New Urbanism vs urban sprawl

[mpetryni 0]

Yeah, the Interstate System in the United States was built for a military purpose. I don't know about the other roads in Europe or elsewhere. My basic point in bringing all that up was to demonstrate how something that was built for one primary purpose, in this case national defense, can become a subsidy (often unintentionally, but this is up for debate) for another secondary purpose. In the case of the Interstate System, this because a huge subsidy for the trucking, oil, and automobile industries.

These industries were all powerful before the advent of the Interstates, but even more powerful today. This is not necessarily a bad or a good thing, although it has made a huge impact on American life and commerce. It's just what happened. There are serious city planning problems that resulted, and dealing with them will be a challenge for years to come. More or less, introducing this was a qualifier to my previous statement that the enabling infrastructure of suburbia was subsidized by the American government given consumer preference. I realized, sometime later that, like the Interstate system, this wasn't always true. Some of the enabling infrastructure was installed for other uses and sometime thereafter became the tools of suburban sprawl.

 

Would these things have still happened without the Interstates? Probably. The point is just that it's doubtful someone planned suburbia to look exactly like it does, and that it is more likely the result of unintended subsidies, consumer preference and other, possibly more natural, factors. All of these factors, intended and unintended, are important issues to consider in how to possibly remedy, or simply improve our urban landscape. 

[Voar Tok 4]

Date: 10/28/2005 4:19:40 PM Author: louisville327 I'll change the subject a bit and offer this: The Most Horrible Thing I've Ever Seen. (Panorama of residential sprawl near San Ramon, CA, courtesy of Exuberance.com)

That is serious urban sprawl.

 

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[Wilfried Webber 22]

Lora, the US saw a strong increase in the number of cars between 1945 and 1960. AFAIK, it doubled from ca. 30 million to ca. 60 million during that period. And because it was clear that there would be even more cars driving around in the following decades, from a time on freeways became nothing but necessary.

It was also caused by the hunger for horsepower. People wanted to have powerful cars and they wanted to drive ever faster. I (still) think that military purpose thing was only a pretext for to keep sensible politicians quiet who never would had allowed spending billions of dollars on highways just because people would like to drive faster.

[louisville327 0]

Date: 11/7/2005 6:28:07 AM
Author: Wilfried Webber

I (still) think that military purpose thing was only a pretext for to keep 'sensible' politicians quiet who never would had allowed spending billions of dollars on highways just because people would like to drive faster.

quote>

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

Yeah, President Dwight Eisenhower, a retired 5-star general and former Supreme Allied Commander during World War II, used Cold War military strategy as a cover for his real desire: cruisin' at 85 in his Studebaker on the open road.

Your history lessons are always entertaining, Mr. Webber.

[mpetryni 0]

I'd also like to add that Eisenhower was a conservative Republican who believed in the principle of limited government and (obviously) a strong national defense. I highly doubt that a person of his particular political persuasion would really be hyped about massive government spending of tax dollars for the restrictive purpose of wicked road trips.

I could be wrong. All that being said, I think allowing people to drive faster and have more fun was less of a main goal and more of an added bonus to a system of military infrastructure. There is some truth to Wilfred's twisted history, though: it could easily be argued that the interstate system is maintained today out of an overwhelming American interest in car transportation and shipping. There is a somewhat reasonable doubt that modern-day politicians are concerned with the Cold War fears that initially fueled the support for the interstate system. It is possible they think of roads now as more of an economic asset as well as a component of a high standard of living, however inaccurate this perception may be in statistical and urban planning terms.

[Wilfried Webber 22]

It's the economy, stupid.

Sometimes there is not much reason within reasons, you know.

But Mr. Louisville knows everything, of course.

[louisville327 0]

Dr. Webber, there's really no need to be so bitter and confrontational. It's okay that we disagree on the merits of sprawl and the future of Western civilization. There's no harm in that at all, and I'm quite comfortable with it.

