Throwing in my few pennies regarding my experiences living in cities.
Having lived in a few well known places, with different urban planning characteristics:
- Tokyo. Very praised for its successes, and there are quite a few: extremely liberal zoning (it seems), based around mass transit rather than cars (great!). Despite the small living space sizes for some, reportedly still very affordable, wide low/med/high density options for at various price-points spread all over. On the other hand, rarely worth having more than prefab buildings (earthquakes), masssssive sprawl, and legendarily horrendous commutes for those living in the suburbs. More than half the city is really quite ugly, grey and concrete.
- Berlin. Lots to like based on good previous planning decisions, and that war-time destruction and reunification somewhat provided opportunities to modernise. The city centre is mostly medium-density 5/6 storey apartment buildings. This seems to be a great sweet-spot that packs in a lot of people, but still leads to a strong community feeling in neighbourhoods. Even in the city centre, extremely green, and very accessible nature thanks to effective public transport. On the other hand, the last few decades of success may have had a lot to do with its historical anomalies, and now that it's normalising in lines with other similar cities, feels like these benefits have been drying up.
- London. Creaking under the legacy of its historical city centre. Planned under the assumption that of course everyone is living in multi-million Pound townhouses in Zone 1. Everyone else is SOL; the rest is low density suburbs with transit that forces most journeys to be via the centre, since there is no outer ring line (great in Berlin, not so great in Tokyo). Seems hardly any medium density: endless neighbourhoods of single family homes, or skyscrapers.
Anyway, none of this is new. It seems pretty clear that the political inability to fix these issues are a massive drain on economies already, and this will only get worse in the future with increasing urbanisation. Frankly, seems the only solution is building entire new cities. Asia has certainly benefited from this in the 20th century...
Having lived in a few well known places, with different urban planning characteristics:
- Tokyo. Very praised for its successes, and there are quite a few: extremely liberal zoning (it seems), based around mass transit rather than cars (great!). Despite the small living space sizes for some, reportedly still very affordable, wide low/med/high density options for at various price-points spread all over. On the other hand, rarely worth having more than prefab buildings (earthquakes), masssssive sprawl, and legendarily horrendous commutes for those living in the suburbs. More than half the city is really quite ugly, grey and concrete.
- Berlin. Lots to like based on good previous planning decisions, and that war-time destruction and reunification somewhat provided opportunities to modernise. The city centre is mostly medium-density 5/6 storey apartment buildings. This seems to be a great sweet-spot that packs in a lot of people, but still leads to a strong community feeling in neighbourhoods. Even in the city centre, extremely green, and very accessible nature thanks to effective public transport. On the other hand, the last few decades of success may have had a lot to do with its historical anomalies, and now that it's normalising in lines with other similar cities, feels like these benefits have been drying up.
- London. Creaking under the legacy of its historical city centre. Planned under the assumption that of course everyone is living in multi-million Pound townhouses in Zone 1. Everyone else is SOL; the rest is low density suburbs with transit that forces most journeys to be via the centre, since there is no outer ring line (great in Berlin, not so great in Tokyo). Seems hardly any medium density: endless neighbourhoods of single family homes, or skyscrapers.
Anyway, none of this is new. It seems pretty clear that the political inability to fix these issues are a massive drain on economies already, and this will only get worse in the future with increasing urbanisation. Frankly, seems the only solution is building entire new cities. Asia has certainly benefited from this in the 20th century...
My thoughts