the best approach & sustainable cities has always been mixed zoning.
city buildings at human scale i.e 4-5 stories like in most European cities. shops / retail etc at retail level. then offices / apartments occupy the other levels.
make places walkable & dense. then have public Parks etc. then shit like niteclubs etc - should be relegated to basement level. same as parking.
That is not how Europe is actually built though. You'll see those four to five stories with shops retail on the ground floor and then the others above on the main street. However, if you get off the track and go behind those streets, you discover that there's a lot of places that are just pure apartments with no retail and some offices but very few in between. If you're expecting to find a place where there's ground floor retail and residents and offices above, you need to be looking at places where there's 15 or more stories on every building. And by every building, I mean every building, not just downtown.
I don’t know why people use “Europe” as a broad term. The city layouts in Warsaw, Paris, Athens, and Amsterdam are quite different.
Even then, I’d say that most larger/capital cities have 5-8 story buildings, with retail or other shops on the ground floor in the majority of central areas.
I usually dislike using 'Europe' as a broad term, but in this context I think it’s fair. I’ve been to more than half of European capitals, as well as major cities in the US, China, Korea, and parts of southeastern Africa. On a global scale, major European cities really aren't that different from each other.
Somebody correct me if I'm wrong, but the places with pure apartments and such are not like this because of zoning laws similar to the US, but they just were created like this by their developers. Thus, they could change much easier to whatever else you'd want from them, should need arise.
Yes yes, my point was that you're not bound by the same strict zoning laws if you decide to redo things - by either retrofitting or rebuilding or whatever. Not that's it's easy, just easier.
However even we don't have 15+ stories on every last building. (My home in Singapore only has 3 stories and legally no one can change that, because it's under conservation.)
Agree. And you also then should ask, why is it so? It’s usually not because they were after some pedestrian nirvana. It’s because land is so expensive they have to utilize it to a high degree for it to make sense. It does help that once you have the density, public transportation is worth investing in. But most of America is how it is because land has been relatively cheap and available and the development was during the rise of the automobile. I think it’s very narrow minded to assume that most Americans would like living in the European style city (the dense version). We have space, yards, large homes, automobiles are affordable, greater privacy than apartments provide, etc. Sure homes here are have grown unaffordable for young people in many areas, it’s certainly a problem. We’ve also built a ton of new apartments and people still complain about affordability. There’s not really any true affordable housing without subsidies, and that’s just shifting the burden somewhere else. Materials and labor is what it is and they add up to big numbers, meaning many people are perpetually priced out. If this is your problem, I’d suggest looking at the tiny house movement as a solution before expecting any US city to redesign itself for your wants/needs. Maybe prices will come down in a decade or so when all the boomers are selling to go into assisted care facilities.
The walls are thick, and no one can access the front door of an apartment without going through that of the building first. I still prefer a house though, with a thick hedge around the lawn isolating you from the world. The real privacy downside with apartments is the windows, as they might be facing other apartments or the street.
The door situation is more so security than privacy IMO. The common setup in the US is we drive right into our garage and nobody even sees us enter or exit our car, depending on garage location I suppose. I guess it’s easier to watch a house and know who lives there and see there comings and going than an apartment where you don’t know which apartment people are coming or going from. I was thinking more so about privacy from neighbors wrt noises through the wall, ceiling, or floor.
Come to think of it, Smells also get shared in many apartments.
Where I live in the Pacific Northwest we all have garages but nobody parks their cars in them. Cars wind up parked in front of the garage or on the street, garage winds up being filled with storage junk.
Comments
the best approach & sustainable cities has always been mixed zoning.
city buildings at human scale i.e 4-5 stories like in most European cities. shops / retail etc at retail level. then offices / apartments occupy the other levels.
make places walkable & dense. then have public Parks etc. then shit like niteclubs etc - should be relegated to basement level. same as parking.
That is not how Europe is actually built though. You'll see those four to five stories with shops retail on the ground floor and then the others above on the main street. However, if you get off the track and go behind those streets, you discover that there's a lot of places that are just pure apartments with no retail and some offices but very few in between. If you're expecting to find a place where there's ground floor retail and residents and offices above, you need to be looking at places where there's 15 or more stories on every building. And by every building, I mean every building, not just downtown.
I don’t know why people use “Europe” as a broad term. The city layouts in Warsaw, Paris, Athens, and Amsterdam are quite different.
Even then, I’d say that most larger/capital cities have 5-8 story buildings, with retail or other shops on the ground floor in the majority of central areas.
I usually dislike using 'Europe' as a broad term, but in this context I think it’s fair. I’ve been to more than half of European capitals, as well as major cities in the US, China, Korea, and parts of southeastern Africa. On a global scale, major European cities really aren't that different from each other.
Somebody correct me if I'm wrong, but the places with pure apartments and such are not like this because of zoning laws similar to the US, but they just were created like this by their developers. Thus, they could change much easier to whatever else you'd want from them, should need arise.
Not really because houses and business have different physical needs that are hard to retrofit after the building is designed.
Zoning limits what your neighbors can do, building design limits what you can do.
Yes yes, my point was that you're not bound by the same strict zoning laws if you decide to redo things - by either retrofitting or rebuilding or whatever. Not that's it's easy, just easier.
Well, you can have a look at Singapore.
However even we don't have 15+ stories on every last building. (My home in Singapore only has 3 stories and legally no one can change that, because it's under conservation.)
Agree. And you also then should ask, why is it so? It’s usually not because they were after some pedestrian nirvana. It’s because land is so expensive they have to utilize it to a high degree for it to make sense. It does help that once you have the density, public transportation is worth investing in. But most of America is how it is because land has been relatively cheap and available and the development was during the rise of the automobile. I think it’s very narrow minded to assume that most Americans would like living in the European style city (the dense version). We have space, yards, large homes, automobiles are affordable, greater privacy than apartments provide, etc. Sure homes here are have grown unaffordable for young people in many areas, it’s certainly a problem. We’ve also built a ton of new apartments and people still complain about affordability. There’s not really any true affordable housing without subsidies, and that’s just shifting the burden somewhere else. Materials and labor is what it is and they add up to big numbers, meaning many people are perpetually priced out. If this is your problem, I’d suggest looking at the tiny house movement as a solution before expecting any US city to redesign itself for your wants/needs. Maybe prices will come down in a decade or so when all the boomers are selling to go into assisted care facilities.
Really? You don’t even have hedges around your yards.
Fences are more common than hedges here. I’m failing to understand how any shared wall apartment tops a single family home in terms of privacy.
The walls are thick, and no one can access the front door of an apartment without going through that of the building first. I still prefer a house though, with a thick hedge around the lawn isolating you from the world. The real privacy downside with apartments is the windows, as they might be facing other apartments or the street.
The door situation is more so security than privacy IMO. The common setup in the US is we drive right into our garage and nobody even sees us enter or exit our car, depending on garage location I suppose. I guess it’s easier to watch a house and know who lives there and see there comings and going than an apartment where you don’t know which apartment people are coming or going from. I was thinking more so about privacy from neighbors wrt noises through the wall, ceiling, or floor.
Come to think of it, Smells also get shared in many apartments.
Where I live in the Pacific Northwest we all have garages but nobody parks their cars in them. Cars wind up parked in front of the garage or on the street, garage winds up being filled with storage junk.
They're often quite thin. See all the comments complaining about being able to hear their neighbor take a piss.