Ive seen several attempts at master planned neighborhoods with little town center type things with the idea that youd rarely have to leave, around South Florida growing up, and even lived in one for a few years. They all failed miserably. I feel like ones that succeed are just lucky. These communities can have basic predetermined guidelines to how growth can happen but the actual growth needs to happen organically. You cant just plot and build every house in town at the start, and you cant expect that things wont change as things pan out. Otherwise youre forcing residents to live in this deterministic Truman Show world lacking real freedom, echoing the major failures of a lot of mid 20th century heavy-handed big-ego design that we still suffer the effects of today
Better than no planning. I live in a part of Dublin (Ireland) that was rapidly developed back in the 1950s to house families that were being rehomed from condemned tenement buildings in the city. The design came from "garden cities", a design from England in the early 1900s. It wasn't very "organic". Entire housing estates were built. These were modest family homes with gardens, and the estates included ample green spaces. Roads still cope well enough with today's traffic. At several places within 10 minutes walk from my house, there are purpose-built shop-front buildings that housed butchers, grocers, maybe even a pub. This was the high watermark of planned development in Dublin. These houses fetch 450k today, and while building regulations were atrocious back then, I km wouldn't trade my old house for anything that's been built since the 2000s at double the asking price. Sincere those good old days, the government and local councils have basically stopped building entirely and leave it up to private building contractors to hoard land, wait for property prices to hit a profitable price and then apply for permission to build multi-story one-bedroom apartments with minimal parking or greenspace, and no thought given to other amenities whatsoever. Because "We have a housing crisis!!" permission is usually granted.
There is a chasm between the Truman Show and a vertical hellhole. If I had to choose, I'd live in the Truman Show.
It's pretty much the same story in the UK. Early c20th slum clearances, followed by well planned council estates built around a community, later (late 60s or 70s) the estates started to fall out of favour with tower blocks taking their place, which was a disaster and led to the justification for the private development free-for-all that we've had to put up with since the 80s which has resulted in terrible American-style, car-dependent suburbs filled with poorly built and poorly designed houses with no services within walking distance.
Same thing in the UK, council housing was high-quality and affordable for new families. Blame Thatcher for selling off council housing (amid her many disastrous policies).
It's amazing how many problems in the UK and the US today can be traced back to Thatcher and Reagan respectively.
The Irish political/building establishment thrives on crisis and desparation: it's a sort of small time disaster capitalism in which the electorate continually collude with their betters in order to further their immiseration.
Seeing the greenspaces of my childhood filled-in with shoddy-looking, expensive housing was shocking. Fingal County Council planning department seem to be giving the go-ahead to build any and every piece of rubbish using the excuse of "housing crisis" that you mention.
I just returned from visiting Dublin (mainly the Northside) after several years away and was irritated by: ridiculous levels of private vehicle usage; broken in-carriage electronic stop announcements on the DART (light electric rail); difficulty in planning trips connecting dublin bus/iarnrod eireann/dart; bus stops without proper shelters; drivers parking on the pavement(sidewalk); lack of courtesy from drivers at non-signalized intersection. On a positive note I will say that all (especially Dublin Bus drivers) personnel interacted with on an individual level were wonderful.
I’m skeptical that all planning is necessarily doomed to fail. Towns already do a considerable amount of planning via their zoning rules, and subdivisions are planned as well. The example here just seems like a subdivision, but planned for walkability rather requiring you to drive. Where did the place you lived in go wrong?
Half of Polish cities were rebuilt using central urban planning and came up awesome (build quality aside). There were a few rules:
- 5-10 min walk to kindergarden/school and local stores
- 3-5 min walk to a bus stop
- tons of green space
- taller buildings but varied in size and angles so that there is both ample space and variety
I literally had no streets to cross when I had to go to an elementary school, and literally 1000 other kids had 1-2 small streets to cross at most, walking 10-15 min or less.
There's also the classic - Nowa Huta, a former city and now part of Kraków, built next to Tadeusz Sędzimir Steelworks (formerly Vladimir Lenin Steelworks) - "nowa huta [stali]" translates to "new steelworks".
I'm linking to a traffic map, because it's best at highlighting the structure of the place. See the big roads forming straight lines, crossing to form distinct cells? This was intentional, top-down design. Zoom on a cell, see how it's made from apartment blocks surrounding shared, green communal areas.
It's currently the greenest place in Kraków, and despite having a reputation of a dangerous place in late 90s[0], it's one of the nicest and most family-friendly areas in the city.
