Urban Planning

This is the Urban Planning Thread, where we talk about cities and the planning, designing, and implementation of their various aspects such as housing, transportation, public spaces, maintenance, and anything else you can think of. In other words, here we share news and discuss ideas on how to make cities harder, better, stronger, faster healthier, safer, and generally better place to live for everyone who calls them home.

For related topics that have their own threads, please see Electric Vehicles, Self-Driving Cars, Sustainable Energy, and Public Transport for in-depth discussions about those subjects in particular.

Opening.

I'm a big Jane Jacobs fan.

Roundabouts are cooler than intersections.

What are your thoughts on using Solar Punk as an inspiration for urban planning? I think it's an interesting idea to implement.

I can agree a lot with Jane Jacobs, my only two cents to this is that good city planning starts thinking on how to make the life of the poorest citizen more accesible rather than trying to pull a Dubai (Never go full Dubai).

Also, never forget to take care of the historical centre of a city, that will always be priceless.

But... like, I don't think that was the thing brought up on either of the last few pages on the EV thread?

It wasn't about resource usage, it was about usage patterns and the effects giant patches of entirely concreted-over urban sprawl have on the environment. It doesn't matter how efficiently you're using resources in comparison if you're cramming into something that happens to be a mechanical problem by its design. Resources weren't the issue being raised (nor cities as a concept).

Yeah, I was referring to the heat islands. The city cores themselves are usually on the okay size, the problem is that the suburbs spread it out to sizes that don't dissipate the way they're supposed to. It's actually usually best for there to be a significant greenbelt around a city because that gives space for the heat to dissipate and equalize. But when you've got huge highways and road networks absolutely everywhere for miles around, it fucks up the weather patterns.

Los Angeles is a really extreme example of this where even the de-facto "core city" is so huge and covered in concrete that it heats up an enormous area that never really cools down to where it should be for the area. New York would be, but the ocean cancels out a lot of it.

Edited by Zendervai on May 21st 2022 at 11:35:31 AM

That's actually a very important concept.

Because of the way concrete absorbs and retains heat like a rock, having huge areas of land paved in it when temperatures are high generates an artificial heatwave that can actually screw over with the dynamic of the area surrounding it. This is another reason why zoning laws in some countries demand that municipalities have parks to compensate for the effect of concrete.

Now, the usonian suburbia adds another effect of their own by their mere existence as Zendervai alluded: due to the way usonian cities were planned to favour private transportation (AKA cars) instead of public transportation since the 50's, they require a lot of roads for them to be interconnected to the centres of work, education, shopping, etc. As cities and demographics grow though this means that roads and suburbs have to keep on expanding, which in turn adds to the problem of the heat islands.

In theory, having big centres of population distant from the core city shouldn't be a problem if they are properly interconnected, the problem though is that the sole use of cars to do so leads to a tragedy of the commons scenario in practice.

One solution that I remember seeing floating around some time ago was the concept of the arcology, which suggested consolidating everything into a single, 3D structure to minimise sprawl and travel time, while maximising usable area.

It's an interesting thought, although there is also the issues that come with effectively fundamentally redesigning cities and our way of living entirely from scratch.

You also run into the issue that if everything is an internal space you’re cutting people off form natural light. That’s both bad psychologically and bad in the sense of vitamin D deficiency.

Then you’ve got the safety issues that come from singular structures. Generally we use the space between buildings as our best firebreaks, you don’t shelter in a different part of a large building in the event of a fire, you exit the building.

To let a bit less conceptual, in London there is renewed discussion around the future of Oxford Circus. Oxford Circus is the intersection between the major Oxford Street shopping area and Regent Street (which leads down to Piccadilly Circus and up to Regent’s Park). Oxford Circus is one of the main spots that tourists visit in London but also sees heavy traffic through it, as it sits between Soho and Mayfair. There has been an extended discussion around pedestrianising the area, with the local council having announced and then abandoned plans to make at least part of the street pedestrian only/dominant. However, control of the local council (called Westminster council) has recently changed hands, so the plans could be back into he menus.

