this post was submitted on 03 Jan 2025
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What's missing is walkability and "third-spaces." Seriously. We are building our cities wrong as a matter of policy and it is absolutely destroying us.
See also:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHlpmxLTxpw
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/dec/29/extreme-car-dependency-unhappiness-americans
https://medium.com/illumination/the-death-of-third-places-and-the-evolution-of-communities-5bbffc01c5e
https://designdash.com/2024/01/29/the-problem-with-car-centric-cities-for-community-public-health-and-more/
https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/11/2/the-negative-consequences-of-car-dependency
https://usa.streetsblog.org/2024/03/05/all-the-ways-that-cars-harm-our-communities-well-almost-all
Europe took a long stroll in that direction too, but there are some major differences. First, most of their cities were established before cars. Second, they're making more of an active attempt (in some areas) to be walkable again.
In short, in America 75 years is a long time. In Europe, 75 miles (120km) is a long way.
That's true for America too, and isn't an excuse. American cities were not built for cars; they were demolished for cars!
For example, downtown Houston, TX in 1957:
vs downtown Houston, TX in 1978:
That's so absurd it almost doesn't seem real
(from my european perspective)
You can actually see this in any small town that hasn't seen significant redevelopment since they first paved the streets. Old houses are really close together, small lots, fairly dense development and its only a couple of miles from any part of town to any other part of town, so pretty walkable/bikable by nature
Are those the same location? I can't see any common landmarks
There are some blatant disinformation peddlers on Lemmy and it seems like Grue and yimby should have that reputation because the developed area in the second pic barely overlaps that of the first. How could this be anything but intentional?
Here's a side-by-side with as close as I could get with current imagery:
Identified in each is the 1910 Harris County Courthouse which is many blocks away from the are of the second pic.
Here's a comparison of the two and an intermediate perspective from modern imagery. The approximate area of the two pics are outlined in different colors, and a few buildings that are common in all three have been lettered. These are now some of the smaller buildings in the downtown area. It makes sense that lower-density / less-efficient buildings would be replaced with more modern structures (though one of them was replaced with a park 💚🌳). The implication from initial juxtaposition of the original pics that a bunch of tall buildings were torn down to make parking lots is a flat out lie.
This is an amazing analysis. I really appreciate how you located where the empty parking lots were, and now I can see them in both images. Yep, it definitely looks like the downtown area has only developed somewhat and that nothing was torn down.
I still believe somewhat OPs claim that areas were expanded more for cars than for walkability, but yeah a different set of images would be needed to cement that
Same location, look for the tall white tower with the vertical stripes and balconies, which is in the middle of the bottom photo. Top photo is slightly more zoomed out.
Forgive me, I'm gonna need some help here
Center of the picture,the building at the top of the color picture seems to be the same one as is found 5 or six buildings north west of the building in the center of the picture in black and white
I'm still not quite seeing it
I would bother with these images tbh since the bottom one is clearly cutting out an unknown amount of the built-up centre...
Sorry about that; these were just random images of the right place/times from a low-effort web search. I remember seeing a side-by-side comparison somebody made that was better, but I couldn't find it again. (I could only find side-by-sides of 1978 vs 2011, when they started removing the parking lots and filling it back in.)
Fair enough, but it's hard to tell unless the comparative images are from sufficiently-similar angles
What's 75 years in metric?
2.3652 gigaseconds