As a Dutchman, I'll never understand the American idea that "suburban feel" has to mean "fully detached houses". I mean, I live in a country where nearly all suburbs and small towns consist of mostly connected houses - duplexes, triplexes, hexadecaplexes (pardon if my Latin fails me here), and so on.
The big downside to such housing (I live in the middle of a chain of 20-odd connected houses) is that gardens are small-ish and close to the neighbours'. If they barbecue, you're sitting in the smoke. But hey, this isn't Texas, people only grill every so often. At the same time, the benefits are enormous: because suburban density is higher, everything is biking distance, even in bigger cities. You need a car for less, which means that there's less cars, so streets are safer.
The local suburban shopping areas are well equipped and nearby (biking distance and often walking distance). In my suburb, there's a few "shopping areas", i.e. street corners with a supermarket and a bunch of other shops (drugstore, kebab parlor, clothes maybe, etc). These shopping areas are not even a kilometer apart from one another. If you live halfway two then you can walk 500m either direction and have sufficient facilities for your daily needs. These shops can stay in business because the suburb is relatively densely populated. If we had detached housing everywhere, the shops would need to be bigger (to make it worth driving to), and thus further away (cheaper rent), and thus need big tarmac parking lots, making it harder in turn to visit multiple shops in a row, etc. It's just a nasty downward spiral.
I'm really glad the Dutch housing culture developed this way. I mean even small towns in cheap areas are built this way, even if the ground prices would mean detached houses are affordable for most. People just want to live close to facilities. Connected housing is the best backyard-included way to accomplish that.
One of the things I miss most about Europe is how even small tiny villages full of detached housing tend to cluster together so everything is walking distance. Keeps the good arable land free for agriculture.
I guess this didn't happen in most of USA because agriculture was already industrialized by the time suburbia was invented. Not to mention the automobile. So everything is spraaaaawling. Even American cities tend to sprawl out endlessly if they can (think LA).
It's quite a shame. SF, NYC, and a handful of others seem like the only places you can live in this country without driving everywhere all the time :/
Depends on what you mean by "everything". Sure, every house in that village is within walking distance. But villages of this size typically don't have any amenities. Back in the good ol' days, there used to be at least some businesses in the villages themselves, but nowadays you have to commute to the next town to reach any supermarkets and amenities (where "town" is anything above about 5,000 inhabitants).
Source: Live in Germany, in a big city. Have relatives living in villages like the picture shows.
The difference goes back to the origin. "Suburbs" in the US sense were largely about two things originally: a "country lifestyle" and cars.
The whole idea was to escape urban density and mimic spacious country living where a home can go back to being "a castle," without all the interdependence that density brings. Sites were big and country-like.
Cars were at the heart of the whole idea, as the enabler. Suburbs were designed for cars. The idea was that cars freed designers (like FLW) from needing to worry about walkability.
I think to find a Dutch equivalent, you probably need to look to more rural areas, like the old cattle farming villages near Groningen. Those villages and surrounding countryside are more like a 1950s designed suburb than a "suburb" of Rotterdam.
What you are describing is a good model, and it suites what more people want today. It just isn't closely related to the suburbs that exist I. The US, Australia and other places that expanded with those models in the 50s & 60s.
Doesn't it also have something to do with the fact that the US has so much more land compared to the amount of people who live there (population density) in comparison to Europe? Basically, we don't have a lot of land in Europe. And given ancient rights, not a lot of land was readily available to simply sprawl suburbia onto.
Not that your factors don't matter, but I think there are additional factors for why it never took off in Europe. Lest we forget, Europeans were also very excited about the car in the 1950s/60s/70s. Several bigger cities in Europe tore down central parts to make way for cars. Stockholm comes to mind. Which is a damn shame.
It does, for sure... especially in the Netherlands. Part of the way these practicalities played a role was/is via design philosophies.
I just think we should keep in mind that in large part, the US-like suburb system works as it was designed to. It was intentionally designed to enable a certain, the car-centric lifestyle enables spaciousness/sprawl. It's not an unintended consequence.
