These two groups(alt.architecture,alt.lanning.urban) are going head to with a battle topic debate. If you don't agree with the group you are in's side, fight for the other one.
Urban Planning, you are going to argue that cities are better then suburbs
Alt.architecture, you are going to argue that suburbs are better then cities.
Let it begin!
I will start out, suburbs are better then cities because suburbs have less poor people in them and also have less crime rates. Also everyones the same so no one gets in fights and stuff.
Actually, suburbs do in fact have more "poor." And having everyone be the same is not a good thing.
San Francisco has a much lower median income than the "suburbs" which are almost ten times bigger than SF.
Everybody is not remotely the same in the suburbs. Bill Gates lives in the suburbs of Seattle. I doubt anybody in Seattle approaches Bill's wealth
There are a lot of Nobel Prize winners in the suburbs of the bay area. I don't think there are any winners in SF but UCSF medical research is Nobel quality and may have some winners.
There are wide variations of people in suburbs, maybe wider variations than in cities (as a guess)
Jack, that's not "the way societies are described" (your repeatedly stated sermon) either! I doubt' that hardly anybody, no matter where, approaches Gates' wealth ... so actually the extreme examples above the 99,9999999 percentile of population are not relevant for that comparison.
Tadej
You've not been paying attention...
Just go to the "Value of Local Shopping Thread". Been there, done that.
Well, you started off on the wrong foot, because today suburbs have MORE poor people in them than the city. Sorry about that.
HAve you looked at the crime stats for both? I think you'd be surprised...
Sorry. I can't accept the premise, unless you're going to pay me at somewhere between the per diem and expert witness rates, of course ; }
Where'd you think he got the (brilliant) idea?
A lot of people try to pretend that the suburbs are only for the bland an boring with no significant difference between the people that live there. I am just pointing out that this nonsense from people that live in large cities is absurd and not even remotely true..
There are also well researched statistical characteristics of cities/suburbs as a function of size. There is no real dividing line in the statistics of cities an suburbs, just a continual power law distribution.
True, but look at the book "Sprawl: A Compact History" see:
Good overview.
Wow. That review is highly rhetorical, and in the paragraph:
As cities grow, however, the critics have a new term to label the process. That term is sprawl, which even little children know is supposed to be very bad indeed. But Bruegmann reminds us that the density gradient for London (and other cities) flattened over time, showing that the so-called suburbs are in fact getting more dense even as center cities are becoming somewhat less densely populated. (Bring Up Gradient Chart in New Window). Further, as economic development takes place, cities all over the world are becoming less dense. (Bring Up Regression Chart in New Window).
..it seems to me that the claims made in the review are not supported by those charts. They may be true, but those charts don't support them.
In the first chart, the difference in the slopes of those lines would seem to describe the *appearance* of suburbs based on car access. It's obvious that car-suburbs more dense than pre-car countryside. If you want to support claims that suburbs are getting more dense, then some data after 1950 compared to 1950 might be in order.
In the second chart there is no time dimension, so I don't see how it has anything to say about historic trends.
As for the elitist nature of anti-suburb rhetoric, in the case of my city, Toronto, the market indicates that urban living preferential compared to suburban living through the mechanism of price. That collective expression of values is not the handiwork of some effete, taste-making elite, but the result of hundreds of thousands of market place decisions every year. It's the same thing that says an Aston is better than an Austin.
Here, generally speaking, most people live as close to the center as they can afford. My last rental accommodation was 1.5 km. from the financial core. Now that I bought a home, I'm 5-8 km. from the center, depending on what you call 'center', but I'm 600 meters from 2 different subway stations.
To join the stupid side of the debate I'd have to say that "I'd abolish all suburbs!"
...Just kidding, but I'd be very reluctant to live in one. Ever.
The density gradients, which are a standard demographic and urban sociology chart, show the history of density for many years. The book also has density charts for several dozen American cities. You should read the book.
1801 to 1951 represents some time span to me. Maybe not you.
Planners like to say that when they run up the price due to land regulation it represents "the market." It represents politics.
That collective expression
But the criticisms of suburbia are class-based and always have been. Most jobs are not downtown anymore in most cities, and being close to downtown is really irrelevant when the jobs are somewhere else. 85% of the commutes in New York City region are suburb to suburb. That is the kind of thing the author was pointing out.
I don't think you've understood my point. My comments were clearly about the review and the claims made in it relative to the data presented to support them.
Look again. There is no mention of time in the *second* chart. The 2 axes are density and GDP/capita. (I'm familiar with graphs.)
Maybe, but that's a broad brush. Some people say everything is political. There's a political dimension to planning, of course. My decision about where to live is personal in a political context. I choose urbanity....as much as I can afford.
Merely repeating a claim does not make it so. At least not downtown ; )
The point I made was that 'class' is a very high-level construct, and there are other simpler constructs to explain the phenomenon, like the market, unless of course it *has* to be class, then by all means...I'll throw my lot in with the urban elite. Just don't expect an apology, or any bourgeois guilt about it, until the Red Guards come to the door. Then, I assure you, I am quite rehabilitatable. I'll then realize that I was only *pretending* to like goat cheese and sun-dried tomatoes on my thin-crust pizza washed down with a fine, all-natural, micro-brewed local beer, while watching "those jokers losing that damned hockey game." (The Leafs)
As Forest, Forest Gump says, Irrelevant is as Irrelevant does. Rush hour is the same here. The location of jobs is not the primary decision in my choosing urbanity. Almost everyone travels to get to work, except me. My primary reasons for being here are "cultural."
You seem to think what you do is what everybody does which is obviously not even remotely true.
People typically want to be with in a reasonable commute distance from their jobs which are now mainly in the suburbs.
On 30 Oct 2007, Jack May wrote
It depends entirely on perceptions and definitions of "reasonable distance".
I recall looking at this as a grad student (1970s) -- there'd been a major Swedish study which looked at the success of their programme of integrated, planned post-war 'new town' suburbs (around Stockholm, IIRC) in reducing commuting distances (which was one of the aims of the programme).
I'm fairly certain that the results pointed to virtually no correlation between residence and working locations: in effect, commuting from the suburbs to the city centre had simply been swapped for commuting between the various new suburban 'towns'.
I'm not talking about anyone else. (Note the consistent use of the first person in my post.)
The second part of what you say is true, of course, but I haven't refuted it. I used *my personal experience* to refute the assertion by George that being close to downtown was "irrelevant" because "jobs are in the burbs", as if the only reason to be downtown is proximity to jobs. That's "not even remotely true" either. I'm downtown by choice. My choice has nothing to do with job locations. Being downtown is highly relevant to me. Therefore the assertion is not true. QED.
The introduction of job locations is a red herring in a discussion about whether the data George presented supports the claims made in George's "review" of a book. You might back up the thread and see what you think.
The comments were documented by the data supplied. Period.
It seems you did not look at the first one.
Bully for you. It is obvious that you find "urbanity" expensive.
Obviously.
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