Urban Legends

So when sprawl occurs, it's a natural outcome of the free market. But when densification occurs, it's due to deliberate government policies? Therefore, we should stop "encouraging" dense development, but we certainly shouldn't "discourage" low-density development.

It seems Kotkin is just advocating for his development pattern of choice, under the guise of a free-market lens. But it really isn't about the market - it's about his preference for a particular outcome.

I can't belive that he is seriously saying that densification dosn't help the enviroment. Its not just about cars. Buildings also save on heating and cooling costs and more because the appartments below heat the appartments above. New York City City consumes the most amount of energy per square foot but the least per person. Cities also save the natural enviroment and animal habitats by destroying less habitats. Suburban lawns with no trees cover much more of the earth and destroy more nature with far fewer people.

It is also healthier to live in an area were land use is mixed and things are condensed because there is, the less of a probability of becoming obese.

Problems with overheating and the urban heat island effect can be solved by designing smarter. By simply making things lighter colored you loose this affect. Sidewalks can be made out of aggregated rubber that won't contribute. There is even a new material being developed that will change color in the winter and summer to respond to the temperature.

What is the question, which facilitated this: Why suburbs, not cities, are the answer.
And here how this answer to a question which has never been asked was constructed:
1. Misconception of the idea that concentration by its very nature creates wealth.
This how this argument is supported:
A. Los Angeles owes its initial ascendancy as much to agriculture and oil as to Hollywood = meaningless rubbish.
B. New York, now arguably the world's cultural capital??? Measured by what and how?
C. Even legitimate cultural meccas aren't insulated from economic turmoil???
D. In fact, the suburbs are not as terrible as urban boosters frequently insist???
2. Throughout the long history of urban development, the size of a city roughly correlated with its wealth, standard of living, and political strength.
This is how this Myth was dismantled:
A. But bigger might no longer mean better!??
B. It turns out that the rise of the mega-city is by no means inevitable - and it might not even be happening???
C. ...more than 80 percent of new metropolitan growth in the United States since 2000 has been in suburbs.
Has it ever occurred to Mr. Kotkin that suburbs don't exist without cities? Parasites don't exist without their hosts!
All mega-cities in the world have the urban core surrounded by suburbs, which try to choke the urban core without realizing that killing cities will destroy suburbs. The reason for that is very simple: the suburbs became centres of mediocrity, cultural, economic, political etc.
Without the prevailing mediocrity nobody wouldn't be able to sell useless staff, including suburbs themselves to anybody. This is how Capitalism creates the "wealth" and disposes of it in order to create the same somewhere else.
Long live Mediocrity!
And this article is the best example of it.

As an Amsterdam urban planner I can't really say anything meaningful about the megalopolises of the developing world, but since Amsterdam and the Netherlands are used as examples in this article, I feel obliged to respond.

First of all: as a city with a highly developed economy, Amsterdam fit’s Florida's and Sassens theories well. Haut finance and the creative sectors of the economy increasingly concentrate in the city’s pre war urban core. At the same time a continuous influx of higher middle class and high educated young starters and students into Amsterdam is visible. These groups also concentrate in the urban core.

The edge cities (garden cities from the 60's and 70's and the new towns) have become the habitus of lower educated migrant groups and the lower middle class. The edge cities are a long shot from becoming centers of innovation and creativity. Although especially the new towns attract families in search of more private space, the main sectors in the service economy concentrate in and directly around the Amsterdam urban core, with its superb public space.

This does lead to rising housing prices and a segregation between 'inside ring road' (built before 1940) and 'outside ring road' (built after 1945) Amsterdam. But so far the higher middleclass and high educated groups do not consider the edge cities an acceptable alternative for living in the urban core.

Because of the high housing prices young families will often leave Amsterdam in search for more private space, but they find this not in the edge cities (migration from Amsterdam to new town Almere has all but come to a halt in recent years), but in nearby cities with pre war urban cores and a lively public space, such as Haarlem. It seems suburbia, with its semi-detached houses and lack of a traditional public space, is in no way a real alternative for city living and working.

Summarizing: concentration of the knowledge economy and high educated workers occurs, be it on a smaller scale, in pre war urban centres. These may not be like Sassen’s World Cities, but they most certainly aren’t suburbs either.

