I would say that stems from the fact that America is extremely young. So all of the development of our cities, architecture, and transportation happened in the last like 300 years.
Exactly, so all of the layouts and architecture was done around the same time, so the styles and culture spread much faster over a wider area. That wasn’t the case in Europe, which has a much more diverse set of cultures from thousands of years. Cities and infrastructure will feel more unique because they weren’t designed with the same considerations.
Kinda, but also not really. The automobile seems like the way to go for quite a number of decades pretty much everywhere. Some countries made more effort than others to be car-centric. When it became clear that a car-centric city kinda sucks, some countries made more effort than others to change away from that.
Sure, some places had historic buildings that meant going 100% car-centric impossible so they effort needed to move away from that is less.
But we can’t ignore the fact that a lot of this is culture. I’m in Canada and I can admit that a lot of places here do look like those photos. And I know that a lot of people are against things like bicycle lanes, and just want to add yet another lane to the roads. It’s controversial to even build an apartment building with shops on the ground floor. Why would people get up in arms over that? I don’t know, but they do.
We don’t even want to try all that much to make the places we live better.
I would say that stems from the fact that America is extremely young. So all of the development of our cities, architecture, and transportation happened in the last like 300 years.
Most of it has been from the 50s
Exactly, so all of the layouts and architecture was done around the same time, so the styles and culture spread much faster over a wider area. That wasn’t the case in Europe, which has a much more diverse set of cultures from thousands of years. Cities and infrastructure will feel more unique because they weren’t designed with the same considerations.
Kinda, but also not really. The automobile seems like the way to go for quite a number of decades pretty much everywhere. Some countries made more effort than others to be car-centric. When it became clear that a car-centric city kinda sucks, some countries made more effort than others to change away from that.
Sure, some places had historic buildings that meant going 100% car-centric impossible so they effort needed to move away from that is less.
But we can’t ignore the fact that a lot of this is culture. I’m in Canada and I can admit that a lot of places here do look like those photos. And I know that a lot of people are against things like bicycle lanes, and just want to add yet another lane to the roads. It’s controversial to even build an apartment building with shops on the ground floor. Why would people get up in arms over that? I don’t know, but they do.
We don’t even want to try all that much to make the places we live better.