First, European countries (and even Canada to some extent) have to take a serious look at modern air conditioning systems... but so does the United States. The US already has AC prevalent, but it's paying too much for the AC that it is getting while lagging regulation permission for the modern systems that would cut energy costs a lot. It's only midlly reassuring that "regulation is a problem everywhere".
Two, just like you can't visit Times Square only and say that New York is a failure of urbanism, the tourist traps in European cities are very much not representative of the lifestyles of most residents... possibly any residents in a lot of cases. (Paris perhaps being an exception). It's quite funny that architecturally-notable urban residences - sorry to only come up with two Brutalist examples, but Habitat 67 and The Barbican - are not free-to-roam places to outsiders. As far as where-the-tourists-go, there are deep similarities between US cities and European cities in these regards. Even a lot of newly-developed US towns have included at least one mall-like area that may be situated and decorated, for its visitors, like an ancient city. And the modern strip mall is basically a one-sided version of this.
Three, urbanists aren't a monolith, and the vast majority of them do not want to remake 90% of America to be like medieval cathedral squares (although, hey, I noticed a lot of town squares like that in Iowa during RAGBRAI - we don't have to tell anyone to do anything, apparently). What I think is agreed broadly is that people should have the option to not need a car every day, or to need one minimally, by way of creating new places (when it is fit to do so) that include walkability with all the other concerns. We point out that people like visiting places that are walkable - Disneyland, Vienna's tourist traps, Times Square - and that people aren't happy with shopping centers that take up 100 acres and have completely detached, distant buildings for sundry items, and that such designs have repeatedly failed and been demolished.
Finally, Europe's attachment to "old buildings" is not quite the superiority talking point for Americans that they think it is. Frankly, it's a lesson in how we must deal with people who want to preserve everything here in the US, including buildings that are barely older than 50. Some of that preservation is a worthy and sensible pursuit! But a lot of it very clearly isn't, and we're getting manipulated by people who argue in bad faith or are slightly deranged about nostalgia. Preservation must be done with a lot more purpose than what we see from selfish attempts to sabotage redevelopment.
Yeah, I thought a lot about the tension between preservation and building stuff. Noted in another comment that Japanese cities gave me a much livelier impression, and feel like places that are still in progress. They don’t exactly have “old towns” where nothing much happens anymore. They have old buildings but overall feel more lived-in. So I’d say Japan inspires me wrt urbanism a lot more than Europe
European cities really do give off the same feeling I sometimes get from San Francisco or New York: their ancestors built great cities, but had the people currently in charge been running things back then they would never, ever have allowed that to happen.
Yep, exactly. I didn't want to go too far afield here so I'll probably write a follow-up, but I got a *totally* different vibe from Japanese cities when we visited Japan last year. Japan made me very enthusiastic about urbanism/city life/great public space/transit/etc. The Japanese cities feel unselfconsciously lived in, and like the people who live in them now are still part of them. I'm curious what exactly causes that difference.
That's a very good summary of how American cities make me feel. It's an obstacle to buying into the boosterism I get from some of my well-intentioned American urbanist friends. So much of what counts for the US's best urban spaces feels like it's running on inertia and way too self-conscious.
“I’d like to know how many people who read at a kindergarten level are visiting a museum of cultural history.”
In Europe, there are probably a lot of people with a kindergarten level knowledge of English - their second, third or fourth language. Providing easy to understand English explanations is a workable substitute to providing explanations in 70+ languages.
I don’t know why they didn’t make the effort over all of the exhibits, if I was there I would ask. Can you say more about what that section was? From the photo, it seems like it’s an overview of the whole museum. If that’s the case, then it makes sense that if they were only going to put resources to doing a small amount of English as a Second Language (ESL) signage, they would make it in an introductory setting.
This is a good point, but that isn't how they presented it. It says this, which talks about literacy but not language or English proficiency per se:
Why is plain language used in the Fortress Museum?
We aim to reach people and be an accessible museum for all. That's why we design our exhibits and programmes to be inclusive and accessible to as many visitors as possible. All visitors should have access to art and culture.
Low literacy is a reality in Europe, too: around one fifth of the population has limited reading skills.
For this reason, the texts are written in plain and simple language. This simplified form of everyday language avoids foreign words and uses short sentences wherever possible.
This does not compromise scholarly standards or the objectivity of the presentation. All content is presented in accordance with the current state of research.
