Even with the opinions in the books, the pandemic — or indeed, the chaotic response to it — has altered people’s perceptions of what a city can be. “As a species, we’re not very good at imagining things we haven’t seen, and the vast majority of North Americans really just view auto-dominated single-family homes the way we do. build things,” said Shoshanna Saxe, an engineer at the University of Toronto who studies sustainable infrastructure. “It is not the only option. It doesn’t have to be like that. We have chosen. During the pandemic, people saw something different.”
The question is whether things will continue as they are.
For the first time in a long time, policymakers at many levels are advocating changes of this kind. In 2019, municipalities like Portland, Oregon and Minneapolis, Minnesota begin remove the partition reserved for a family try solve justice and the climate crisis. Under Biden’s administration, transportation allowance States are still allowing highway extensions, but there are also smaller-scale changes that improve neighborhoods.
New York City, Washington DC, New Orleans and San Francisco have all moved to build permanent pandemic parks; Boston did not. “We don’t know if those changes are just a reflection of our desire for local businesses to continue to have service or our desire to change our relationship with the street,” Freemark said. “The fact is, we’re out there somewhere.”
What people Actually dislike, and have never liked, is to travel more than half an hour to get anywhere. Until about 150 years ago, that meant most people lived only a mile or two away from where they worked, ate, studied, and partyed, because that was the distance a person could travel. set or, if you are rich, on a horse. The result is in effect a highly populated town — a city center like you’ll find in Europe or older North American cities. That is the goal of leaders in places like Paris or Barcelona, which are building bicycle infrastructure and public transport to meet climate goals and create more pleasant urban experiences.
When trolleybuses and buses arrived in cities in the 19th century, the radius of that circle expanded to tens of miles. The result is (like this very good account said) higher-density corridors link neighborhoods to neighborhoods or, more likely, places with lots of homes to places with lots of jobs.
After World War II, the inclusion of cars in this spatial calculation really messed things up. A car, unrestricted, can easily go 30 or 40 miles in half an hour. But as soon as multiple cars try to do the same thing on the same route, the system falls apart — especially if one end of the route is mostly residential and the other is mostly work, so Everyone wants to drive to the same place at the same time.
In the United States, instead of building than houses inside the old circle (or, god forbid, even closer together and near where people go), people built houses even farther. For most of the 19th and 20th centuries, transits were built in front of houses; Trolley lines are what have made housing developments practical — even valuable. When the car came in, the track was ripped apart, but exclusionary (and often racist) zoning Popular single-family homes on large lots are still in place. Housing costs have increased. And, you can see the geometry problem here.
