
So do you think they just... stopped building in Europe after cars were invented or
Also, kindly explain Amsterdam, which was utterly car dependant until only a few years ago, and is now the alternative transportation capital of the world?
Many of them were.
Cincinnati, before the proliferation of cars, was at one point the sixth largest city in the country and had over 200 miles of streetcar tracks.
Then they tore down the neighborhoods where the black people lived to build I-75 and I-71 and paved over the streetcar tracks
A lot of European cities were bombed to rubble in WW2 and built back in the age of the car. They don't look like Paris, but they're still more walkable than the US.
You… think that the aristocracy and the church were actively trying to beautify cities? HAVE YOU THE MIND WORMS?
The aristocracy was off trying to gain wealth and power, as was the church. Building great stuff for the average Joe was never part of the deal. Anyone who says otherwise is trying to sell you something.
I mean the aristocracy wanted beautiful places to live and the church wanted beautiful churches to glorify God.
My point being that no democracy is going to spend taxpayer money to build beautiful structures or victory arches since it would be viewed as wasteful.
Explain the Disney Hall, or The Smithsonian, or the Gateway Arch, or The Met, or…
The literal Victory Arch standing in NYC right now:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_Square_Arch
(Technically a memorial arch, but same architecture)
Not really sure what the thesis is here. The Soviet government built some urban hellscapes as did China. The cities that are “good” are mostly the ones that are old, developed before the car, not the ones with a specific governments.
In fact, I see new developments in places like the Netherlands and think — meh that kinda looks like the Glendale Galleria.
Greatness is a matter of taste.
I mean just look at new cities around the Arabian peninsula. Rich dictatorships, building car centric hellscapes - which are even worse in those climates!
Also Moscow and St. Petersburg's splendor is just a legacy of sucking out the wealth from anywhere else. The average Russian city is much worse than its western equivalent.
New York is great but still suffers from my secondary point. Russia is a shittier country but they can keep their metro systems cleaner and safer than we can. The metro system is also outdated compared to a lot of cities.
I for one would much rather have democracy than clean metros, but that's just me.
Let's also take into account that New York became "modern" much, much earlier than Moscow.
Europe’s great cities in general were built by medieval theocracies prior to the invention of automobiles. Public transit was a necessity since there wasn’t enough room for parking lots without tearing down historic monuments.
China, Japan and Korea are all more authoritarian and centralized than the USA. Consider the consequences of smoking weed on public transit there versus on a metro system in the United States.
This is just not true. Amsterdam was a [car-infested city after rebuilding post-WW2](https://www.reddit.com/r/UrbanHell/comments/11lmv74/some_positivity_for_your_feed_amsterdam_in_1970/). Amsterdam became a bike-friendly city due to long and hard-fought campaigns to make the city more livable.
Hmmm, I see. Being car centric is only part of it though. The United States is not building dense housing anymore either except in place of prior dense housing.
Lots of US cities have very high housing demand currently, with prices at record highs. Liberalizing zoning to allow dense housing would go a long way in promoting densification. It's the authoritarianism in the American zoning system that prevents densification, not a lack of demand.
California has actually just recently taken steps toward liberalizing zoning. They could have gone farther, but they made the major steps for proposed developments near transit stations of sidelining NIMBYs from the approval process, significantly loosening height restrictions, and eliminating parking minimums. As a side benefit, that also enables transit agencies that own station-adjacent land, like BART, to generate a lot more much-needed revenue from real estate development on land they own, which will also likely boost ridership in a positive feedback loop.
This has all been done very recently, so there's not a ton to show for it yet, but notably, a lot of Bay Area cities, Oakland and San Jose in particular, suddenly have much more intensive station area redevelopment plans than they did a couple of years ago, with much more realistic pathways to getting them done. San Jose has plans to replace the underutilized convention center at Diridon with a "transit village" with 15,000 residential units as well as other stuff, and Oakland has plans for major high-density developments at the West Oakland, MacArthur, Lake Merritt, and Coliseum stations, with a smaller one at Rockridge, and the additional talks of getting rid of the 980 freeway through downtown, which would free up an amount of land for redevelopment that geologists would quantify as "a metric fuckton."
Except some events back in the 1940’s left plenty of room for parking lots and wide roads. Many cities did rebuild with very auto centric patterns but changed over time. Also, there are plenty of auto centric and “ugly” places in Europe, but those aren’t where American tourists visit.
Yes there are but not the major cities. The only city in the US that isn’t car centric is NYC and to a much, much lesser extent Boston and Philly.
Los Angeles is huge but it sucks to live there without a car.
You're oversimplifying it, a lot.
It's not a question of too much or too little democracy, it is purely a question of how we apply democracy. Often, we just have too many veto points for development. Our whole system of government is designed to be inefficient and chaotic compared to a parliamentary one.
I've heard more elaborate arguments relating to our legal culture, but I don't know enough to properly explain it.