What are peoples thought on pedestrianising city centres? It’s a common thing in Europe due to town/city centres having been build before motor vehicles and thus actually working better if everyone is forced onto foot. Generally the motor vehicle ban isn’t total, delivery vehicles still operate, emergancy vehicle access is maintained, occasionally taxis can operate and even private vehicles may have the ability to drive through. However, the entire street is treated a sidewalk, so any vehicle moving through has to go very slowly as it is very much operation on the territory of the pedestrians.

Specifically back to London again, it’s a very weird case of urban planning because of the lack of urban planning. London started as two cities (Westminster and London), which grew into each other and have since then being growing outwards, consuming small villages and even moderately sized towns like Croydon, major urban contraction phases have been focused randomly due to the free land coming from events that cleared land randomly (the great fire of 1666 and The Blitz during WW 2). However much of the character of areas has remained, I know of one London area that I’ve described to people as a small English village that London grew around. Legally the county of Middlesex (where London historically sat) was abolished and replaced by Greater London back in 1965.

What’s now London is defined by the M25 ring-road around it, with London having outgrow the previous ring-road of the North Circular (a planned northern half of the circuit) and the South Circular (the souther half of the circuit which was really just a bunch of local roads stitched together). Finally, connecting into the heat sink point, London contains a number of royal parks that operate as green spaces, often being pretty large.

I don’t think you can prevent sprawl - North American families aren’t just going to stop wanting a house with a yard, and current statsfrom Canada show that cities are growing both out and up - city centres are getting denser, and there’s sprawl at the edges.

What you need, in my opinion, is more medium-density neighbourhoods, with a mix of low-rises, row houses, and commecial buildings, and some taller buildings along main streets - it makes for a more enjoyable neighbourhood, as it’s got the population density to sustain more grocery stores, restaurants, shops, etc. That’swhat neighbourhood is now and it’s one of the most popular places in the city.

We’ve got a major housing shortage and skyrocketing property prices despite the outward and upward growth - it’s rare to get a single-family house for under a million in any major city - so not building outward simply isn’t an option. Building outward is currently the only way anyone except the top 10% can support a house. But there’s no reason why suburban neighbourhoods need to be designed to be exclusively single-detached houses, or exclusively residential rather than mixed.

Greenbelts create nice urban parks, but they don’t stop sprawl, the sprawl just continues beyond them. Toronto and Ottawa are both prime examples of this.

Well, there's several things at play there. The idea of having greenbelts isn't to contain the sprawl (at least, not all the time), it's to break it up. And people need greenery around, so it's just a good decision in general.

But the super huge amounts of single-use zoning that go on in some places is a really bad idea. Yes, sure, it can be terrible if a nightclub opened up right next to your house (though people who moved in after some sort of venue was already there should have their ability to complain about unchanged noise levels rescinded), but the idea that you just have swathes and swathes of houses but all the amenities are inaccessible except by car is utterly ridiculous and inefficient.

I've never lived further than an old lady could walk from some sort of convenient shopping. Maybe not a big supermarket, but things like very basic groceries and household items? Yeah.

The way you sprawl can have a huge impact though. London hasn’t just sprawled around what was once Middlesex, it’s also spawned the London commuter belt. However, that belt is connected to London primarily by railroad rather than roads. Commuter towns exist as distinct town entities with their own internal economy and enough density that you don’t need a car to get about town, while the public transport (both within the town and from the town to London) means you don’t need a car to get into work.

Suburbs and commuter towns are very different forms of sprawl and have different environmental impacts.

Though we also now have to consider the shift to home/remote working. If you’re able to do a job remotely and only enter an office space on occasion that both frees up space in urban centres and means people can be more spread out. The cascading reduction in office support jobs (both direct in the form of say office cleaners and indirect in the form of stuff life coffee shops aimed at sleepy commuters) could then further compound the reduction in sprawl pressure.

