The plague could permanently rebuild cities


Even with ideas in books, a plague, or a casual response to them, it has changed the way people view the city. “As living organisms, we cannot imagine what we have never seen, and many North Americans consider carpentry to be a family affair,” says scholar Shoshanna Saxe. an engineer at the University of Toronto who studies standard architecture. “It was not the only way. It didn’t have to be that way. We decided. During the plague, people saw something. ”

The question is whether things will be this way.

For the first time in a long time, policy makers in many sectors support this kind of change. In 2019, cities like Portland, Oregon and Minneapolis, Minnesota began eliminating the division of shares for one family trying to do so speak righteousness it is a climate problem. Under the Biden Administration, transportation costs governments allow for the widening of highways, as well as small, regional reforms.

New York City, Washington DC, New Orleans, and San Francisco have all moved on to create sustainable epidemics; Boston did not. “We don’t know if the changes were just a reflection of the desire for local businesses to continue operating, or to change our relationship with the street,” Freemark said. The fact is, we are somewhere.

People do really I did not like, and I did not like, walking more than half an hour to anywhere. Until about 150 years ago, this meant that most people lived about a mile or two from work, eating, studying, and partying, because that was a walking distance, or, if you are rich, on a horse. The result is becoming more and more urban – as rural as you can see in Europe, or the ancient cities of North America. It is the goal of leaders in places like Paris or Barcelona, ​​who are developing bicycles and construction achieve seasonal goals and create exciting urban experiences.

During the 19th century, when trolleys and electric buses came into the cities, the area grew for miles. The result was (e.g. this excellent account says) corridors with high density connecting neighboring areas or, perhaps, areas with multiple houses in areas where there are many activities.

The placement of vehicles after World War II in spatiotemporal calculations disrupted the situation. One car, uninterrupted, can easily travel 30 or 40 miles in half an hour. But when most cars try to do the same thing the same way, the system collapses — especially if one side of the road becomes a house and the other side is a function, so everyone wants to drive in one place. at the same time.

In the United States, instead of construction More houses inside the old courtyard (or, in the wrong place, even close to and close to where people go), people build houses even from a distance. For most of the 19th and 20th centuries, transportation was built before houses; The trolley lines were what made the houses so effective, even so expensive. When the car pulled in, the tracks ripped apart, but unselected (and often racist) zone the preference for single-family homes on a large scale has been established. The price of housing increased. And, well, you can see the problem of geometry here.

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