We're fairly business focused, so when someone goes man I wish there was a way to meet people, they create a .com to help people meet (filled with bots) instead of trying to actually meet people.
At any rate, bars DO exist in the United States and last I heard they didn't all go out of business in the last week.
Because we have mainstreets, buildings, blocks, community centers, parks, American-style squares, and so on. The sense of community that Americans are hungry for is ultimately the post war sort that has been dying out in recent decades; the ideal. We are a country in transition but the transition will probably not be shortened through planning, that is a bit too close to the dying post war ideal. Growing pains, we are still young.
> The sense of community that Americans are hungry for
But also, we only hear the loud,
lonely voices yelling online. The people that aren't terminally online, and have great offline community aren't going to go find places where people are being depressing lonely and try and get everyone to touch grass. In science, that'd be a sampling bias.
People will say they want these things and then move to some far flung enclave of a suburb neighborhood, vote against transit and bike lanes, vote to widen highways, and fight removing parking minimums.
Mere blocks from Union Square is http://frontier tower.io, a 16 story commercial building that was almost a we work. These German investors bought the building and turned it into a vertical village, a community. If you're in San Francisco and looking for community, look there!
Squares don’t create activity — activity creates squares. In other words, “People do not use city parks and squares because they are parks and squares, but because of the uses to which adjoining streets put them.” -The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs
I love this book, and it is used in many Urban Planning courses. She notes that Rockefeller Plaza works because it borrows life from the city. It is surrounded by offices, shops, restaurants, transit and used all day by different groups (workers, tourists, skaters, diners). Rockefeller Plaza succeeds because it is intensely connected to daily life and fed by continuous pedestrian traffic.
A good square is a place where a human being can be. That means if you want it to be vibrant the connecting streets also have to be places where humans want/need to be. And I specifically mean humans who walk and not cars. But how do they get there if you need to keep cars out?
Other reasons my european mind can think of why this doesn't work in the US:
- weird car-centric zoning regulations that lead to weirdly unorganic space use. Where I have my grocery store, my gym, my record shop and my doctor all within walking distance of my home that would be often utopian in the US. Good spaces are mixed spaces, and for that mixing has to be allowed
- generally an egoistic cut-throat society, where some would rather burn the money, than risk the chance of having someone else profit from it. But good public spaces thrive from the surrounding owners caring about the public spaces and the people within it as well.
- commercial interest trumps everything. In Europe many nice places are surounded by shops/redtaurants that are family owned for generations. And while economics do play a role also in Europe, they are not the be-all and end-all, when it comes to decisions. If your business has meaning to your whole family, you decide differently than a faceless megacorp that looks to extract value like a leech from everything that makes life worth living
Part of the country doesn’t even like many of the others. Let’s fix that. Sometimes I wonder if having all the US teams play against each other with fake cities or states attached to them (because the players aren’t even from that area) hurts more than helps.
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[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 45.8 ms ] threadAt any rate, bars DO exist in the United States and last I heard they didn't all go out of business in the last week.
But also, we only hear the loud, lonely voices yelling online. The people that aren't terminally online, and have great offline community aren't going to go find places where people are being depressing lonely and try and get everyone to touch grass. In science, that'd be a sampling bias.
The crime wave of the 80s and 90s really messed up urban architecture.
Parks got a similar reputation- even now there’s still a “good park”/“bad park” mentality.
Mass surveillance has its downsides, but safer public spaces is not one.
Citation needed.
I love this book, and it is used in many Urban Planning courses. She notes that Rockefeller Plaza works because it borrows life from the city. It is surrounded by offices, shops, restaurants, transit and used all day by different groups (workers, tourists, skaters, diners). Rockefeller Plaza succeeds because it is intensely connected to daily life and fed by continuous pedestrian traffic.
Other reasons my european mind can think of why this doesn't work in the US:
- weird car-centric zoning regulations that lead to weirdly unorganic space use. Where I have my grocery store, my gym, my record shop and my doctor all within walking distance of my home that would be often utopian in the US. Good spaces are mixed spaces, and for that mixing has to be allowed
- generally an egoistic cut-throat society, where some would rather burn the money, than risk the chance of having someone else profit from it. But good public spaces thrive from the surrounding owners caring about the public spaces and the people within it as well.
- commercial interest trumps everything. In Europe many nice places are surounded by shops/redtaurants that are family owned for generations. And while economics do play a role also in Europe, they are not the be-all and end-all, when it comes to decisions. If your business has meaning to your whole family, you decide differently than a faceless megacorp that looks to extract value like a leech from everything that makes life worth living