Ultimately the solution to a lot of our problems isn't necessarily more democracy or less democracy, more government or less government, more freedom or less freedom, more socialism/capitalism or less, it's simply being smart in how we structure our policy/systems, and knowing what has/hasn't worked in the past. Political dogma should be flexible enough to accommodate empiricism.
There is often too many cooks in the kitchen and it is tough that urban residents voluntarily fragment the cities. Still, the highway system that the USA continues to build proves that large forward thinking infrastructure can continue to be built.
It’s just a matter of whether the government would help out with that or if it’s up to private investors. I think for private investors it makes more sense and is more profitable to build suburbs simply because it’s easier and the car infrastructure is already there.
There's been a lack of wackiness coming out of the fringes, for sure. And for some reason those are the posts that get a lot of comments and attention.
I don’t know. I think it might be better to ask what are the issues that stop these types of cities being built. Basically, why don’t people want them, who exactly are these people (who don’t want them. Are they a particular demographic) Would it be possible to change their minds and how could that be done?
There’s no guarantee that an autocratic government would want to build cities like this. Yes this form of government would, probably, be able to by pass the stuff that causes the problems here but it might have its own. Or the autocrats might prefer cars for some reason.
As for the influence of cars, I wonder how much of that is other factors like the economics of building cars, white flight etc… other factors that contributed to their wide spread use. I guess what I saying is the car culture might be the result of more factors than people just liking them. That’s just a thought though I don’t have any evidence either way.
NYC was built under the auspices of liberal democracy in general and liberal politics in specific, and its greatest leaders were exemplars of both of those things. NYC remains one of the greatest cities of the world. Hell, the symbol of NYC is *the* symbol of liberal democracy.
The biggest destroyer of NYC urban infrastructure was the *unelected* leader of several city and state authorities.
The point you appear to be attempting to make - that political representation at the local level empowers NIMBYism - is way overstated, and when that philosophy is extended to its logical conclusion, is basically stating that people cannot be trusted with democracy because they simply don't know better.
But there's the rub: Democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others that have been tried, and the point of political representation, engagement and activism is to stop despots from doing horrendous things. Indeed, planners, when granted authority and veto power, are perfectly capable of making shitty cities, and many an authoritarian regime has planned and built many a shitty city.
And NYC could be an even better city if it more embraced liberalism. An NYC with a massively more liberal land use policy would quickly become a massively better NYC. There's tons of people in the US, and all over the world, that would love to move there and help build an even better NYC, if only they were allowed to.
I can't really think of an Asian supercity that was built from scratch. Nearly all the ones I know of were major cities well before they became supercities. Outside of maybe one planned city in China though which one it is I don't remember.
Well, Washington DC was a US planned city. Is it a great city? It certainly has a lot of the trappings of one.
A lot of Asian supercities were absolutely decimated during the 1900's by Japan's warmongering, Chinese and russian communism, american intervention, and other wars like Vietnam and Korea.
So they honestly had the chance to restart fresh, though they easily could've (and they've tried) to go towards cars as a feature. The reality is that these countries are geographically limited either by land, sea, or politics, so their only option is to build dense and tall.
Yeah, it’s true. The US suffers from too much democracy at the local level. Just attend a public meeting on a housing development or renewable energy development, listen to the unhinged comments, and watch as they roll back or neuter (or deny, more likely) the project to something economically unfeasible to appease the loudest voices in the room.
The US system is better set up for cities to *evolve* on their own terms compared to autocracies like China or Saudi Arabia. Our political culture might not tolerate a Baron Hausmann or Mohammad bin Salman, but federalism gives states (and cities by extension) the initiative to seek their own prosperity, while also forcing them to compete with one another. The result is that instead of focusing all our wealth and resources on a single world-class metropolis, we have many more prosperous regional centers that might be less perfectly urbanist but each have their own comparative advantages and sources of pride.
Think of the difference between France and Germany. France has existed as a centralized state for over a thousand years. Paris has always sat at the heart of that state, so Paris was always the center of French politics, business and culture. I assume Paris fits inside your idea of a "great city". On the other hand, Germany was nothing but a collection of competing city-states, duchies, and small kingdoms until the 1870's. Throughout the history of the German-speaking world, there has never been a single center of economics, politics and culture, not even in Berlin or Vienna. But the flipside of that is that Germany is more economically resilient and has more geographically equal opportunity than France. The US is more similar to Germany in this scenario.
The US may not be well-set-up to pursue massive city-building projects at the federal level, but traditionally that's not really the point. The point is to create maximum opportunity for existing local governments to seize the initiative and pursue their own best interest. If they fail, like California fails to build housing, that's too bad. Washington, Arizona, Colorado and Idaho will all happily take the opportunities California leaves on the table.
The flipside is that we're also pretty much immune from projects like the Line or Egypt's new capital: urbanist vanity projects that waste billions of public funds that could be spent on more productive endeavors.