The urban legend I grew up with goes, this cell-based design is partially for defensive purposes: during a ground conflict, spaces between outermost apartment blocks form choke points and could be barricaded to close off the sub-district.
There's another, less happy story that I've heard - that the steelworks and the city of Nowa Huta were purposefully placed by the Soviets on the most fertile soil in the area, destroying it in the process, in order to get the Poles to urbanize more and generally to spite them. I haven't found a confirmation of this - it might be an urban legend, but it's one that's widely believed over here.
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[0] - Since taken by other districts; last I heard, Kurdwanów was the prime "hot zone". By "dangerous" I mean "you can get robbed at knife point" and "you can get beat up by hooligans". The joke goes, hooligans that lived in Nowa Huta have since grown up, started families, and don't have time for petty crime anymore.
And a lot of old issues about how drab they were are due to how long it took for the green areas to flourish properly after the building spree. These days it's much easier to "kickstart" the green areas.
Indeed, in the places that lacked decoration it's nice to see them added.
A bit of a problem however is when original detailing gets removed on n the estates that did have it, often replaced with cheap pastel Styrofoam insulation.
Oh absolutely! I was surprised to find that the communist city planning in Poland made for extremely livable cities. The block apartments may not have much going for them architecturally, but they are arranged around beautiful parks and gardens, wonderful public spaces dotted with stores and markets. The best way to describe the planning philosophy is US college dorm life on a big state campus. It's even common to have a canteen in the center of the neighborhood just like you would a dining hall. The only sad thing is that as car ownership expands, the green space keeps getting eaten away by parking lots since these areas were designed for car-free living with excellent transit links to the rest of the city.
It's a virulent meme. Planned towns are bad. Organic growth is good. Planning is tyranny, is oppression, is taxation. Please read "Seeing Like a State". Organic growth is freedom, is markets, is good.
It's not entirely wrong, just extremely misleading. Urban planning doesn't have to create complete, inflexible designs, managing every tiny bit of life. And outside some failed experiments[0], it almost never is.
Think of planning towns as growing gardens. You work with the forces of organic growth, not against them, but still nudge and direct them to create a result that's better[1] than what would be there on its own.
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[0] - Some planners got high on cybernetics/system thinking, in an era we could not computationally support designing complex systems - then others used this to push political ideologies; mix in power struggles and regular corruption, and of course it fails. What's annoying is that it gets painted as "planning bad", "cybernetics bad", "central bad", instead of recognizing the incentive failures in the mix.
[1] - Better according to the gardener. Nature optimizes for its own thing. It's important to remember that natural, organic growth rarely optimizes for the benefit of individual units, whether plants or people.
This is fascinating! Thanks for sharing. It’s hard to tell what the specificity of the planning was… it seems to have included the street layouts and the below-ground infrastructure, but unclear on the facades and the shop/business distribution?
I didn’t know about this but it makes a lot of sense. Those enormous boulevards are clearly not original nor unplanned.
Even the facades in Paris were planned to the point that there were regulations on color and material and design [1]. Regulations were eventually loosened up somewhat.
Well Manhattan, for example—obviously at first it developed organically, but the upper part of the island was largely planned, with a strict grid system of streets and avenues and a large park in the center!
Planning works great for public utilities- roads, libraries, parks etc. The moment we cross that are have a planned bank, grocer, retail I think it falls apart. The grocery shop needs guarantee on revenue to be setup, and then they will slack off because they won’t need to compete or innovate. People will realize once the HOA bill runs in to several hundred dollars and have to deal with shitty services. In the real world, depending on the area, one grocery chain will die and another will take its place.
In a small neighborhood, that would shatter the illusion that you never need to leave, at which point the distant walk to your car for actual shopping becomes a problem. (Or, alternatively, the lack of delivery services because they can't actually reach both your home and the place they shopped using the same mode of transportation.)
You have a bus stop with buses getting to city center every 3-5 min, and the supermarket store around a corner has literally all grocery things I needed when I lived around (it’s the size of 3-4 medium Wallgreenses)
The post I was responding to suggested that it wasn't necessary to arrange for at least one grocery store in the walkable neighborhood, and that leasing to retail establishments could be entirely up to the building owners. I was observing that if that results in no grocery stores located in the neighborhood, that would make the neighborhood much less walkable.
(Even if there's one in walking distance, hopefully it has an excess of carts and doesn't mind them going home with people...)