The corner/village shop is probably a key fixture of British urban planning, it enables areas to self-sustain on at least some level.

Edited by Silasw on May 22nd 2022 at 9:32:19 AM

I've also never lived further than I can walk from a supermarket (y'know, that I can walk now or like when I was 10+, not that I could've done when I was 2). Admittedly, for most of my life that was still under a motorway bridge and through a park as well as a few miles, but hey; actually a pleasant walk except for the last stretch from the park exit to actually get to the shopping part of the town centre. Though I think the only time I ever actually did that whole journey was when I felt like getting a sandwich.

From what I remember of US city planning, even if you were that far from something (hardly practical for large-scale shopping), there'd still be a complete deficit of adequate pathing for it unless you were already in the dead centre of a major urban area. <_>

Edited by RainehDaze on May 22nd 2022 at 11:02:37 AM

I will point out that not everywhere in the US is as averse to other modes of transportation than personal cars, or unwalkable. I live just outside of Boston, and it's a mixed-use area where I can walk to a lot of what I need, or take pubic transportation (bus and subway). Condos and duplexes mixed in among single-family homes. And there are tons of bikers - quite a few bike paths and bike lanes. I gave up my car not long after I moved to my current place, because I just wouldn't use it. Lots of trees and open space too - not that that completely mitigates heat island effects, unfortunately.

A lot of the basic street patterning was there before there even were cars, though. Our roads are famously crazy (grid what grid?) and the traffic is ridiculous. ...I'd probably be more at home in a lot of places in Europe than in a lot of other places in the US.

I think it says a lot that organic road development is considered crazy over there.

I don't know if it counts as urban planning, but it feels adjacent enough to be worth mentionning.

Here in Montreal, the City has been planting nothing but male, pollen-producing trees in the past few decades because female trees bear seeds, and those seeds can sometimes be a public disturbance due to littering the ground or falling on people. As such, the allergy seasons each year has been worsening and it becomes increasingly difficult to deal with it.

So, if you've been having trouble with allergy season the past few years, that might be why. And tell your city planners to plant female trees.

@ techno156

The arcology concept runs into various troubles aside from the ones Silas W mentioned. For one, there's waste disposal, which is the same problem that the high buildings of Dubai currently have. The other is water supply since an arcology would basically become a black hole in resources given how much water is going there and, if something breaks, the impact of a shortage is that much bigger.

Then there are structural limitations that make an arcology impractical, tall buildings by default tend to suffer much more from earthquakes and wind currents so building an arcology, which is supposed to house everything, becomes a very brittle point of failure and, if something fails in the inside, it's not like it can be repaired since the entire point is that everything is bundled together.

And finally, there's cost issues to consider, if arcologies really are meant to have everything from parks to houses and shopping centres, that basically means desigining a building that can withstand all of that weight and more. It really becomes a money sink when you think about it because of how cheaper it is in perspective to just let building rest on the ground.

@ Silas W

I do remember seeing the concept of pedestrianising cities becoming more popular with historical centres, both as a way to protect the buildings and as a way to make it more comfortable for the tourists to go around. It's a good idea since that also serves as a push back against the car though there are some areas in which it can be done and others in which it can depending on zoning and car flow.

@ Galadriel

While sprawl is more or less inevitable, it can be contained if you somewhat restrict the "house with a yard" model for the mixing zoning you mention, it also lessens the impact of traffic since people don't have to travel far to get their groceries or the like.

The housing shortage and high prices though are a different matter and that goes into the problems of housing bubbles.

This was talked before in the economical thread but I will sum it up a bit, the basic problem is that real state tends to be deflationary property (it increase in value in time) due to the way cities have grown and consolidated as core centres of wealth and education, this mean in practice that buying a property has a dual component to its price: the property itself and the location of the property, a wealthy and dynamic city like New York will always demand high prices because of the number of opportunities there.