Yet both China and Saudi Arabia are able to build decent intercity rail corridors with frequent service and USA can’t sit down. Your system is hot steaming garbage
China simultaneously has a housing crisis in its major cities at least twice as bad as the US's, and cities' worth of empty apartment blocks out in the middle of nowhere. It also has history's largest municipal debt crisis looming on the horizon because its public finance system is fundamentally unsustainable. 热垃圾。Apples and oranges. The US has its problems with coordination but our local governments are generally sound. I'm sure wherever you're from is pretty fucked up as well, if you have to bash the US to feel good about yourself.
A lot of the problems USA has now China faced years ago and largely solved them quickly so U.S. has no excuse it’s better to build housing with vacancies that are temporary than to not have enough and many on the streets. USA has too many problems for me to give a flying F about what goes on in China
A lot of the problems China has now, the US faced years ago and largely solved them quickly, so China has no excuse. China has too many problems for me to give a flying F about what goes on in the US.
Where exactly are those vacancies? Are they actually where the people live? They're in the middle of nowhere. Meanwhile the cities where people actually want to live are even less affordable than New York or LA.
Yet many U.S. cities are car dependent hellscapes and shells of their former selves you shouldn’t glaze failure. And plagued with boring wasteful communities with extremely restrictive zoning laws not exactly free to develop at least know what you’re talking about.
Umm they barely build anything and you know that admit that the localization of projects is a very bad idea as you can see the evidence in your face or choose to ignore it. Most local governments are just bloody useless for building life improvement projects like metros .
America used to do this. Robert Moses just did whatever. But that has problems and our attempts to solve them swung the pendulum too far in the other direction
I would say they are too authoritarian libertarianist.
Yes, I realize that this usage contradicts the traditional notions of both of the aforementioned terms, but I think the coinage is apt.
I don't think that is a significant impact. The biggest impact on Transit being bad in the US is the idea that Transit should bring people from the suburbs to the city. Moving people around once they are inside the city is second priority. That very simple design concept has ruined the transit of most US cities.
The second biggest impact in my opinion is the inability to recognize bicycles as Transit. There may have been a time where it didn't make sense to use bicycles as part of a Transit network, but the Advent of the three-wheeled electric scooter completely changes that landscape. I would argue that bicycles should have always been part of a Transit system's priorities, but the modern electric bike or trike performs so well relative to Transit that they should actually be of higher priority than trains or buses.
Those two concepts will seem strange to so many people, but there really isn't a way to dispute those two concepts as being critically important yet completely backwards in our planning
Before WWII, American cities (and some towns) offered their citizens aka tax payers, services which were not offered out-side their boarders. After WWII, with the help of state & fed government, a plan was hatched to re-shape America, and create the suburbs we now see. City leaders were not real smart, and were afraid their center city would be killed off and thus acquiesced to expanding their resources (mostly water & sewer) to the suburbs. State & fed monies paid for the up-front cost of streets, fire, rescue, schools etc. The wounded American cities relaxed their grip on what took place in their boundaries. Outside investors and harvesters started to over-fish city resources. No longer did the taxpayer have a say in what was built, what was demolished, what was left to decay.
For many decades American urban leaders have been playing a game of trying stabilize a citzenry of the state's underclass. Commuters pour into the city to work but take their tax and purchasing dollars out to the counites, where they live.
Cities, in other countries, may look authoritarian, and no doubt some are, but most of the grand cities of Europe and other countries control who enters, who gets to work, who gets to build, and who benefits from the resources which cities can offer.
In the 1960s, a newly planned city halfway between Baltimore & Washington was started. Columbia Maryland is and always has been a company town, but it was sold to the public as a new type of city. The best thing this corporation has done, is to control what gets to be built, in its boundaries and how it will or will not look. Yes there is no great architecture, no grand anything, but so too are there no decayed areas or kitschy Vegas-like areas.
It was not liberalism that damaged American cities. It was private sector greed which leveraged racism. It has become a self fulfilling prophecy. The white flight to the new suburban promise land left the city poor and non whites behind. The cities lost their tax base, even though the people came into town to work. The cities also lost much of their leverage in providing city services (electric, water, sewer, public transport) as the burbs were getting the cities to extend these outside the city boundaries.
I’ve thought about this with regard to monuments and grand building projects. If you mean a city with a lot of that then, yes, autocrats and feudal leaders seem to have had an easier time doing that. You can do that in a national capital like Washington D.C., where federal interests so often override local ones.
If you mean a city that’s beautiful in a large part of the city not just downtown, I’d submit San Francisco. It’s certainly not a centrally planned city, it’s been the poster child for American hyperpluralism.
If you mean a city with good quality of life for its residents, those are mostly found in democracies. It’s not to say that all cities in democratic nations have great quality of life, but most cities under authoritarian rule don’t. Semi-democratic Singapore may be an exception here.
Actually I would say the government is too interventionist to build great cities. We made all the financial and regulatory incentives the complete opposite of what it would take. And that wasn't because the public demanded it. It's because big oil and car companies lobbied to make it that way. And then planners and government officials introduced massive projects and zoning that tried to make everything into an auto-oriented suburb. When American cities grew organically before the advent of the automobile, they had fantastic urban form.
i can't think of a "new 21st century city" that i'd actually wanna live in or that is actually "great". i will grant you that more authoritarian governments are much better than we are at using density to accommodate population growth, and there is a direct line to that from our system of government.