And unless you want to go out for groceries far too often, you're going to end up with a quantity of groceries that's incompatible with taking a bus. You'd need a car, or a bike trailer for a very dedicated cyclist, or a delivery service and the ability for them to deliver.
I live in a London suburb. I don't have a car, or even have a drivers license because I've always lived places where having a car isn't important enough to weigh up the cost and nuisance (to me).
Before delivery services, I'd walk to the grocery store every few days. It was perfectly fine. When I commuted I'd just pop by on the way home from work. There are at least 4 small-ish shops within 10 minutes walk, and half a dozen bigger ones within 20 minutes walk or a short bus ride (that would also coincide with the commute for a large portion of the people living around me).
And I live in perhaps the worst location locally in this respect - I'm pretty much equidistant from three 3-4 different shopping areas, dead centre of a very low density residential area with few shops.
Overall, the key thing to maintain a walkable neighbourhood is simply that enough people who live there actually want to walk. In that case there will be enough shops nearby. The problem occurs when too many of the people in these neighbourhoods like to live in an area that is walkable, but still prefer to use the care.
I think the key to make such neighbourhoods work is fewer parking spaces to explicitly ensure a sufficient portion of the people living in them actually bring foot traffic to the nearby retail spaces. Do that and you get grocery stores without any need for detail regulation.
Where I live the council won't approve planning applications with more than 1.5 parking spaces per living unit on average. It could probably be significantly lower.
Zoom Google Maps into almost any town in continental Europe[0] and search for "grocery store" or "supermarket". [1]
Or look at one supermarket and see how many shops they have [2].
Depending on the size of the household and personal preference, people might use these shops every 2-4 days, perhaps using a bicycle or trolley to take things home.
[0] I'm sure there are exceptions, like Arctic areas, mountains, tourist towns, etc.
> And unless you want to go out for groceries far too often
I know carless Londoners whose commute takes them past a grocery store on foot every day. So they will literally go into the store for a single item.
However, you're right that this isn't a good solution for everyone - for example, people who are starting a family. Even if you can fit a week's groceries for one person into a backpack, that's no help for four-person households. Grocery delivery services are widely used in London for this reason. As is moving out of the city in order to start a family.
For a grocery store, it's location location location. A grocery store is going to want to be located there. It'll happen organically. I've lived in Europe, there always seems to be a grocery store of some sort nearby. Nobody centrally planned it.
For much the same reason I don't want an hour-long commute: I don't want to waste the time. I enjoy taking a pleasant 5-minute (or 20-minute) walk regularly, but I'd much rather spend 90 minutes grocery shopping a month rather than 10-20 minutes every day or every few days.
Rather than national businesses that take the profit out, how about an accommodation for small business owners to live in the community as well? But not subsidize them so they actually have to be viable businesses.
In many cities, there are plenty of first floor shops with the proprietors living upstairs. It seems that collectively, they'd keep the planning and policies in favor of active and vibrant lifestyle, focus on keeping crime in check, promote community cohesion.
I am one hundred percent certain that both the locatelli grocer that has almost nothing I want to eat in it ever and has nothing but mexican standoff intersections with people walking around really slow, and the 'california' grocery that I really have to work hard at not just eating all the food in inside the store are both heavily planned, in terms of where exactly they are and all of the ridiculously excessive lighting and product placement inside of the stores. There is some vague pretension to a capital market and some vague notion that some of the great many retail businesses which are essentialy a second form of rent extraction may go out of business, but by and large it would seem extremely clear that there is a great deal of planning going on with information that business people are not supposed to have access to. Whether or not there is a viable alternative to said situation is a more complicated question, but there is no question that there is not some kind of innovation() support system where if you just figure out how to build a better mousetrap or run a better grocery store or sandwich shop, you will succeed and grow.
Doesn't zoning largely let you choose where private businesses go? Maybe you can't select exactly where to put the bank versus the grocery store, but you can select categories of businesses, to create the feel you want.
(I'm not sure whether zoning is a "good" thing or not in general, but there are certainly lots of successful towns and cities with zoning rules.)
* People don't want the things that are specified in the master plan, so there's no tenant that would be both legal and viable.
* Businesses are protected from competition (for their space, and for their niche in the area) so they charge too much and deliver too little.
* People want things that aren't in the master plan, and they aren't allowed to exist. (The politically engaged majority can get the plan amended with enough work, but these top-down designs can miss the long tail of niche interests, none individually powerful enough to get itself on the agenda).
The solution in most of the world is to not create too detailed plans, and often to minimize the amount of zones with pretty much all of them having multiple uses.