It is kind of silly, however, to attribute the building of the US highway system to a primitive desire to drive fast when you can actually read Eisenhower's quotes about road-building and discern his true motivations:

Eisenhower to Hearst Newspapers, 1952:

The obsolescence of the nation's highways presents an appalling problem of waste, danger and death. Next to the manufacture of the most modern implements of war as a guarantee of peace through strength, a network of modern roads is as necessary to defense as it is to our national economy and personal safety.

quote>

There was of course a major economic factor behind the building of the US interstate highway system, but for Eisenhower's main motivation you need only read the popular title of the eventual law (signed in 1956):

National Interstate and Defense Highways Act

I mean, you're right---people DO like to drive, and drive fast, but that was not the main motivation of the interstate highway system. Sorry to be such a know-it-all, but the facts are what they are.

[Wilfried Webber 22]

You treat quotes and statements as if they were unspoken reasons behind something. I am speaking of those unspoken reasons. I can't tell if I'm really right about this. It's just a mere presumption.

It's like with the war in Iraq - everyone knows that it was about oil above all else, and much less about democracy and freedom, with only some kind of US Republican Party style democracy as the remaining side effect - a kind of democracy we here in Europe don't understand, as well as many Americans don't, I believe (some 49 per cent, eh? ) - but no one can prove this presumption to be true. Facts are that there's now democracy and freedom all over Iraq.

 

At least for the German Reichsautobahn I can tell that the chief engineer Dr. Fritz Todt (who had won the Iron Cross, the German Order for the Highest Merit, German Defense Wall Honor Award etc.) stood against several military generals who wanted the Autobahn to be adjusted to military needs.

[gofeedthebears 0]

Date: 12/17/2004 12:03:47 PM
Author: kmannkoopa

What we need is to go back to the old pre-World War II planning. Housing everywhere, and then commercial on major streets and especially at the major intersections. Queens, NY is the best example in the country of development this way.

quote>

I felt I'd elaborate on the best example of pre-war development, since well... it's the best example of pre-war suburban development and doesn't purposely try to imitate urban areas like New Urbanism does, even if Queens does have trappings of urban life such as subways and apartments:

Queens, America's first sprawled middle-class suburb(developed the same way today's sprawl did--developers buying massive tracts of land, developing them quickly, and naming the resulting communities after themselves), is home to 2.2 million people, has an average pop. density of over 20,000 per mi. sq. (4th most dense county in the country behind New York, Bronx, and Kings counties... see a trend?) and is widely considered the most ethnically/culturally/etc. diverse county/city in the world (in the US it definitely is), with immigrants from every single country on the planet making up nearly 50 percent of the residents (and much of the rest of the number are those born in the US to immigrant parents) and dozens of languages can be seen on storefronts. Its crime is most likely the lowest out of US cities over the 1 million mark, it's population isn't necessarily poor (10% under the poverty line and the single family houses are even more expensive than Long Island houses of similar size) or lower-middle class as often perceived, its streets are tree-lined, its residential neighborhoods absolutely beautiful (though quite a few commercial strips tend to be a bit run down and covered in graffiti). The subways and buses, though not as good as in the three urban boroughs, are still adequate to allows nearly everyone to not be car-dependent... and when you do drive, traffic is even less congested and roads less wide than in Nassau County to the east due to the wider availability of convenient mass transit (the big exceptions are Queens boulevard which leads into Manhattan, downtown Flushing and Jamaica Center). Parking lots, a major symbol of modern commercial development, are never the size of your typcial ones, even in the most suburban areas--and creative measures have many times been taken to ensure this. St. John's University has a parking lot underneath their football field, Douglaston Plaza has stores like Macy's and a movie theatre located underneath the parking lots, etc. Also, the Queens Center Mall (most profitable mall per square foot in America) is located centrally in the borough along one major subway line and fairly close to the other one, which encourages people to drive or take a bus to the subway to avoid having to park there. It's also built vertically over four stories, thus avoiding mall sprawl and making it indistinguishable as a mall on Google Earth. Slightly more households are renter-occupied than owener-occupied, but not to the extent of the three urban boroughs. And since so many houses were built to house multiple families, it doesn't suffer from the illegal housing problems that faces Long Island (I once lived in a neighborhood on Long Island where probably 40% of the single family households rented out floors or individual rooms... and it wasn't an immigrant issue like in many places, it was a not enough apartments exist so young people and displaced people who wish to stay in the neighborhood can't afford to buy problem, and the taxes are too high so you need to rent to pay them problem).