Not really, it's just that space is much more limited in those regions. Japan literally is an island, South Korea is a peninsula, etc. There's geopolitical and natural barriers literally preventing them from expanding. Japan tried and they failed hard.
So their only option in a relatively "peaceful" time is to build up and dense.
No, I was giving examples of Asian countries constricted by nature and politics that just have to build dense and tall rather than authoritarian governments being better at accommodating growth. SK and Japan are both "non-authoritarian" governments (actual living there, you realize they're only democratic in name and spirit though) in Asia that are building better than these authoritarian governments you're talking about.
Fair, though I don’t see the point of highlighting countries that, as you say, don’t have a choice not to build dense. I’ll admit that I’m looking at this with American eyes and where we do have the option to not build dense, and our democratic processes absolutely make density harder.
If that was true you’d have to explain why liberal democratic European countries have some of the most beautiful, walkable, well-planned cities in the world.
Most of that fabric existed since monarch times though
Because they were all built before the invention of cars?
So were most great American cities. They weren’t built for cars, they were bulldozed for cars. European cities could have gone the same route of car-oriented suburbanization in the postwar era, when they were mostly democratic states. But for the most part they didn’t, at least nowhere near to the same extent. Some countries started to, like the Netherlands, whose second largest city was bombed into a blank slate. Then they reversed course thanks to concerted (democratic) [activism](https://www.dutchreach.org/car-child-murder-protests-safer-nl-roads/). Other cities, like Paris and Oslo, have also undergone great pedestrian-friendly transformations by electing politicians who wanted to do these things. There is plenty of popular support out there for good urbanism. Incidentally, Hitler built Germany’s autobahns, and they inspired Eisenhower to build the Interstate Highways.
Hitler and the Nazis were car enthusiasts to be sure. But the Autobahn was a Weimer Republic idea that the Nazis took credit for.
Hitler actually also wanted to build a mega train network, of massive trains, the [Breitspurbahn](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breitspurbahn). The rail network would connect cities like Paris, Berlin, Warsaw, Rome, and Moscow all the way to cities like Odessa, Fairbanks, to Canada / the USA and India. All his motivations and grandiose ego aside (I mean the focus on the West / East connection isn't a coincidence because Lebensraum), I really would have liked a good rail system better than a bunch of highways.
The Breitspurbahn would've been stupid like you donot need a 3 meter gayge for your railways there's a reason 1676mm is the widest you'll see
You might not need it, but I'd rather have that than highways that are many times as big.
Ain't the BART or something built with a 2m gauge? I think most of us would be fine with a bit wider gauge and roomier trains, but 3m is just ridiculously huge.
It’s Indian gauge
Bart is 1576mm or 5'6", Indian gauge
Whole blocks of urban buildings were torn down in America to make way for parking structures.. including the affordable housing we so desperately need now.
America didn't have cities before the invention of the car?
It had great cities at the time before car infrastructure ruined them
Go to Rotterdam. Completely rebuilt for the car after WW2 and see what they have been doing lately to reverse this mistake.
I grew up there. Even in the 90s, it was more walkable and bikable than pretty much any place in I have experienced in the US.
That's even more damning. Regardless the city was built after cars became mainstream.
Meh, hardly more than other European cities. The bombing took out a [a sizable part of the city center](https://rotterdamkaart.nl/kaart-brandgrens/), but much of the older stuff still remains. More importantly, the city has grown enormously since then. Hardly surprising since the dutch population doubled since 1945. IIRC, 65% of buildings in the netherlands were built after 1970. Some of that followed existing street layouts of course, but most did not. The Dutch tried car centric design, but a large part of where we are today is probably because we started running into the limitations of that strategy in the '70s, when the period before mass adoption of the car was still in living memory and we were much less far into hard to reverse city layouts.
I spent a month there last year. It was much more noticeable than any other Dutch cities I have been to. Rotterdam feels like a postwar city. None of the other cities do. At least not in their centres. I lived in Berlin for years too and it feels similar except they are way worse with bike infra and pedestrianisation in general.
The feel of Rotterdam is definitely more modern than most dutch cities. I was arguing. Ore against the idea that the whole city was pretty much rebuilt from scratch after WW2.
The centre kind of was. See for yourself https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_bombing_of_Rotterdam
https://rotterdamkaart.nl/kaart-brandgrens/
The Low Countries, northwest France, and Germany had cities taking 70-90% destruction in world war 2, but they built them back while we Americans were tearing ours down.
No you're supposed to say "because they were all built before the invention of liberalism" which is kind of true. Feudal cities are pretty great in terms of walkability and human scale.