This means for example that people obsessed with house prices can't stop a grocer from existing within walking distance.
Alternatively in the real world, one grocery store will die because a Wal*Mart opened an hour away and is replaced by an hour's drive instead of a brief walk to pick up groceries because people can't resist a dollar cheaper and ten more in gas.
> People on a budget absolutely pay attention to the cost of gas.
People on a budget do for certain levels of "on a budget". If you only have $5 to buy food (and no credit) and a full tank of gas, it doesn't matter if it costs more in the long term. You burn extra gas now or your kids don't eat.
No, you either didn’t read what I wrote or you haven’t been living on a budget. Poor people don’t waste more money on gas than they save by going to Walmart.
They go to Walmart because it’s significantly cheaper to do weekly shopping there than even other big retail grocery outlets, let lone little ones. My parents absolutely fucking hate going to Walmart but they go there weekly because it’s $50/week difference just for the two of them vs Kroger.
You’re both not wrong. I’ve seen both. I’ve lived both. One of my earliest memories was being chastised by my family for spending a tiny fraction more than the lowest price on something; same brand, twice the volume, didn’t have a shelf life, wasn’t over budget. I got in trouble as a poor kid in a poor family for listening to advice my family had given me to shop smart.
I also got the same in reverse for being less thrifty and more considerate.
Big shrug emoji. I know poverty so much it scares and traumatized me. I appreciate that not everyone does, but I also don’t think it should be represented as something uniquely rational.
Poverty is duress. People make all kinds of good decisions because they have survival instincts, and all kinds of bad decisions because they have a bunch of incentives. They often do both and everything in between in a single outing because, yep, gas is expensive. And they’re tired. And the world is hard and expensive.
I definitely have been living on a budget, having been literally born into poverty and never quite able to move up a level. It's been with me my entire life and I assume it'll continue to be so for the rest of it. Kroger's a rich people store; there are plenty of stores that aren't that have been actually driven out of business by Wal*Mart.
Because their prices weren’t competitive, it’s that simple. Shopping at Walmart is not fun. People flock there because it’s cheaper than everyone else.
You’re suggesting that poor people lose more money by going to Walmart than they would shopping locally, which is just ridiculous. It implies poor people have no basic math skills on a average, which isn’t the case.
Walmart doesn’t crush local competitors with shitty warehouse lighting and angsty employee vibes. They do it by being far cheaper with their massive logistics.
Poor people shop where the money will go the furthest, full stop.
I find this pretty insulting to the average persons intelligence and out of touch with the pricing realities in many locations.
I have two local grocery stores. One is in town and the other the next over. Both are less than 3 miles. The prices are between 2-4x compared to me driving 30 miles in either direction to visit Cost Co/Walmart.
I don’t mind paying more for local or the convenience but I quite literally can’t afford to more than double my grocery budget for the month. So I only buy perishables locally for the most part.
The economics of this are problematic in both directions, but I still need to put food on the table.
I’m not disagreeing with the functionality, and personally don’t find the grid to be particularly bad, but do you really think West Village isn’t dramatically more liveable feeling? I suppose this quickly veers into hard-to-define sensations so perhaps the point is moot :)
I do suspect that a lot of people would prefer to live in that part of town over the more modern areas… as evidenced by the especially insane rent.
I’ve lived in Manhattan for close to thirty years got married here and raised a family here.
What you call a dramatically more livable feeling means different things to different people. Honestly it meant different things to me at 25, 35 and 45. It also meant different things when I was stretched financially and when I was flush.
The village substantially more expensive than e.g. the upper west side? (These places are all outside of my price range so I've never really looked.)
There are also lots of other reasons the tip of manhattan may have been more expensive—for example, it's just the oldest part of the city, so everything started there and expanded outwards.
...that might not be the best metric, I bet there are fewer super small apartments to be had on the UWS! I know the village has a fair number of places that were built before current laws about minimum square feet per apartment.
I don't know what the right metric would be—maybe median rent or even family income? I guess I also don't really think you can tell much from all this.)
Totally ripe for confirmation bias, which is why my comment seemed very uncertain. I’m kind of going from a heuristic of older cities versus newer ones under the (potentially wrong!) assumption that zoning has tended toward more stringency over time.
One of the main reasons to make a plan should be that it allows you to realize when you are starting to deviate from it. That’s a time you have to do some thinking and either realize you’re about to make a mistake or adjust the plan/come up with a new one.
If you do plans badly, you don’t do the thinking, but just declare any deviation from the plan a mistake.