Tastes have shifted (especially among architects and such) and it is now seen as "sprawl necessitates cars" rather than "cars enable spaciousness." Walkability is seen as a value and sprawl is seen as a barrier to it. When these designs were made, spaciousness was seen as a value and cars were seen as an enabler of it.
A lot of the issues we see now are (a) problems of scale. What happens when a city already has 1m suburban homes. (b) changing values/tastes.
I spent five minutes googling for this to no avail. I really want to know this. If you're right, then why do I do my taxes in hexadecimal and not in decaheximal?
Does anyone know what "(Latin numeral)-ex" is called? I'm not even sure what term to search for :-)
I know you're trying to do the kind of non-witty sarcasm that usually just yields endless downvotes on HN, but you're onto something that I hadn't considered. I don't associate cars with anything, culturally. They're just a thing I use, like the dishwasher. But if there's a deep cultural idea that "car = freedom" then a residential area built around cars makes a lot more sense.
This is absolutely part of the American cultural bedrock. The gap-year road-trip, the teenager's first car, every single fast and furious movie... A really good recent example of this sort of meme is the movie Baby Driver. American culture equates driving with freedom, youth, and good times. Getting a car is a rite of passage in a lot of US communities.
>
Biking is for liberals and not needing a car is socialism...
Regulating that to drive a car, you need a driver's license is dictatorship. Building cities so that you need a car is enslaving the public to the car industry.
You can take this further. Having lived both styles you mention, plus the ultra dense, I (tongue-in-cheek) don't understand how a Dutchman's idea of "suburban feel" has to means "connected houses".
In a metropolis, almost everything is a few minutes walk away...and lots of it. Not a "kebab parlor" for eating, but hundreds of different restaurants (from every culture at every price point). Not a few "shopping areas" but first class shopping malls. These shopping malls aren't even _500m apart_ from each other, but directly connected. Public transport is great and cheap. This variety and, in many cases, extreme multiculturalism, exists because of dense population.
If there's on downside it's likely that some of these cities appear to be poorly planned: little green space and a lot of pollution. But not all (anecdotally, the ones worth living seem to have relatively few cars, but maybe that's a correlation).
This is how I was discussing with someone how growth should be. Rather than allowing developers to build a 1000 unit monstrosity (well monstrosities may also be allowed but within limits), allow the city to grow by relaxing limits on everyone and you will see that over 20 years, some of the new supply will come from the houses already there.
However today, I have seen examples in bay area, cities get pitted against residents (some call them nimbys but I do not agree with the characterization) by approving these monstrosities I mention and keeping the rules fairly rigid for ordinary homeowners. Some say it is because a) the developers have money to finance the politicians, and b) this allows the councillors to keep the development on the side of the city they do not live in. Not sure if the allegations of nimbyism to their neighborhoods are true, but have seen developer money talk.
The article's example would be a welcome change if cities went this way.
[ Dont want to name cities, but google cities vs residents with some creative search terms (yes I am not giving exact terms) and you will find many examples in bay area. ]
My point was that quadplex would be internally consistent. That then means you can predict the ones you don't already know, is it tenplex or decaplex for example?
In the US I suspect you would rarely hear either term, although tenplex would be more likely. A development of that size would more likely to be in the form of a townhouse, with row house or terraced house being more likely in the UK.
So the author's street doesn't properly have off street parking for everyone meaning if it snows you can't plow. Kids can't play in the street anywhere and you're more likely to get terrible neighbors. I'll pass. My last neighbors used to burn their garbage in their lawn leaving ash to drift onto our cars and the fire department told them to claim it was a cooking fire if anyone complained. I get why people who enjoy cities wouldn't be opposed to this but I'm okay with my property value not going down because the types of people renters brings tend to care less about the neighborhood and having my neighbors far away from my house so they can do their thing and we can do ours without forcing our life choices on each other.
> ...you're more likely to get terrible neighbors. ... the types of people renters brings tend to care less about the neighborhood
Nice classist stereotypes right there. Sounds like the local fire department was not doing their job properly if it simply let your neighbors burn garbage on their property. One way of ensuring "people care about their neighborhood" is to enforce sensible rules like preventing garbage fires.
