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Comment by dnissley | Hacker News Reader

How do you think NYC became NYC?

NYC became NYC in a different time and it was always the gateway to the new world

You can create a new city in the middle of nowhere but you'll be missing any authenticity or history. You won't find a bar "since 1889". Some care more about that than others.

Of course that's less of a factor in the US anyway as everything is much more recent.

Planned cities can work but I still tend to find them quite weird. Luke Canberra in Australia. Or Lelystad and Almere in the Netherlands (their whole province is reclaimed land).

It developed organically over Four Hundred Years. 400 years. Four Hundred Years.

Good point. Better point: zoning wasn’t a thing for… ~340 of years. People could largely do what they want and co-located uses was the name of the game. Central planning doesn’t fucking work.

Zoning was definitely a thing since time immemorial (and 5000 years before that). Zoning was enforced by the Count or Lord or Guildhall, and you can bet your bottom dollar that nobody was allowed to run a tannery right next to the ducal palace or Market Square.

Zoning laws are a more recent invention, and zoning laws combined with financial leverage and green belts/density limits for maximum real estate price pain only cropped up as an innovation in the 20th century.

Ok, I agree with everything you’ve written, but my point was that New York didn’t develop under the zoning laws that we have had since the 1950s municipal central planning paradigm.

A lot of ignorance in this comment. Many early American cities now big major metros were built on top of native American trading routes/trading posts. This idea of a blank slate is grounded is totally false.

Through incremental changes over the past 400 years.

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