The scope of the content is no less extensive — it is simply presented in an easily understandable form.
We wish you a fascinating and rewarding visit to the exhibition.
I'm glad Japan has already come up in other comments, and I'm glad it left you feeling encouraged. It's very strange and frustrating watching so much of the American urbanism debate get taken up by a proxy war over whether Europe is good or not. People on both sides of it tend to exhibit a strange complex about Europe that has them fixated on it as a basis of comparison, to the exclusion of anywhere else.
Meanwhile, Japan has a higher air conditioning adoption rate than the United States (and more modern units), despite its per capita GDP having slipped below Italy's. Its most populated areas sit at the same latitude as the American South and have a similar climate, so we can neatly set aside all debates about "it didn't used to be this hot here" and so on. As I think you noticed, Japan has a utilitarian mindset toward the built environment somewhat similar to Americans', just turned to different priorities, and almost none of the self-flagellation that gets American conservatives so exasperated with Europeans. American anti-urbanists in my experience like to wave off Japan, and "first world Asia" in general, as too culturally different to be a useful comparison, but I think for the purpose of these conversations, it is more similar to US than Europe.
The question then turns to whether the areas where Japan and the US do dramatically differ are an inevitability or not. Is Japan's density and spirit of cooperation simply a byproduct of limited land and frequent natural disasters that cannot be reproduced elsewhere? Is the quality of its public spaces, in turn, downstream of people not having a whole lot of private space? Maybe to some degree, but I really want to believe these things are not so deterministic. It's not too hard for me to imagine an American city where things become somewhat like Japan, but with larger homes and more amenities reflecting Americans' greater wealth and land availability. It's entirely possible to stack a bunch of roomy city apartments right next to each other, if that's what's desired.
I really dislike American-style suburban living, I'm having trouble identifying parts of the country that don't work that way, and leaving again would be difficult for all sorts of reasons, so I hope this is possible. There's some survey out that I need to find, allegedly showing about a 55/45 split among Americans between preference for more space and local amenities, so, if true, it's a minority preference, but not overwhelmingly so.
Lately I feel like American tolerance for antisocial behavior may be at the root of everything, or at least, I feel like much could be learned about what we're actually dealing with if fears about safety and order were removed from the picture. It's also extremely personally infuriating (I live in a not very nice neighborhood because it's close to work and it happens to be where I found housing I liked that I could afford). Even though it's less sexy than other topics, I can feel most of my energy being drawn to anti-disorder arguments. After all, you can build the most amazing midsize point access block imaginable, and still not many people will want to live there if the surrounding area is messy and feels unsafe. Hopefully it could get some conservatives onboard, too. It's disturbing how many of them are ready to assume I'm soft on crime just because I'm a liberal, until I make my feelings clear to them.
I kinda feel like we're turning a corner on acceptance of anti-social behavior, largely because it's gotten so out of hand. Young folks seem pretty fed up about it. And it's always funny hearing about the crazy stuff our boomer parents used to do that I never hear from my own generation. Most of us just stay inside playing video games these days, rather than drinking and vandalizing things. That could all just be anecdata, though.
I really hope so. I can't stand it, and everything I want out of my environment is incompatible with it. Not that people staying home playing video games all the time is great, either, but one step at a time I guess...
I suspect the accessible language thing might be for tourists from places like China, who have knowledge of some English, but not German. The accessible language would be easier to put into a translation app and get a coherent result. It also means they don't have to pay a bunch of translators to put the same message in dozens of different languages on a website accessible by QR code.
It's also important to note that it's not just international tourists who go to museums. Hardly anything in the museums at Les Invalides was in English or any other European language. There were school groups and locals aplenty.
Another thing to realize is that Europeans hate tourism, even as they recognize the importance of it for their economies. There's some passive aggression there and a definite lament that Americans only think of their countries as castles and cathedrals.
Interesting. Yeah likely, but fwiw that isn't how they explain it. This was text introducing the simple language exhibit:
Why is plain language used in the Fortress Museum?
We aim to reach people and be an accessible museum for all. That's why we design our exhibits and programmes to be inclusive and accessible to as many visitors as possible. All visitors should have access to art and culture.
Low literacy is a reality in Europe, too: around one fifth of the population has limited reading skills.
For this reason, the texts are written in plain and simple language. This simplified form of everyday language avoids foreign words and uses short sentences wherever possible.