Simple statistics, not class, wealthy people are just as likely to be terrible neighbors, more people means more chances for terrible neighbors regardless of class. I've also been a renter numerous times. Nearly no one in a rental property wants to invest the hundreds of dollars into heavy landscaping when they could be evicted and most rental property owners won't see a return on investment so don't do it.
The neighbors I had were terrible neighbors but they were home owners that were close to my house. The fire department in question literally writes the rules for fires, despite more than one fire where children were killed in town they still never had a problem with burning roofing tiles, bonfires large enough to burn 30 foot trees, etc. While I agree with you that enforcing sensible rules is a way to make better neighbors it is still more likely that higher numbers of neighbors leads to higher possibility of poor neighbors.
I've lived in multiple cities in multiple states, nearly all in fairly nice apartment or shared spaces so I'm definitely not limiting my dislike to poor areas. I grew up relatively poorer than my area and have been fortunate to get where I am by a lot of hard work and good luck, I also spend much of my free time working to help disadvantaged people within my community. So while I can see how you might have mistook my writing as classiest it was definitely not intended as such, noise complaints with neighbors are super common, as are smoke leaking through walls and floors, animals not being properly trained (my wife was attacked by such a dog), property and shared expenses disputes are all more likely in shared property. Now much of this can be handled by a good landlord, however the term slumlord exists for a reason. While this doesn't bother some people it bothers me a lot.
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[ 7.7 ms ] story [ 70.2 ms ] threadThe big downside to such housing (I live in the middle of a chain of 20-odd connected houses) is that gardens are small-ish and close to the neighbours'. If they barbecue, you're sitting in the smoke. But hey, this isn't Texas, people only grill every so often. At the same time, the benefits are enormous: because suburban density is higher, everything is biking distance, even in bigger cities. You need a car for less, which means that there's less cars, so streets are safer.
The local suburban shopping areas are well equipped and nearby (biking distance and often walking distance). In my suburb, there's a few "shopping areas", i.e. street corners with a supermarket and a bunch of other shops (drugstore, kebab parlor, clothes maybe, etc). These shopping areas are not even a kilometer apart from one another. If you live halfway two then you can walk 500m either direction and have sufficient facilities for your daily needs. These shops can stay in business because the suburb is relatively densely populated. If we had detached housing everywhere, the shops would need to be bigger (to make it worth driving to), and thus further away (cheaper rent), and thus need big tarmac parking lots, making it harder in turn to visit multiple shops in a row, etc. It's just a nasty downward spiral.
I'm really glad the Dutch housing culture developed this way. I mean even small towns in cheap areas are built this way, even if the ground prices would mean detached houses are affordable for most. People just want to live close to facilities. Connected housing is the best backyard-included way to accomplish that.
Here's an example from google: https://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=https%3A%2F%2Fcache.des...
I guess this didn't happen in most of USA because agriculture was already industrialized by the time suburbia was invented. Not to mention the automobile. So everything is spraaaaawling. Even American cities tend to sprawl out endlessly if they can (think LA).
It's quite a shame. SF, NYC, and a handful of others seem like the only places you can live in this country without driving everywhere all the time :/
Depends on what you mean by "everything". Sure, every house in that village is within walking distance. But villages of this size typically don't have any amenities. Back in the good ol' days, there used to be at least some businesses in the villages themselves, but nowadays you have to commute to the next town to reach any supermarkets and amenities (where "town" is anything above about 5,000 inhabitants).
Source: Live in Germany, in a big city. Have relatives living in villages like the picture shows.
The whole idea was to escape urban density and mimic spacious country living where a home can go back to being "a castle," without all the interdependence that density brings. Sites were big and country-like.
Cars were at the heart of the whole idea, as the enabler. Suburbs were designed for cars. The idea was that cars freed designers (like FLW) from needing to worry about walkability.
I think to find a Dutch equivalent, you probably need to look to more rural areas, like the old cattle farming villages near Groningen. Those villages and surrounding countryside are more like a 1950s designed suburb than a "suburb" of Rotterdam.
What you are describing is a good model, and it suites what more people want today. It just isn't closely related to the suburbs that exist I. The US, Australia and other places that expanded with those models in the 50s & 60s.