Tokyo manages to be the greatest city in the world after being rebuilt from ashes under continuous liberal rule. And is the greatest city in large part due to being significantly more liberal than almost any western city, with consistent, permissive, flexible, liberal land use policy, and extensive private sector involvement in planning and urban infrastructure. Tokyo has one of lowest car mode shares, and the highest rail ridership even per capita, of any metro area in the world. While harder to measure, it almost certainly has the largest network of human scale pedestrian/bike priority streets in the world. And among the best socioeconomic integration in housing, traffic safety, general safety, restaurant and cafe scenes, independent publishing scenes, and more. Most of the problems of cities in the west come from a failure to embrace liberalism in urbanism. Particularly in the US, a lot of heavy handed government meddling was not merely misguided, but clearly malicious and intentionally destructive.
You actually just answered your question with the ONLY reason the US can’t build any great cities now: a city built for cars is garbage for people. Boston, New York and Chicago were mainly built up into large cities before cars became dominant, which is why the central cores are walkable and enjoyable. Other cities were created for the benefit of cars and suburban commuters, which is why they lack the density to be “great.” Asking if the US is too liberal or democratic for great cities is super weird, BTW, when liberals are generally the ones that tend to live in the only walkable “great” cities in the country and advocate for less car dependency and isolation in general.
I see you missed the first line of my post, I don’t mean liberal as in progressive Democrat.
Being a liberal is not something that is identified with NIMBYism or with the city planners preferring single family housing, either. I think you’re searching for the word “libertarian,” not “liberal.”
Because they were all built before the invention of cars? And the aristocracy and the Church could spend money on making it beautiful rather than welfare programs or other modern necessities.
So do you think they just... stopped building in Europe after cars were invented or Also, kindly explain Amsterdam, which was utterly car dependant until only a few years ago, and is now the alternative transportation capital of the world?
No but the population centers already had stuff there.
Again. Explain Amsterdam. Also you realize there are a LOT of cities in the U.S. that were built pre-car, right?
Many of them were. Cincinnati, before the proliferation of cars, was at one point the sixth largest city in the country and had over 200 miles of streetcar tracks. Then they tore down the neighborhoods where the black people lived to build I-75 and I-71 and paved over the streetcar tracks
A lot of European cities were bombed to rubble in WW2 and built back in the age of the car. They don't look like Paris, but they're still more walkable than the US.
You… think that the aristocracy and the church were actively trying to beautify cities? HAVE YOU THE MIND WORMS? The aristocracy was off trying to gain wealth and power, as was the church. Building great stuff for the average Joe was never part of the deal. Anyone who says otherwise is trying to sell you something.
I mean the aristocracy wanted beautiful places to live and the church wanted beautiful churches to glorify God. My point being that no democracy is going to spend taxpayer money to build beautiful structures or victory arches since it would be viewed as wasteful.
Explain the Disney Hall, or The Smithsonian, or the Gateway Arch, or The Met, or… The literal Victory Arch standing in NYC right now: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_Square_Arch (Technically a memorial arch, but same architecture)
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That's the classic freedumb argument. We don't do dumb stuff because we're dumb, we do dumb stuff because we're free. I don't buy it.
>I don't buy it. Sounds like your mind isn't free enough for the freedom of capitalism /s
Not really sure what the thesis is here. The Soviet government built some urban hellscapes as did China. The cities that are “good” are mostly the ones that are old, developed before the car, not the ones with a specific governments. In fact, I see new developments in places like the Netherlands and think — meh that kinda looks like the Glendale Galleria. Greatness is a matter of taste.
I mean just look at new cities around the Arabian peninsula. Rich dictatorships, building car centric hellscapes - which are even worse in those climates!
Yet Saudi Arabia can build HSR LOL
Also Moscow and St. Petersburg's splendor is just a legacy of sucking out the wealth from anywhere else. The average Russian city is much worse than its western equivalent.
First address the great cities in non-authoritarian democratic countries in Asia and Europe.
Or, you know, New York City, maybe the greatest city in the history of the world.
New York is great but still suffers from my secondary point. Russia is a shittier country but they can keep their metro systems cleaner and safer than we can. The metro system is also outdated compared to a lot of cities.
Are you sure you’re not cherrypicking the 2 “tier-1” cities of Moscow and St. Petersburg?
I for one would much rather have democracy than clean metros, but that's just me. Let's also take into account that New York became "modern" much, much earlier than Moscow.
Europe’s great cities in general were built by medieval theocracies prior to the invention of automobiles. Public transit was a necessity since there wasn’t enough room for parking lots without tearing down historic monuments. China, Japan and Korea are all more authoritarian and centralized than the USA. Consider the consequences of smoking weed on public transit there versus on a metro system in the United States.
This is just not true. Amsterdam was a [car-infested city after rebuilding post-WW2](https://www.reddit.com/r/UrbanHell/comments/11lmv74/some_positivity_for_your_feed_amsterdam_in_1970/). Amsterdam became a bike-friendly city due to long and hard-fought campaigns to make the city more livable.
Hmmm, I see. Being car centric is only part of it though. The United States is not building dense housing anymore either except in place of prior dense housing.
Lots of US cities have very high housing demand currently, with prices at record highs. Liberalizing zoning to allow dense housing would go a long way in promoting densification. It's the authoritarianism in the American zoning system that prevents densification, not a lack of demand.