This does not compromise scholarly standards or the objectivity of the presentation. All content is presented in accordance with the current state of research.
The scope of the content is no less extensive — it is simply presented in an easily understandable form.
We wish you a fascinating and rewarding visit to the exhibition.
Good observations but I think America is also getting an ossified bureaucracy that seems to forbid us from building on the scale and speed that we used to! Just read the book Abundance (not an ironic title) for many examples ! Maybe the latest housing bill will start to make it easier to build….
A friend refers to the YIMBY movement as Euro-Fetishization. That if we only had narrower streets with 6 story apartments on both sides, our housing crisis would be solved.
We need an ala carte menu of what works and what doesn’t from our European brethren. We need to acknowledge that some aspects of suburbia ARE nice.
Many European cities were first built on land because it was defensible. North America provided much more space- the flatter parts at least. We need to be building with a thought to both what we want now our cities to be and how well those choices will age.
And in regard to this, I noted to a few other folks that Japanese cities gave me a totally different feel. Japan is kind of similar in having a very long history and a less dynamic economy than in the past, but the cities there feel really unselfconsciously lived-in a way that I feel less in Europe or the United States. I'm trying to figure out why I sense that difference, and possibly it's because Japan has sort of not undergone "modernism" and never really broke with its past, so there isn't this division between "That's our history and we have to preserve it like an artifact" and "This is what we do now." Not sure though.
Yeah, totally. A lot of Europe is just path dependency, we did build great cities in America in that dense/compact pattern, but they’re really just divergent situations. I’m being tongue in cheek largely but I think it’s true that “Europe” is not really how Europe lives for the most part. Their modern suburbs/outer urban areas are more urban than ours but not in a dramatically different way. The outer parts of Salzburg, where we stayed at a little b&b, reminded me a lot of an old American small town/streetcar suburb. I largely feel we can relearn most of this stuff from our own history, and that a lot of our towns and small cities are underappreciated
I have no idea what the deal with AC is supposed to be in France. It can't be generalized to Europe in total because I don't think there's any laws about it in Poland but also they apparently still manage to have five times as much of them as we?
We have AC and public spaces I frequent have AC but I live in a capital. I guess I wouldn't like to be in the countryside on one of the hottest days of the year. Generally speaking, Warsaw seems to lack most of the things you complain about. It's kind of ugly in places though, and I don't think we can blame it just on WW2 at this point. Also it's the flattest place in Europe and I will try to move to France or Switzerland when I finish uni because I need mountains to live.
When I lived in the Netherlands, my bedroom had windows both sides that were perfect for warm summer nights. Unfortunately, I could not tolerate mosquitoes buzzing around my ears and not to mention being bitten all night.
I've been to Europe many times and while I do enjoy the historic city centers I often get more enjoyment out of wandering around many of the relatively newer less-touristy neighborhoods. While older city centers often have a lot of charm and narrow streets its cool to see some of the more modern features of urbanism (like more parks) and the diversity of architecture across different eras and building types even if they aren't as ornate as the older styles. So many fun nooks and crannies to explore.
Now while I do have a soft spot for European cities in general I'm not naive enough to think they don't drive cars or are much more auto-oriented than they probably should be (to whom much is given much is expected right?) and I have found it quite sobering to learn about how NIMBY European cities can be. Although some of these flaws further illuminate the failures of most US cities:
Madrid loves to drive yet its a beautiful city with an amazing transit system.
There are suburbs full of single-family homes with yards outside of Copenhagen yet Copenhagen is a great city to walk in with great transit and bike infrastructure.
Suburbs and smaller towns in the Netherlands where you can still bike and walk to many places without getting killed.
We've decided to have the worst of both worlds: disconnected and poorly planned suburbs with nearly non-existent transit and dangerously designed roads. You shouldn't need to live in a shoe box, throw out your AC, or have churches from the 1500's to have good urbanism. The thing I mourn most about US cities is not that we aren't Europe clones but we have been deprived of the different flavors of better urbanism you would see around the country if highways through cities and single-family zoning weren't so heavily subsidized. Maybe we would still drive more compared to some parts of the world and have more SFH's but we would definitely have better and more interesting cities!