Not that your factors don't matter, but I think there are additional factors for why it never took off in Europe. Lest we forget, Europeans were also very excited about the car in the 1950s/60s/70s. Several bigger cities in Europe tore down central parts to make way for cars. Stockholm comes to mind. Which is a damn shame.
I just think we should keep in mind that in large part, the US-like suburb system works as it was designed to. It was intentionally designed to enable a certain, the car-centric lifestyle enables spaciousness/sprawl. It's not an unintended consequence.
Tastes have shifted (especially among architects and such) and it is now seen as "sprawl necessitates cars" rather than "cars enable spaciousness." Walkability is seen as a value and sprawl is seen as a barrier to it. When these designs were made, spaciousness was seen as a value and cars were seen as an enabler of it.
A lot of the issues we see now are (a) problems of scale. What happens when a city already has 1m suburban homes. (b) changing values/tastes.
decahexaplexes, I think.
Does anyone know what "(Latin numeral)-ex" is called? I'm not even sure what term to search for :-)
Also is it even Latin? Greek, maybe? A mix?
According to that page, both hexadeca- and decahexa- are valid. I think hexadeca- is more common. You gave on example, another is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IUPAC_numerical_multiplier.
It's about time the political left reclaimed that word.
Regulating that to drive a car, you need a driver's license is dictatorship. Building cities so that you need a car is enslaving the public to the car industry.
In a metropolis, almost everything is a few minutes walk away...and lots of it. Not a "kebab parlor" for eating, but hundreds of different restaurants (from every culture at every price point). Not a few "shopping areas" but first class shopping malls. These shopping malls aren't even _500m apart_ from each other, but directly connected. Public transport is great and cheap. This variety and, in many cases, extreme multiculturalism, exists because of dense population.
If there's on downside it's likely that some of these cities appear to be poorly planned: little green space and a lot of pollution. But not all (anecdotally, the ones worth living seem to have relatively few cars, but maybe that's a correlation).
I’m extremely sensitive to sound and absolutely cannot share any walls with anyone.
However today, I have seen examples in bay area, cities get pitted against residents (some call them nimbys but I do not agree with the characterization) by approving these monstrosities I mention and keeping the rules fairly rigid for ordinary homeowners. Some say it is because a) the developers have money to finance the politicians, and b) this allows the councillors to keep the development on the side of the city they do not live in. Not sure if the allegations of nimbyism to their neighborhoods are true, but have seen developer money talk.
The article's example would be a welcome change if cities went this way.
[ Dont want to name cities, but google cities vs residents with some creative search terms (yes I am not giving exact terms) and you will find many examples in bay area. ]
"Duplexes, triplexes and fourplexes"
Why not quadplexes? The author also uses 'oneplex'.
In the US I suspect you would rarely hear either term, although tenplex would be more likely. A development of that size would more likely to be in the form of a townhouse, with row house or terraced house being more likely in the UK.
Nice classist stereotypes right there. Sounds like the local fire department was not doing their job properly if it simply let your neighbors burn garbage on their property. One way of ensuring "people care about their neighborhood" is to enforce sensible rules like preventing garbage fires.
The neighbors I had were terrible neighbors but they were home owners that were close to my house. The fire department in question literally writes the rules for fires, despite more than one fire where children were killed in town they still never had a problem with burning roofing tiles, bonfires large enough to burn 30 foot trees, etc. While I agree with you that enforcing sensible rules is a way to make better neighbors it is still more likely that higher numbers of neighbors leads to higher possibility of poor neighbors.
I've lived in multiple cities in multiple states, nearly all in fairly nice apartment or shared spaces so I'm definitely not limiting my dislike to poor areas. I grew up relatively poorer than my area and have been fortunate to get where I am by a lot of hard work and good luck, I also spend much of my free time working to help disadvantaged people within my community. So while I can see how you might have mistook my writing as classiest it was definitely not intended as such, noise complaints with neighbors are super common, as are smoke leaking through walls and floors, animals not being properly trained (my wife was attacked by such a dog), property and shared expenses disputes are all more likely in shared property. Now much of this can be handled by a good landlord, however the term slumlord exists for a reason. While this doesn't bother some people it bothers me a lot.