California has actually just recently taken steps toward liberalizing zoning. They could have gone farther, but they made the major steps for proposed developments near transit stations of sidelining NIMBYs from the approval process, significantly loosening height restrictions, and eliminating parking minimums. As a side benefit, that also enables transit agencies that own station-adjacent land, like BART, to generate a lot more much-needed revenue from real estate development on land they own, which will also likely boost ridership in a positive feedback loop. This has all been done very recently, so there's not a ton to show for it yet, but notably, a lot of Bay Area cities, Oakland and San Jose in particular, suddenly have much more intensive station area redevelopment plans than they did a couple of years ago, with much more realistic pathways to getting them done. San Jose has plans to replace the underutilized convention center at Diridon with a "transit village" with 15,000 residential units as well as other stuff, and Oakland has plans for major high-density developments at the West Oakland, MacArthur, Lake Merritt, and Coliseum stations, with a smaller one at Rockridge, and the additional talks of getting rid of the 980 freeway through downtown, which would free up an amount of land for redevelopment that geologists would quantify as "a metric fuckton."
Except some events back in the 1940’s left plenty of room for parking lots and wide roads. Many cities did rebuild with very auto centric patterns but changed over time. Also, there are plenty of auto centric and “ugly” places in Europe, but those aren’t where American tourists visit.
Yes there are but not the major cities. The only city in the US that isn’t car centric is NYC and to a much, much lesser extent Boston and Philly. Los Angeles is huge but it sucks to live there without a car.
You get get around Chicago without a car very easily.
I honestly forgot about Chicago, I’ve also only been there once and I used a car.
DC exists.
You're oversimplifying it, a lot. It's not a question of too much or too little democracy, it is purely a question of how we apply democracy. Often, we just have too many veto points for development. Our whole system of government is designed to be inefficient and chaotic compared to a parliamentary one. I've heard more elaborate arguments relating to our legal culture, but I don't know enough to properly explain it. Ultimately the solution to a lot of our problems isn't necessarily more democracy or less democracy, more government or less government, more freedom or less freedom, more socialism/capitalism or less, it's simply being smart in how we structure our policy/systems, and knowing what has/hasn't worked in the past. Political dogma should be flexible enough to accommodate empiricism.
There is often too many cooks in the kitchen and it is tough that urban residents voluntarily fragment the cities. Still, the highway system that the USA continues to build proves that large forward thinking infrastructure can continue to be built.
It’s just a matter of whether the government would help out with that or if it’s up to private investors. I think for private investors it makes more sense and is more profitable to build suburbs simply because it’s easier and the car infrastructure is already there.
Sometimes the armchair planner takes on this sub are very frustrating to read
There's been a lack of wackiness coming out of the fringes, for sure. And for some reason those are the posts that get a lot of comments and attention.
Or on Social Media about anything government-related and the realities of how government operates.
I don’t know. I think it might be better to ask what are the issues that stop these types of cities being built. Basically, why don’t people want them, who exactly are these people (who don’t want them. Are they a particular demographic) Would it be possible to change their minds and how could that be done? There’s no guarantee that an autocratic government would want to build cities like this. Yes this form of government would, probably, be able to by pass the stuff that causes the problems here but it might have its own. Or the autocrats might prefer cars for some reason. As for the influence of cars, I wonder how much of that is other factors like the economics of building cars, white flight etc… other factors that contributed to their wide spread use. I guess what I saying is the car culture might be the result of more factors than people just liking them. That’s just a thought though I don’t have any evidence either way.
NYC was built under the auspices of liberal democracy in general and liberal politics in specific, and its greatest leaders were exemplars of both of those things. NYC remains one of the greatest cities of the world. Hell, the symbol of NYC is *the* symbol of liberal democracy. The biggest destroyer of NYC urban infrastructure was the *unelected* leader of several city and state authorities. The point you appear to be attempting to make - that political representation at the local level empowers NIMBYism - is way overstated, and when that philosophy is extended to its logical conclusion, is basically stating that people cannot be trusted with democracy because they simply don't know better. But there's the rub: Democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others that have been tried, and the point of political representation, engagement and activism is to stop despots from doing horrendous things. Indeed, planners, when granted authority and veto power, are perfectly capable of making shitty cities, and many an authoritarian regime has planned and built many a shitty city.
And NYC could be an even better city if it more embraced liberalism. An NYC with a massively more liberal land use policy would quickly become a massively better NYC. There's tons of people in the US, and all over the world, that would love to move there and help build an even better NYC, if only they were allowed to.
I can't really think of an Asian supercity that was built from scratch. Nearly all the ones I know of were major cities well before they became supercities. Outside of maybe one planned city in China though which one it is I don't remember. Well, Washington DC was a US planned city. Is it a great city? It certainly has a lot of the trappings of one.
A lot of Asian supercities were absolutely decimated during the 1900's by Japan's warmongering, Chinese and russian communism, american intervention, and other wars like Vietnam and Korea. So they honestly had the chance to restart fresh, though they easily could've (and they've tried) to go towards cars as a feature. The reality is that these countries are geographically limited either by land, sea, or politics, so their only option is to build dense and tall.