So much in the urbanism world discussions leaves out that Europeans have had an urban culture for hundreds and hundreds of years (if not thousands), and so they rightly balked at what post-war car culture was doing to their older cities and changed direction. Our cities and towns were mostly very young by comparison, so we didn't have the same attachments. Give us a few hundred years, and we will. The Dutch had their heyday like 400 years ago, for God's sake.
I always think the most interesting part of any European trip is getting out of the city centers, to see how people live. You see more sprawl than you'd expect (as an American), some horrendous housing projects that make the US examples sometimes seem quaint, and just a lot of - surprises. The city centers and town centers are gorgeous and wonderful. But like you said, built by a culture that no longer exists. In fairness, the culture that built the beautiful American towns of the past also doesn't exist, so we share that issue.
Reading this article you might get the idea that Europeans die young compared to Americans. Nothing could be further from the truth - Europeans live some years longer (on average).
The whole AC debate is being presented by the American right as some kind of crime the European elites are committing against their own poorer and older citizens. This is largely nonsense.
The fact is European cities were built without AC because it was not needed until people burnt fossil fuels and caused global warming. It will take some time to retro-fit European cites with AC. Most Amercian cities were built with AC because the climate was such they they always needed it (tho' I have studied in university librarairies around Boston which did not have AC, so this was never 100%).
I acknowedge there are individuals in Europe who have an ideological problem with AC. But you can find people with almost any weird idea (flat earthers, climate change deniers...) if you try hard enough.
Most Europeans I know realize AC is going to be required for the foreseeable future. This change cannot be implemented everywhere, all at once, but already new builds of hospitals and schools are adopting AC. And regular people are out buying AC units for their appartments...
Air conditioning wasn't invented until around 1900. Took another 50 years to take off and arguably wasn't the norm in new residential construction until Reagan was in office.
A week in southern Scotland - two nights in Glasgow, three in Edinburgh, one in an Airbnb halfway between -- was great fun and I enjoyed it very much. This was not in the summer so no heat to deal with.
Anyway to your points it didn't make anyone in my family (we live in central Chicago) feel like we'd want to _live_ there all things considered! LOL honestly
P.S. small correction, okay actually my wife might, provided she got to pick the century (not less than 300 years before now) _and_ could be certain of being born into a noble family....
We already have dense, walkable, air conditioned, and safe urban living in America - just go to New York City (and, to a lesser extent, in the cores of a handful of other cities). Living in New York does have some tradeoffs in terms of getting less space for your money, true, but the tradeoffs are not as extreme as this piece suggestions.
Would most Americans make the trade offs necessary for walkable, dense urbanism? Probably not. But it can simultaneously be true that a majority of Americans prefer car-based, suburban living and that walkable, urban living is nonetheless grossly undersupplied relative to demand.
Yeah I think both of these are true. And more Americans would like it if we had more domestic examples. I do think we would still want our larger private spaces/comforts/etc.
"And the thing is, they’re not really building these things anymore. If America had an extra 1,000 years, we’d be Europe. We’d have houses and cathedrals from the dark ages too. Europe isn’t better at this; they’ve just been around so long, they’ve stopped doing it for longer than we’ve even been around."
While we often associate architecture with permanence, it takes great labor and capitol to keep buildings maintained and adaptable to modern use. So "stopped doing" is a mischaracterization, even if they are not building much new stuff. European summers becoming unbearable is a recent consequence of climate change.
Some years ago we spent a couple of miserable nights in Quebec because I booked an inn with no AC because "what were the chances that it would be too hot in Quebec?"
I grew up in Montreal and in the 1950s I remember days when the temperature was in the 90s (degrees F) and thei air was also dripping with humidity. High temps in summer there are not new, though like everywhere else in Canada they probably have more super hot days per year now.
Why not both? It doesn't have to be all suburbs and sprawl or all dense cities. This is what kills me about this argument, both sides tend to take an all or nothing approach. We can make it just as easy to build better 'urban' environments as it is to build sprawl and let people live where they want to. It won't have the character and history of European cities but that will come with time if we take the care to build nice things.
Absolutely, that's my own view. Some urbanists are really down on suburbia which I think is mistaken but I am definitely not anti-urban. Personally classic small towns are probably my favorite sort of built environment.
First, European countries (and even Canada to some extent) have to take a serious look at modern air conditioning systems... but so does the United States. The US already has AC prevalent, but it's paying too much for the AC that it is getting while lagging regulation permission for the modern systems that would cut energy costs a lot. It's only midlly reassuring that "regulation is a problem everywhere".