Summarizing: concentration of the knowledge economy and high educated workers occurs, be it on a smaller scale, in pre war urban centres. These may not be like Sassen’s World Cities, but they most

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When urbanists (at least smart ones) refer to high density it dosen't mean packed cities it means MIXED USED, where you have within a short distance as many places as possible to satisfy people's demand, and not kilometers of houses without a supermarket, o kilometers of offices buildings without a theater. Of course if you aglomerate millions of people in a small area you won't only get a "heat island", you'll get a "heat continet", saying that dense cities don't work because they aglomerate to many people is banal and seems to come from somebody that hasn't look deep enough into this subject or is making a bit of a lobby. And of course cities need to boost all aspects, from economic growth to small art galleries. At the american Sun Belt (Houston, Phoenix, etc.) there are suburbs becuase is what people ask for and are willing to pay for, but in China suburbs are sprawling because the goverment says that's what's going on, so you cannot compare the dynamic of cities with such a diferent sociological background, again, more banalities.

In my opinion, cities are not to be sectorized or fragmented, they should be seen as Infraestrcutures that house as many human activities as possible, as NY based architect and urbanist Stan Allen has said, with a capacity to re-generate as time passes and human activites change as Yona Friedman proposed many yeras ago.

The phenomena of Urbanism transcends its role as a mere space that allows economic flows and exchanges to happen. In most countries, for most people; suburbs and rural areas are places where they are stuck in predetermined roles, with very little possibility of either social or economic upward movement. Cities offer opportunities to the thousands of people who enter them everyday; that just aren't available to those who live in the economic devastation that floats between them; especially in developing countries. Cities survive moments and periods that should have led to their decline or demise but haven't done either. Whether its Mumbai after one of its regular terrorist attacks, an occupied Paris, a deluged New Orleans, a divided Jerusalem or a reunited Berlin, even New York after 9/11; great cities pick themselves up and move onward. A City can present that most torturous of pleasures - Hope.

In the midst of extreme poverty and depressing wealth, The City allows most of its inhabitants a certain of level access to other peoples and cultures whose origins and practices are far from their places of origin; making the city a cultural artifact and a work of public imagination by creating a proximity that allow them to interact with each other at a far more fundamental level than any non -urban space. This inherent diversity of population and purpose allows for the development of culture, art and architecture that result in the creation of "Place" - an evocative term used by Urbainsts to describe memory, longing and location.

To most people all over the world, especially in South Asia and other developing economies; Suburbia, in its American version is an impossible dream, simultaneously idealized as an escape from poverty and reviled as a symbol of excess. Where such suburbs exist, they are defined primarily by what they do not contain such as poverty, slums, dirt , noise etc; erecting walls to keep all of those things away. Thus defined by exclusion and bigotry; these Mac-mansions form unsustainable islands of wealth in these societies, which divert resources from other places that desperately need them. In addition, the suburbs occupy an unnecessarily great deal of land, consume more fuel for commutes, create architectural eyesores and carve out a large hole in the fabric of urban life. The Suburbs are by their very nature a self fulfilling prophecy about the death of the Great City.

If the death of the Big City is indeed imminent, then the alternative is hardly the suburban sprawl that afflict so many cities in the US and Australia. But the City as a mode of civilisation is far older and more complex than advocates of suburbia suppose; and will endure, perhaps for the simple reason that there is no other alternative.

suburbanization does not necessarily entail car dependancy. if you can build suburbs the way they were built before 1945, then thats good, and those are actually the best places to live, like parkdale or annex in Toronto. these places are still very urban, and still considered downtown, as the city has grown around them. they mostly consist of 2 and 3 story houses and buildings with lots of trees and are very walkable and bikeable, filled with a mix of different people of different ages who make very different amounts of money and have different schedules than one another. they were also historically well connected to electric rail transit and still are. you can also walk to the financial district within an hour. WALK. ya.

however, the post WWII suburb is all about cars, the speedy consumption of resources, isolation, ugly, cheaply made buildings and shitloads of asphalt. these places suck and are clearly not the future, and to suggest so is laughable. not only that, but the new outer suburbs are built so far away from the city that it is literally impossible to walk to downtown, and noone ever does it, because there is probably only a highway connecting the two. these sorts of places have a very sad future.

Because the Mega Cities were founded in a century when water transport was the primary means of commerce, their topologies usually are maximized with sides that have a water boundary. That is, they are either islands, peninsulas, on the side of bays or edges of rivers. So, in many cities, there are 1, 2, 3 and even 4 (Manhattan, Singapore islands) sides that are bounded.

This topology may have made sense 2 centuries ago, but in the 21st century, when expansion is needed, the old boundaries provide endless "problems" that need to be fixed with overabundant "infrastructure". Case in point is downtown Seattle. Urbists are forever waxing about the need for some new bridge or tunnel to fix the mess. However, the mess is self-inflicted when you realize that downtown Seattle is a peninsula, bounded by a bay, a lake and ship canal. If ever you were to pick the worse possible place for one of the central nodes of an area, the Seattle Peninsula would be it.