I think the developers had no choice but to make everything the way they did because of large demand and limited space to begin with. With Queens being located on an island, the fact that Queens lost more than half of its previous area when it was annexed by NYC (and hence future annexations are impossible because it's obvious Nassau wanted nothing to with NYC back then and today Nassau is more urbanized than many cities like Houston and Phoenix), and a lot of people in Manhattan and the Bronx looking for a less-urban setting, led to this dense course of development. Queens isn't overly griddy or lacking in parkland like Manhattan and Brooklyn, and only two small neighborhoods contain ridiculously serpentine roads that characterize many modern developments. The biggest urban trapping Queens has is its street naming and addressing system. Streets go as high a 271, Avenues go as high as 165. Two of the communities where numbers aren't used have alphabetical names (Austin St, Burns St, ect.). Also, every house number contains a hyphen and the number of the last cross-street or avenue, which seems kind of mechanical like a highly urban city would have. What is cool, though, is that even though Queens is entirely within NYC limits, local neighborhood names are used, so on your license it says Flushing, NY instead of Queens, NY or New York, NY.

My avatar is a typical semi-detached Queens house (or rather a pair of them...) in a suburban neighborhood. The vast majority of neighborhoods in Queens consist of a balanced and mixed development of low through high densities, attached through detached properties... although towards the east it tends to be limited to low and medium densities, where two-story garden apartment complexes share the same neighborhood as post-Levittown houses.

I've already rambled long enough, but I'd like to add that one of the main contributors to Long Island being a successful suburb (with nearly 3,000,000 people between Nassau and Suffolk counties and some of the highest real estate in the nation) is its long skinny quality, so expansion can only progress in one direction. Also, only three rail and highway lines are needed--southern, middle and northern lines. Over 200,000 people use the simple Long Island railroad to commute to work every day. Manhattan also benefits from the long skinny quality with is mass transit network.

All right I'm done.

[louisville327 0]

gofeedthebears, this is an excellent post. It sheds light on early suburban development that began before the explosion of automobile use.

I think this quote sums it up best, though:

Queens ... is home to 2.2 million people, has an average pop. density of over 20,000 per mi. sq.

quote>

As you mentioned elsewhere, despite the aesthetic qualities Queens shares with suburban development (detached, single-family homes and tree-lined streets), Queens has a remarkably high density. There are a lot of people squeezed into a relatively small area. Modern suburban sprawl is different, though, because densities are far lower---there are suburbs of Atlanta, for example, that easily match the size of Queens but have less than half the population (and no mass transit service).

While Queens resembles contemporary suburbs in superficial ways, the overall context of the city is completely different. Queens is still very much urban.

[cnystrom1 1]

a while ago i thought suburban sprawl was ok... then my town started getting it. Now, orchards are being torn down for a bunch of houses that all look the same with no back yards, and big box stores are comming ( theres been like 4 in my lifetime, and we only have like 5!), and so shops are shutting down. theres a target where my uncle once lived! i dont like it, and its getting worse... they built a school by a orchard, now theres only houses, no orchards. and everyone lives in cul-de-sacs, far from stores. i live on a block, about 4 blocks from a store, with an orchard behind my house (soon to be a developement)... its not cool to see everything change so fast... but its happening everywhere! on sc4, i like sprawling suburbs, but in real life its wierd...