Two, just like you can't visit Times Square only and say that New York is a failure of urbanism, the tourist traps in European cities are very much not representative of the lifestyles of most residents... possibly any residents in a lot of cases. (Paris perhaps being an exception). It's quite funny that architecturally-notable urban residences - sorry to only come up with two Brutalist examples, but Habitat 67 and The Barbican - are not free-to-roam places to outsiders. As far as where-the-tourists-go, there are deep similarities between US cities and European cities in these regards. Even a lot of newly-developed US towns have included at least one mall-like area that may be situated and decorated, for its visitors, like an ancient city. And the modern strip mall is basically a one-sided version of this.
Three, urbanists aren't a monolith, and the vast majority of them do not want to remake 90% of America to be like medieval cathedral squares (although, hey, I noticed a lot of town squares like that in Iowa during RAGBRAI - we don't have to tell anyone to do anything, apparently). What I think is agreed broadly is that people should have the option to not need a car every day, or to need one minimally, by way of creating new places (when it is fit to do so) that include walkability with all the other concerns. We point out that people like visiting places that are walkable - Disneyland, Vienna's tourist traps, Times Square - and that people aren't happy with shopping centers that take up 100 acres and have completely detached, distant buildings for sundry items, and that such designs have repeatedly failed and been demolished.
Finally, Europe's attachment to "old buildings" is not quite the superiority talking point for Americans that they think it is. Frankly, it's a lesson in how we must deal with people who want to preserve everything here in the US, including buildings that are barely older than 50. Some of that preservation is a worthy and sensible pursuit! But a lot of it very clearly isn't, and we're getting manipulated by people who argue in bad faith or are slightly deranged about nostalgia. Preservation must be done with a lot more purpose than what we see from selfish attempts to sabotage redevelopment.
Yeah, I thought a lot about the tension between preservation and building stuff. Noted in another comment that Japanese cities gave me a much livelier impression, and feel like places that are still in progress. They don’t exactly have “old towns” where nothing much happens anymore. They have old buildings but overall feel more lived-in. So I’d say Japan inspires me wrt urbanism a lot more than Europe
European cities really do give off the same feeling I sometimes get from San Francisco or New York: their ancestors built great cities, but had the people currently in charge been running things back then they would never, ever have allowed that to happen.
Yep, exactly. I didn't want to go too far afield here so I'll probably write a follow-up, but I got a *totally* different vibe from Japanese cities when we visited Japan last year. Japan made me very enthusiastic about urbanism/city life/great public space/transit/etc. The Japanese cities feel unselfconsciously lived in, and like the people who live in them now are still part of them. I'm curious what exactly causes that difference.
That's a very good summary of how American cities make me feel. It's an obstacle to buying into the boosterism I get from some of my well-intentioned American urbanist friends. So much of what counts for the US's best urban spaces feels like it's running on inertia and way too self-conscious.
“I’d like to know how many people who read at a kindergarten level are visiting a museum of cultural history.”
In Europe, there are probably a lot of people with a kindergarten level knowledge of English - their second, third or fourth language. Providing easy to understand English explanations is a workable substitute to providing explanations in 70+ languages.
I don’t know why they didn’t make the effort over all of the exhibits, if I was there I would ask. Can you say more about what that section was? From the photo, it seems like it’s an overview of the whole museum. If that’s the case, then it makes sense that if they were only going to put resources to doing a small amount of English as a Second Language (ESL) signage, they would make it in an introductory setting.
This is a good point, but that isn't how they presented it. It says this, which talks about literacy but not language or English proficiency per se:
Why is plain language used in the Fortress Museum?
We aim to reach people and be an accessible museum for all. That's why we design our exhibits and programmes to be inclusive and accessible to as many visitors as possible. All visitors should have access to art and culture.
Low literacy is a reality in Europe, too: around one fifth of the population has limited reading skills.
For this reason, the texts are written in plain and simple language. This simplified form of everyday language avoids foreign words and uses short sentences wherever possible.
This does not compromise scholarly standards or the objectivity of the presentation. All content is presented in accordance with the current state of research.
The scope of the content is no less extensive — it is simply presented in an easily understandable form.
We wish you a fascinating and rewarding visit to the exhibition.