Rather than trying to plan it all out from the beginning, it has a planning philosophy that seems to have sustained it through the decades and my understanding is that the philosophy is used to this day to try to ensure a vibrant town. Not all of the early ideas and development worked either, but change seems to have been built in and the town is looking to grow in the coming years pretty significantly.
I've been there a couple times and it reminds me of various mixed developments outside of city centers I've been at in Europe. The twist seems to be a gearing around walkability and abundant commercial/business zoning so people can live and work there.
I just don't see the point of these kinds of things when you could just move to an existing city. I moved to the middle of an Australian city and I haven't left a 2km radius because there is just no need, everything exists within walking distance. My city is also great because it is surrounded by a ring of parklands so I could go on a 10km walk through nature without ever leaving the parklands (other than crossing a few roads).
I wouldn’t say Seaside, the new urban community where the Truman Show was filmed failed really. It seems to have held on to some sense of year round community that is not completely overwhelmed by the vacation crowd. I always liked staying there before it got too popular because it felt like a tiny functioning city with book store, arts, year round jobs etc, not like a vacation spot that turns into a ghost town after September.
while that is true, a lot of the house are for sale and people will make small changes. Also local governments ask for input from the people that live there. Shops can come and go as these are mostly rentel spaces. So while we do a lot of planning there is still room to make it your own. This village seems to be a Holliday park like experience. With only rentals and pre defined shops
> You cant just plot and build every house in town at the start, and you cant expect that things wont change as things pan out.
I wonder if you have ever talked with actual urbanist, as I have, and this definitely not how they think.
Urbanism can actually be very ‘agile’, with a difference that you have a vision for the outcome you want to reach (which good agile in sw development is adding as well).
A master plan doesn't hurt, they could get it wrong but it's not that much worse than haphazard randomness.
The good cities you see aren't good because of early planning. They're good because of constant vigilance to improve and maintain. Subway systems for example aren't usually part of the master plan of the city at inception but are the result of constant vigilance to improve.
Meanwhile western US suburbia is the result of unplanned urbanization reacting to the whims of corporate car culture. Totally unplanned and terrible.
Those aren't "planning" codes, it's more rules and guidelines. Development is still largely free and left to the market so long as they stick within the guidelines.
It's those rules and guidelines that make suburbia so miserable though. When you can't build retail without 1 off-street parking spot per 100 sq ft or new residential without 1.5 parking spaces per bedroom, then there is no possible outcome other than the car-dependence we see today. Parking requirements make building a walkable town impossible.
Car dependence comes from the low density infrastructure. The rules are a consequence of that. Low density infrastructure exists because many cities were built during a time when car companies were trying to make the automobile mainstream.
Density is limited explicitly by code. It's limited implicitly by parking requirements which are code. Car dependence also largely follows from segregation of uses (residential and retail can't mix) which is again code.
That's too simple of an answer. These codes did not exist until recent times. The codes actually exist because people wanted them to exist, because car culture influenced the way people think and how they should live. All these codes were put into place AFTER low density infrastructure was already the established norm.
You can see it in how cities are built this country. Cities established in the east before car culture took over are much more walkable and have a different set of "codes"
Part of the problem is that presently walkable cities don't have walkable codes, so as they expand or even replace old buildings they become more car centric. They are only walkable because current buildings are from prior to the adoption of the code. The Illegal City of Somerville [0] brought popular attention to this a few years ago.
I don't know why you insist on putting scare quotes around the words "planning" and "codes." In municipal governments all across the country, people who went to school for "Urban Planning" and have the job title "Planner" work for the "Planning Department" and administer the "Planning Code." These the canonical, legal names.
I put quotes around them because they aren't actually planned. They're officially and canonically called "planning" codes but no real long term urban planning is involved. It's more short term satisfaction planning and not the kind of actual planning that goes on in other places like say China or Tokyo. Now you know why.
>Part of the problem is that presently walkable cities don't have walkable codes, so as they expand or even replace old buildings they become more car centric
Unlikely a city doesn't convert a high density building into a low density building because of a remodel. People really need to leave the city in droves for this to happen.
What you're referring to is NEW cities or new expansions.
Somerville is like a one off. It's also not really a walkable city like Tokyo or Hong Kong is. It's more like a walkable town or village.
I think you're right for two reasons. The first being that cities and communities should evolve organically to meet the changing needs of the people living there over time. The second reason is that all successful communities (arguably all successful anything) are so because they're lucky.
