Originally Posted by
UniChris
Again, you have it backwards.
The businesses are in the correct places. It's the housing miles from anything useful that is misplaced.
Nothing should be being built out there - not housing, not businesses, nothing, because such locations only work by car.
We need to concentrate the development of housing as well as business in the denser, walkable areas.
I agree with you... but your statements are forward looking.
What we have right now is the result of national changes that occurred from about the 1920s until the 1950s, with the automobile boom largely occuring post WW2. Prior to the 1920s, the cities were largely mixed... with housing and commercial IN the same area... largely due to the "walking cities" and horse driven trades of the earlier 1880s being the dominate manner in which cities were built. The automobile did not show up until the 1890s, and was largely a rich man's "toy" until mass production started by Ford in 1908... Production slowly ramped up until the 1920s.
A look at the chronology of urban growth in America—with transportation as a key variable—shows how automobiles have transformed cities. Historians have mapped out a three- or four-stage transportation chronology for the American city: walking city (pre-1880), streetcar city (1880-1920), and automobile city (post-1920). One historian has divided the latter period into a “recreational vehicle” period (1920-1945) and a “freeway” period (post-1945).
The first stage—“the walking city”—was marked by highly compact cities and towns; an intermingling of residences and workplaces; a short journey to work for those employed in a variety of tasks; mixed patterns of land use; and the location of elite residences at the city centers. In this era, many cities and towns had large central squares that served as meeting places, open markets for buying and selling goods, and parade grounds for special occasions. For the most part, streets were narrow, meandering, and unpaved. Until the nineteenth century, there were few means other than walking or on horseback to traverse American cities.
The Automobile Shapes The City: From?Walking Cities?to?Automobile Cities?
So we did have that intermingling of residences and commercial properties well before the advent of the automobile... but, post WW2, and into the '50s the American landscape was pushed into what we have now by automobile culture and the advent of the Interstate, brought on by the National Highway Act of 1956.
All this came to a horrible peak and crash, withe the gasoline (oil crisis) in the '70s.
But America has not yet reshaped back into mixed use areas... although attempts have been made... and it is "the new vision," largely because some folks have seen the disaster that the automobile culture can bring.
But America is largely still dominated by this culture, unlike some European cities that chose to convert away from car culture, such as Copenhagen and Amsterdam... which started down the path of car culture, but broke that path early.
We are currently stuck with the politics, the zoning laws and the economic mentality of that earlier car culture... and true mixed use cities have not yet dominated our landscape, and building new developments in "suburbs" and "exurbs" still continues.