I'm glad Japan has already come up in other comments, and I'm glad it left you feeling encouraged. It's very strange and frustrating watching so much of the American urbanism debate get taken up by a proxy war over whether Europe is good or not. People on both sides of it tend to exhibit a strange complex about Europe that has them fixated on it as a basis of comparison, to the exclusion of anywhere else.
Meanwhile, Japan has a higher air conditioning adoption rate than the United States (and more modern units), despite its per capita GDP having slipped below Italy's. Its most populated areas sit at the same latitude as the American South and have a similar climate, so we can neatly set aside all debates about "it didn't used to be this hot here" and so on. As I think you noticed, Japan has a utilitarian mindset toward the built environment somewhat similar to Americans', just turned to different priorities, and almost none of the self-flagellation that gets American conservatives so exasperated with Europeans. American anti-urbanists in my experience like to wave off Japan, and "first world Asia" in general, as too culturally different to be a useful comparison, but I think for the purpose of these conversations, it is more similar to US than Europe.
The question then turns to whether the areas where Japan and the US do dramatically differ are an inevitability or not. Is Japan's density and spirit of cooperation simply a byproduct of limited land and frequent natural disasters that cannot be reproduced elsewhere? Is the quality of its public spaces, in turn, downstream of people not having a whole lot of private space? Maybe to some degree, but I really want to believe these things are not so deterministic. It's not too hard for me to imagine an American city where things become somewhat like Japan, but with larger homes and more amenities reflecting Americans' greater wealth and land availability. It's entirely possible to stack a bunch of roomy city apartments right next to each other, if that's what's desired.
I really dislike American-style suburban living, I'm having trouble identifying parts of the country that don't work that way, and leaving again would be difficult for all sorts of reasons, so I hope this is possible. There's some survey out that I need to find, allegedly showing about a 55/45 split among Americans between preference for more space and local amenities, so, if true, it's a minority preference, but not overwhelmingly so.
Lately I feel like American tolerance for antisocial behavior may be at the root of everything, or at least, I feel like much could be learned about what we're actually dealing with if fears about safety and order were removed from the picture. It's also extremely personally infuriating (I live in a not very nice neighborhood because it's close to work and it happens to be where I found housing I liked that I could afford). Even though it's less sexy than other topics, I can feel most of my energy being drawn to anti-disorder arguments. After all, you can build the most amazing midsize point access block imaginable, and still not many people will want to live there if the surrounding area is messy and feels unsafe. Hopefully it could get some conservatives onboard, too. It's disturbing how many of them are ready to assume I'm soft on crime just because I'm a liberal, until I make my feelings clear to them.
Yeah. All of this.
I kinda feel like we're turning a corner on acceptance of anti-social behavior, largely because it's gotten so out of hand. Young folks seem pretty fed up about it. And it's always funny hearing about the crazy stuff our boomer parents used to do that I never hear from my own generation. Most of us just stay inside playing video games these days, rather than drinking and vandalizing things. That could all just be anecdata, though.
I really hope so. I can't stand it, and everything I want out of my environment is incompatible with it. Not that people staying home playing video games all the time is great, either, but one step at a time I guess...
I suspect the accessible language thing might be for tourists from places like China, who have knowledge of some English, but not German. The accessible language would be easier to put into a translation app and get a coherent result. It also means they don't have to pay a bunch of translators to put the same message in dozens of different languages on a website accessible by QR code.
It's also important to note that it's not just international tourists who go to museums. Hardly anything in the museums at Les Invalides was in English or any other European language. There were school groups and locals aplenty.
Another thing to realize is that Europeans hate tourism, even as they recognize the importance of it for their economies. There's some passive aggression there and a definite lament that Americans only think of their countries as castles and cathedrals.
Interesting. Yeah likely, but fwiw that isn't how they explain it. This was text introducing the simple language exhibit:
Why is plain language used in the Fortress Museum?
We aim to reach people and be an accessible museum for all. That's why we design our exhibits and programmes to be inclusive and accessible to as many visitors as possible. All visitors should have access to art and culture.
Low literacy is a reality in Europe, too: around one fifth of the population has limited reading skills.
For this reason, the texts are written in plain and simple language. This simplified form of everyday language avoids foreign words and uses short sentences wherever possible.
This does not compromise scholarly standards or the objectivity of the presentation. All content is presented in accordance with the current state of research.
The scope of the content is no less extensive — it is simply presented in an easily understandable form.
