City Life vs. Suburban Life: Which is more sustainable? (schools, houses, equal)
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You mean we don't get to use our imagination after all?
Dang ...
Actually this thread has turned out to be quite imaginitive.
The idea of holsteins and heifers plummeting from the "range" atop soviet-style fishtank towers onto dense, walkable streets without any auto traffic is one of the most entertaining ideas we've ever come up with in this forum.
You know, something I noticed when HUTD bolded it; this proposal is just for single people. If you're married, you're exempt! What about kids? Divorcess? Widows and widowers?
Or, you could look at any small town that was settled and developed before World War II, and the answer is ... not always. I've lived in a half dozen small Midwestern towns -- that's what being a newspaper reporter will do to you over the years -- and none had public transit, except maybe one or two taxis. Why would they? You can walk from one end of town to the other in less than =30 minutes.
The downtowns did indeed have mixed-use buildings. I can think of only one that had an honest-to-goodness town square, and that was in northeastern Ohio, whose small towns are very New England-y. Otherwise, the parks were all tucked away in residential neighborhoods, or on the outskirts of downtown.
Walkable neighborhoods, yes, but strictly residential, with an occasional pocket of neighborhood businesses in the larger towns, usually along the main drag.
Even in the 19th century people wanted their living and commercial areas to be separate.
A walkable, self-contained neighborhood doesn't need public transit to cross--any more than it needs automobiles to cross. Both are redundant on the strictly neighborhood scale of a few blocks--walking distance. Transit systems are used to get to other neighborhoods--or other cities--like steam railroads, interurbans, streetcars, and yes, bus systems using roads built for cars and trucks.
And were those decisions about residential vs. commercial location based on some desire to separate uses, or out of a desire to consolidate retail locations on the common town square, which was typically the heart of the town's transportation network? Again, most of my experience is with western towns, but generally the train station became the de facto center of town--if a town existed before the train arrived, the train either went downtown or the new train station moved downtown to its proximity.
Were these "strictly residential" neighborhoods always so? Traditional neighborhoods had corner stores on every block, generally with the owners living in adjacent or upstairs quarters. Often these corner stores have been demolished and replaced with newer buildings, or their former retail identity has been masked or supplanted.
You know, something I noticed when HUTD bolded it; this proposal is just for single people. If you're married, you're exempt! What about kids? Divorcess? Widows and widowers?
it's ok because we all know that from reading this forum that cities are only for single people and suburbs are for everyone else.
A walkable, self-contained neighborhood doesn't need public transit to cross--any more than it needs automobiles to cross. Both are redundant on the strictly neighborhood scale of a few blocks--walking distance. Transit systems are used to get to other neighborhoods--or other cities--like steam railroads, interurbans, streetcars, and yes, bus systems using roads built for cars and trucks.
And were those decisions about residential vs. commercial location based on some desire to separate uses, or out of a desire to consolidate retail locations on the common town square, which was typically the heart of the town's transportation network? Again, most of my experience is with western towns, but generally the train station became the de facto center of town--if a town existed before the train arrived, the train either went downtown or the new train station moved downtown to its proximity.
Were these "strictly residential" neighborhoods always so? Traditional neighborhoods had corner stores on every block, generally with the owners living in adjacent or upstairs quarters. Often these corner stores have been demolished and replaced with newer buildings, or their former retail identity has been masked or supplanted.
These "town square" type towns, such as New England and NE Ohio farm towns, are not the only small town model. Some have a main drag along a highway, and not much else commercial. Some have a "Main Street" with perhaps a grocery store, a hardware store, and a coffee shop and not much else. I have lived in and traveled through many an Illiniois farm town set up in these ways. Often, the grain elevator was the "main event" in town. People went into a larger city, e.g. Champaign, Danville, Decatur, etc for doctors, clothing, and many other needs. Sometimes, there are a bunch of little towns in a general area, and, as in my experience in the mill towns of Pennsylvania, one or two might have a nice shopping area; the others, not so much.
The idea of holsteins and heifers plummeting from the "range" atop soviet-style fishtank towers onto dense, walkable streets without any auto traffic is one of the most entertaining ideas we've ever come up with in this forum.
It sounds even better when you put it all in one sentence! But you forgot the high rise structures for the amber waves of grain. Parking garages for your Wheaties, if you will.
Wow, think of the energy expenditures. We better have a whole lotta city dwellers ferried out to the nuke plants.
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