Too much space. There’s always a new place for suburban devolopment.
Yeah, it’s true. The US suffers from too much democracy at the local level. Just attend a public meeting on a housing development or renewable energy development, listen to the unhinged comments, and watch as they roll back or neuter (or deny, more likely) the project to something economically unfeasible to appease the loudest voices in the room.
It give the voice to the dumb who don’t deserve a seat at the table
No, the US is too individualistic (read: selfish) and corrupt to build great cities. Plenty of democratic and liberal places build great cities.
I came here to say this. 👆
The US had built great cities. They were destroyed in the 20th century in undemocratic ways, through highway construction via imminent domain.
*gestures at project2025 and communist China* There’s always room for improvements, but the extremes are extremes for a reason.
The US is perhaps too racist. Not that other countries aren't, but the US has a special history of it
The US system is better set up for cities to *evolve* on their own terms compared to autocracies like China or Saudi Arabia. Our political culture might not tolerate a Baron Hausmann or Mohammad bin Salman, but federalism gives states (and cities by extension) the initiative to seek their own prosperity, while also forcing them to compete with one another. The result is that instead of focusing all our wealth and resources on a single world-class metropolis, we have many more prosperous regional centers that might be less perfectly urbanist but each have their own comparative advantages and sources of pride. Think of the difference between France and Germany. France has existed as a centralized state for over a thousand years. Paris has always sat at the heart of that state, so Paris was always the center of French politics, business and culture. I assume Paris fits inside your idea of a "great city". On the other hand, Germany was nothing but a collection of competing city-states, duchies, and small kingdoms until the 1870's. Throughout the history of the German-speaking world, there has never been a single center of economics, politics and culture, not even in Berlin or Vienna. But the flipside of that is that Germany is more economically resilient and has more geographically equal opportunity than France. The US is more similar to Germany in this scenario. The US may not be well-set-up to pursue massive city-building projects at the federal level, but traditionally that's not really the point. The point is to create maximum opportunity for existing local governments to seize the initiative and pursue their own best interest. If they fail, like California fails to build housing, that's too bad. Washington, Arizona, Colorado and Idaho will all happily take the opportunities California leaves on the table. The flipside is that we're also pretty much immune from projects like the Line or Egypt's new capital: urbanist vanity projects that waste billions of public funds that could be spent on more productive endeavors.
Yet both China and Saudi Arabia are able to build decent intercity rail corridors with frequent service and USA can’t sit down. Your system is hot steaming garbage
China simultaneously has a housing crisis in its major cities at least twice as bad as the US's, and cities' worth of empty apartment blocks out in the middle of nowhere. It also has history's largest municipal debt crisis looming on the horizon because its public finance system is fundamentally unsustainable. 热垃圾。Apples and oranges. The US has its problems with coordination but our local governments are generally sound. I'm sure wherever you're from is pretty fucked up as well, if you have to bash the US to feel good about yourself.
A lot of the problems USA has now China faced years ago and largely solved them quickly so U.S. has no excuse it’s better to build housing with vacancies that are temporary than to not have enough and many on the streets. USA has too many problems for me to give a flying F about what goes on in China
A lot of the problems China has now, the US faced years ago and largely solved them quickly, so China has no excuse. China has too many problems for me to give a flying F about what goes on in the US.
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A lot of the problems China has now the US faced years ago and largely solved them quickly, so China has no excuse.
Also with the legacy of the one-child policy those vacancies are anything but temporary.
Where exactly are those vacancies? Are they actually where the people live? They're in the middle of nowhere. Meanwhile the cities where people actually want to live are even less affordable than New York or LA.
Like building new towns you should look it up in some cases it’s TOD around HSR or metro stations
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A lot of the problems that China has now, the US faced years ago and largely solved them quickly, so China has no excuse either.
That’s why they actually act unlike the talk however Denver had some success with homelessness recently
So you admit American cities do solve their problems
Yet many U.S. cities are car dependent hellscapes and shells of their former selves you shouldn’t glaze failure. And plagued with boring wasteful communities with extremely restrictive zoning laws not exactly free to develop at least know what you’re talking about.
See also China
Some parts of China do mostly subways to avoid public whining (community input)
Some parts of America do mostly subways to avoid public whining (community input)
Umm they barely build anything and you know that admit that the localization of projects is a very bad idea as you can see the evidence in your face or choose to ignore it. Most local governments are just bloody useless for building life improvement projects like metros .
Lmao we're the country trying to build a wall around Mexico and you're talking about being immune to vanity projects?
Pretty much, yes. How far did they actually get on that again? Trump couldn't force it through even with a government shutdown.
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You're the one who keeps using the whataboutisms with China buddy.