We wish you a fascinating and rewarding visit to the exhibition.
Good observations but I think America is also getting an ossified bureaucracy that seems to forbid us from building on the scale and speed that we used to! Just read the book Abundance (not an ironic title) for many examples ! Maybe the latest housing bill will start to make it easier to build….
Yeah, that is also true. We still build sprawl pretty quickly!
A friend refers to the YIMBY movement as Euro-Fetishization. That if we only had narrower streets with 6 story apartments on both sides, our housing crisis would be solved.
We need an ala carte menu of what works and what doesn’t from our European brethren. We need to acknowledge that some aspects of suburbia ARE nice.
Many European cities were first built on land because it was defensible. North America provided much more space- the flatter parts at least. We need to be building with a thought to both what we want now our cities to be and how well those choices will age.
And in regard to this, I noted to a few other folks that Japanese cities gave me a totally different feel. Japan is kind of similar in having a very long history and a less dynamic economy than in the past, but the cities there feel really unselfconsciously lived-in a way that I feel less in Europe or the United States. I'm trying to figure out why I sense that difference, and possibly it's because Japan has sort of not undergone "modernism" and never really broke with its past, so there isn't this division between "That's our history and we have to preserve it like an artifact" and "This is what we do now." Not sure though.
Yeah, totally. A lot of Europe is just path dependency, we did build great cities in America in that dense/compact pattern, but they’re really just divergent situations. I’m being tongue in cheek largely but I think it’s true that “Europe” is not really how Europe lives for the most part. Their modern suburbs/outer urban areas are more urban than ours but not in a dramatically different way. The outer parts of Salzburg, where we stayed at a little b&b, reminded me a lot of an old American small town/streetcar suburb. I largely feel we can relearn most of this stuff from our own history, and that a lot of our towns and small cities are underappreciated
I have no idea what the deal with AC is supposed to be in France. It can't be generalized to Europe in total because I don't think there's any laws about it in Poland but also they apparently still manage to have five times as much of them as we?
We have AC and public spaces I frequent have AC but I live in a capital. I guess I wouldn't like to be in the countryside on one of the hottest days of the year. Generally speaking, Warsaw seems to lack most of the things you complain about. It's kind of ugly in places though, and I don't think we can blame it just on WW2 at this point. Also it's the flattest place in Europe and I will try to move to France or Switzerland when I finish uni because I need mountains to live.
If anything, Europeans need to install screens on their windows to fend off bugs. But their war on AC is almost a form of religion.
Oh yeah, the windows aren’t even screened. I forgot to mention that!
When I lived in the Netherlands, my bedroom had windows both sides that were perfect for warm summer nights. Unfortunately, I could not tolerate mosquitoes buzzing around my ears and not to mention being bitten all night.
I've been to Europe many times and while I do enjoy the historic city centers I often get more enjoyment out of wandering around many of the relatively newer less-touristy neighborhoods. While older city centers often have a lot of charm and narrow streets its cool to see some of the more modern features of urbanism (like more parks) and the diversity of architecture across different eras and building types even if they aren't as ornate as the older styles. So many fun nooks and crannies to explore.
Now while I do have a soft spot for European cities in general I'm not naive enough to think they don't drive cars or are much more auto-oriented than they probably should be (to whom much is given much is expected right?) and I have found it quite sobering to learn about how NIMBY European cities can be. Although some of these flaws further illuminate the failures of most US cities:
Madrid loves to drive yet its a beautiful city with an amazing transit system.
There are suburbs full of single-family homes with yards outside of Copenhagen yet Copenhagen is a great city to walk in with great transit and bike infrastructure.
Suburbs and smaller towns in the Netherlands where you can still bike and walk to many places without getting killed.
We've decided to have the worst of both worlds: disconnected and poorly planned suburbs with nearly non-existent transit and dangerously designed roads. You shouldn't need to live in a shoe box, throw out your AC, or have churches from the 1500's to have good urbanism. The thing I mourn most about US cities is not that we aren't Europe clones but we have been deprived of the different flavors of better urbanism you would see around the country if highways through cities and single-family zoning weren't so heavily subsidized. Maybe we would still drive more compared to some parts of the world and have more SFH's but we would definitely have better and more interesting cities!
Excellent comment, thank you!
A banger, well done.