This can be solved in two ways: on a metropolitan level, the mayor of a city could finance creating housing buildings at undermarket value to pop the bubble, though this is not exactly politically convenient since there's a NIMBY component to that high price as it keeps "those people" from living in places they shouldn't be. On a nation-wide scale, you basically need to reroute the channels of wealth outside of the established so that the inner and rural areas can also become an attractive location of opportunity, and thus lowering the prices overall.

In Canada, housing prices are high almost everywhere, and while about 1/5 of work is now remote, the remainer isn’t. People live in cities because job opportunities are there, as well as amenities, as well as a diversity of cultures. A small town cannot have the same job opportunities as a big city, because it doesn’t have the same diversity of demand.

And remote work has created new housing issues - prices in smaller cities and towns have skyrocketed as people with jobs in Toronto but the abiliity to work remotely flee the city for somewhere they can actually afford. Not that this has made prices in Toronto any more reasonable.

We thought it was a bubble for a long time, but it’s not; it’s a shortage of homes. The problem isn’t just overvaluation, it’s that supply is genuinely far short of demand. While it’s essential to deal with speculation and prevent homes being left empty as investment properties, that’s not the whole of the problem - Vancouver has high foreign-owner taxes plus high vacant-properties taxes and is still seeing major price increases, esp. since the pandemic.

We’re talking a 50% rise in housing prices since the pandemic started. In that kind of a crisis, my position is: I support housing anywhere, everywhere, and of all kinds, and I’ve no time for hair-splitting or NIMB Yism. I strongly agree with more density, but there will be both density and sprawl, not one or the other, and even with both prices won’t quickly come back into the affordable range even for the middle class.

Basically, I’m not talking about a Manhattan or San Francisco problem, I’m talking about a national problem.

Edited by Galadriel on May 22nd 2022 at 11:37:19 AM

Mass-building houses is kind of the time to build things correctly. You wouldn't get a better opportunity for it.

"On a nation-wide scale, you basically need to reroute the channels of wealth outside of the established so that the inner and rural areas can also become an attractive location of opportunity, and thus lowering the prices overall."

Interesting. How is this done?

@ Galadriel

In that case, well, I agree with you, sprawl and height would be needed to cover the demand. I still think you will have to get the public system involved so that the supply actually covers the demand of housing in Canada. The private system will not be of help here because even if it the supply cover the demand, it will not sell at any price below market value.

@ De Marquis

First, you need to interconnect everything. Infrastructure is key in helping wealth get out of the core centres and into other places, trains are also important because that way you can link up diverse locations at a low expense, which is essential in closing the wealth gap as the purchasing power of a population now tends to decrease as one moves away from the big cities.

Next is investing in those areas, which will have to involve public or public-private money since private investment likes to stay in the established cores. This is pretty much where Keynes and the neomercantilist arguments take force because wealth is like a river, and unless you direct the river yourself it will flow through the path of least resistance all the time, and the more the river passes through the same place, the less resistance it will encounter.

Now, what exactly can be invested in those areas is the later phase, production areas like the rural ones could always use a bit of help in getting their businesses growing and further linked to the national market. Education is also another generator of wealth but this also gets into how public universities are managed and I'm not sure how bad is the situation in the United States, making it more accesible though will get more people setting up shop to cover all necessities that a university could require.

It's a complex problem, but it's not without solution, it just needs constant effort to get the results down the line.

Trains are very cool. Though they would be cooler if we the people of the United States did what my older brother said they do in Europe: have separate lines for passenger and freight trains.

This Swiss person has seen plenty of freight trains passing through railway stops, so I'd question that assessment. I think the main difference is that our railways have a higher capacity than the US ones and that many of our countries have all rail lines run by the same company so that we don't get a coordination nightmare.