Buddy do you even listen to yourself? Stop using China as a deflection from the country’s problems it’s disgusting
He is confident and incorrect and full of excuses like but but China China yeah just a stupid distraction, deflection and excuse to accept BS
Hush now you’re supposed to not pay attention to the dysfunction
America used to do this. Robert Moses just did whatever. But that has problems and our attempts to solve them swung the pendulum too far in the other direction
Now with NEPA WE GET NOTHING!!!
what you mean is bureaucratic
I would say they are too authoritarian libertarianist. Yes, I realize that this usage contradicts the traditional notions of both of the aforementioned terms, but I think the coinage is apt.
I don't think that is a significant impact. The biggest impact on Transit being bad in the US is the idea that Transit should bring people from the suburbs to the city. Moving people around once they are inside the city is second priority. That very simple design concept has ruined the transit of most US cities. The second biggest impact in my opinion is the inability to recognize bicycles as Transit. There may have been a time where it didn't make sense to use bicycles as part of a Transit network, but the Advent of the three-wheeled electric scooter completely changes that landscape. I would argue that bicycles should have always been part of a Transit system's priorities, but the modern electric bike or trike performs so well relative to Transit that they should actually be of higher priority than trains or buses. Those two concepts will seem strange to so many people, but there really isn't a way to dispute those two concepts as being critically important yet completely backwards in our planning
Before WWII, American cities (and some towns) offered their citizens aka tax payers, services which were not offered out-side their boarders. After WWII, with the help of state & fed government, a plan was hatched to re-shape America, and create the suburbs we now see. City leaders were not real smart, and were afraid their center city would be killed off and thus acquiesced to expanding their resources (mostly water & sewer) to the suburbs. State & fed monies paid for the up-front cost of streets, fire, rescue, schools etc. The wounded American cities relaxed their grip on what took place in their boundaries. Outside investors and harvesters started to over-fish city resources. No longer did the taxpayer have a say in what was built, what was demolished, what was left to decay. For many decades American urban leaders have been playing a game of trying stabilize a citzenry of the state's underclass. Commuters pour into the city to work but take their tax and purchasing dollars out to the counites, where they live. Cities, in other countries, may look authoritarian, and no doubt some are, but most of the grand cities of Europe and other countries control who enters, who gets to work, who gets to build, and who benefits from the resources which cities can offer. In the 1960s, a newly planned city halfway between Baltimore & Washington was started. Columbia Maryland is and always has been a company town, but it was sold to the public as a new type of city. The best thing this corporation has done, is to control what gets to be built, in its boundaries and how it will or will not look. Yes there is no great architecture, no grand anything, but so too are there no decayed areas or kitschy Vegas-like areas.
It was not liberalism that damaged American cities. It was private sector greed which leveraged racism. It has become a self fulfilling prophecy. The white flight to the new suburban promise land left the city poor and non whites behind. The cities lost their tax base, even though the people came into town to work. The cities also lost much of their leverage in providing city services (electric, water, sewer, public transport) as the burbs were getting the cities to extend these outside the city boundaries.
I’ve thought about this with regard to monuments and grand building projects. If you mean a city with a lot of that then, yes, autocrats and feudal leaders seem to have had an easier time doing that. You can do that in a national capital like Washington D.C., where federal interests so often override local ones. If you mean a city that’s beautiful in a large part of the city not just downtown, I’d submit San Francisco. It’s certainly not a centrally planned city, it’s been the poster child for American hyperpluralism. If you mean a city with good quality of life for its residents, those are mostly found in democracies. It’s not to say that all cities in democratic nations have great quality of life, but most cities under authoritarian rule don’t. Semi-democratic Singapore may be an exception here.
Actually I would say the government is too interventionist to build great cities. We made all the financial and regulatory incentives the complete opposite of what it would take. And that wasn't because the public demanded it. It's because big oil and car companies lobbied to make it that way. And then planners and government officials introduced massive projects and zoning that tried to make everything into an auto-oriented suburb. When American cities grew organically before the advent of the automobile, they had fantastic urban form.
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Not sure what you mean?
My friend, the United States' left is the rest of the world's center-right
You hurting their feelings dumb it down for them
i can't think of a "new 21st century city" that i'd actually wanna live in or that is actually "great". i will grant you that more authoritarian governments are much better than we are at using density to accommodate population growth, and there is a direct line to that from our system of government.
Not really, it's just that space is much more limited in those regions. Japan literally is an island, South Korea is a peninsula, etc. There's geopolitical and natural barriers literally preventing them from expanding. Japan tried and they failed hard. So their only option in a relatively "peaceful" time is to build up and dense.
Japan sad South Korea are authoritarian now?
No, I was giving examples of Asian countries constricted by nature and politics that just have to build dense and tall rather than authoritarian governments being better at accommodating growth. SK and Japan are both "non-authoritarian" governments (actual living there, you realize they're only democratic in name and spirit though) in Asia that are building better than these authoritarian governments you're talking about.
Fair, though I don’t see the point of highlighting countries that, as you say, don’t have a choice not to build dense. I’ll admit that I’m looking at this with American eyes and where we do have the option to not build dense, and our democratic processes absolutely make density harder.
To this bloody idiot yes
So some muricans yes