So much in the urbanism world discussions leaves out that Europeans have had an urban culture for hundreds and hundreds of years (if not thousands), and so they rightly balked at what post-war car culture was doing to their older cities and changed direction. Our cities and towns were mostly very young by comparison, so we didn't have the same attachments. Give us a few hundred years, and we will. The Dutch had their heyday like 400 years ago, for God's sake.
I always think the most interesting part of any European trip is getting out of the city centers, to see how people live. You see more sprawl than you'd expect (as an American), some horrendous housing projects that make the US examples sometimes seem quaint, and just a lot of - surprises. The city centers and town centers are gorgeous and wonderful. But like you said, built by a culture that no longer exists. In fairness, the culture that built the beautiful American towns of the past also doesn't exist, so we share that issue.
Thank you! And yes, agree
Reading this article you might get the idea that Europeans die young compared to Americans. Nothing could be further from the truth - Europeans live some years longer (on average).
The whole AC debate is being presented by the American right as some kind of crime the European elites are committing against their own poorer and older citizens. This is largely nonsense.
The fact is European cities were built without AC because it was not needed until people burnt fossil fuels and caused global warming. It will take some time to retro-fit European cites with AC. Most Amercian cities were built with AC because the climate was such they they always needed it (tho' I have studied in university librarairies around Boston which did not have AC, so this was never 100%).
I acknowedge there are individuals in Europe who have an ideological problem with AC. But you can find people with almost any weird idea (flat earthers, climate change deniers...) if you try hard enough.
Most Europeans I know realize AC is going to be required for the foreseeable future. This change cannot be implemented everywhere, all at once, but already new builds of hospitals and schools are adopting AC. And regular people are out buying AC units for their appartments...
Air conditioning wasn't invented until around 1900. Took another 50 years to take off and arguably wasn't the norm in new residential construction until Reagan was in office.
A week in southern Scotland - two nights in Glasgow, three in Edinburgh, one in an Airbnb halfway between -- was great fun and I enjoyed it very much. This was not in the summer so no heat to deal with.
Anyway to your points it didn't make anyone in my family (we live in central Chicago) feel like we'd want to _live_ there all things considered! LOL honestly
P.S. small correction, okay actually my wife might, provided she got to pick the century (not less than 300 years before now) _and_ could be certain of being born into a noble family....
We already have dense, walkable, air conditioned, and safe urban living in America - just go to New York City (and, to a lesser extent, in the cores of a handful of other cities). Living in New York does have some tradeoffs in terms of getting less space for your money, true, but the tradeoffs are not as extreme as this piece suggestions.
Would most Americans make the trade offs necessary for walkable, dense urbanism? Probably not. But it can simultaneously be true that a majority of Americans prefer car-based, suburban living and that walkable, urban living is nonetheless grossly undersupplied relative to demand.
Yeah I think both of these are true. And more Americans would like it if we had more domestic examples. I do think we would still want our larger private spaces/comforts/etc.
"And the thing is, they’re not really building these things anymore. If America had an extra 1,000 years, we’d be Europe. We’d have houses and cathedrals from the dark ages too. Europe isn’t better at this; they’ve just been around so long, they’ve stopped doing it for longer than we’ve even been around."
While we often associate architecture with permanence, it takes great labor and capitol to keep buildings maintained and adaptable to modern use. So "stopped doing" is a mischaracterization, even if they are not building much new stuff. European summers becoming unbearable is a recent consequence of climate change.
Some years ago we spent a couple of miserable nights in Quebec because I booked an inn with no AC because "what were the chances that it would be too hot in Quebec?"
I grew up in Montreal and in the 1950s I remember days when the temperature was in the 90s (degrees F) and thei air was also dripping with humidity. High temps in summer there are not new, though like everywhere else in Canada they probably have more super hot days per year now.
Oh yeah - no A/C either. I don't think there was any, anywhere. Not on the bus, not in stores, not in schools.
Why not both? It doesn't have to be all suburbs and sprawl or all dense cities. This is what kills me about this argument, both sides tend to take an all or nothing approach. We can make it just as easy to build better 'urban' environments as it is to build sprawl and let people live where they want to. It won't have the character and history of European cities but that will come with time if we take the care to build nice things.
Absolutely, that's my own view. Some urbanists are really down on suburbia which I think is mistaken but I am definitely not anti-urban. Personally classic small towns are probably my favorite sort of built environment.