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As someone who deliberately left behind suburbia and its mandatory car ownership to find a better quality of life in a traditional city i find it saddening to hear you argue against human-friendly urban planning. I find your arguments unconvincing.

* Just because apartments are small doesn't mean you hear your neighbors, or live uncomfortably. I've lived in three different apartments the past decade and the only time i had noise issues was with a neighbor who played techno at full volume at 3 am, which would be an issue in any city design, dense or sparse. The notion that hearing three crying babies every night is just how it works is only true in hollywood movies which fictionalize poverty in the inner city. In real world apartment life you have a mixed habitation pattern, and soundproofing.

* suburbia is even less dense than any sort of city. It's not the density that's the issue, it's the ability to commute. In a city where commuting can be done on foot or through public transit, like many european cities, it's simply not an issue. I walk 5 minutes and then take the tram to work, reading HN while commuting.

* There's no such thing as a traditional city, yet you're arguing against it. The article was quite clear on what is meant by the traditional city.

* Having low density at the edges is a feature, not a downside, because some people prefer the isolation. Anyway, if we built all cities in this pattern, there would be a better density distribution. City edges would blend. In high density urban construction everybody struggles to reach the center and get back out again, every day during rush hour. Having ten smaller less dense cities without suburbs instead of one big dense one with a lot of suburbs seems like it would have fewer traffic problems and a better quality of life. Maybe it's just my personal preferences talking though.

* I've been to NY, as a tower city with low car ownership it is impressive, and i was glad to visit, but also glad to leave. The best living in NY is in traditional city areas like greenwich village. High rise is not the answer to quality of life in urban planning.

* The cost argument is a red herring. We don't know how to build traditional cities cheaply because we haven't done it enough recently. It would solve itself. Business finds a way when forced to.

Anyway, whatever design is used, there is a sort of universal understanding what a city that is nice to live in is like, and it's one without cars. Cars simply don't belong inside a city where people actually live. I hope urban planners everywhere eventually realize this and force cars to remain at the edge, where they belong. Usually the people who want to drive their car inside the city don't even live there.

I definitely am not here to argue against pedestrian friendly environments (which I'm all for) in favour of suburbia and car-domination, just to point out some of the shortcomings of the exact view expressed. The will to change the way the development industry works is great, but you can't do this with naive views.

In this vein, I don't disagree with a lot of what you say, but just to touch on a few counter arguments:

* Historic cities with good public transport systems are great, but building new public transport is not something governments (taxpayers?) seem to want to spend on in the west at present. You have to build public transport before people will stop driving cars.

* I question your point on high-rise living. Why is this bad? What makes you feel bad in New York? New York is not the only possibility of high-rise living.

* The cost argument is definitely there. See my response to another comment.

> Just because apartments are small doesn't mean you hear your neighbors, or live uncomfortably.

Having lived in three apartments in the densest city in America, this is patently false. I can hear my neighbors eat dinner, fart, kick their son out at 2am, etc. You can do sound insulation, but that doesn't mean cheapo developers do!

I wonder how this differs by area and building type. My apartment walls in the Bay Area were razor thin - I couldn't believe how much could be heard. But in the four apartments I've been in Manhattan (all ~50-100 years old), plus a good friend's new high-rise that I frequent at all hours, I've never heard my neighbors.

In fact, in my current apartment I have not once heard my roommate when my door was closed despite the bedrooms sharing a wall.

That completely depends on the type of building. I'm in a NYC high rise that is poured concrete. I can't hear a damn thing. Once in a blue moon the people upstairs drop something and I hear a thud, that's about it.

I have previously lived in some hilariously thin walled places before. I actually think the 2-3 story apartment rows in suburbia are the worst offenders. If you are building a 20+ story building, you have to make it a bit thicker and use steel or concrete.

Like others mentioned, this largely depends on the building type -- e.g. concrete vs wood and gypsum. Most American apartment complexes below 5-6 stories high are usually all wooden with low sound proofing.

For what it's worth, I'm in a newish (2010) apartment building in Berkeley. It's one of those wood and drywall jobs, and we never hear anything from neighbours except those above us if they drop something or stomp.

Perhaps this building might be unusually well built. All the windows are double-glazed for example, which is definitely not needed for climate reasons around here (Berkeley has to be one of the mildest climates on Earth).

Having said that, this building is mostly populated with moneyed students (the garage looks like a BMW/Merc/Audi/Porsche showroom - factory stickers are common). I imagine they're not the noisy type. We're a family of 5 where the kids have done things like use skateboards indoors, so perhaps our neighbours are cursing us for the noise :).

You don't necerally need high buildings to create density. You can have density with single family homes, if you have narrow streets and less parking. http://www.newworldeconomics.com/archives/2011/061211.html

There is such a thing as sound insulation, not every appartment building is noisy.

Not everything need to be super high density. There are thresholds that make a local restaurant, corner store, transit stop etc profitable.

Not everybody wants to live like this sure, but many do, and these places are sadly often straight up illegal to build. Besides sprawl is incentivised through subsidized road construction, parking minimums, zoning etc.

I agree with all of what you say, particularly with the last paragraph (I strongly believe that road/parking subsidies/legality has stopped a lot of good development and encouraged bad development to the great detriment of cities).

Dense single family housing is great too - I wish it was more common. Apartment living can be great for families too, where there is good public space around it - there are many people with a mental block against it though.

One of the great difficulties is that people can usually either easily afford a house or will struggle to afford one. The former live in grand houses. The latter in whatever is cheapest. Whilst terrace houses may have good amenity and also be space efficient, they are the choice of neither the rich nor the poor for this reason.

The thresholds thing is more difficult. Transit depends on type but more often fails for lack of pre-planning ("oh wait. we have to build a tunnel now. If only we'd reserved some land for this earlier"). Restaurants/corner-stores are great but whats shown in the linked examples is proper centres which terrace houses won't generally support (within 5 mins walk). Its worth also noting that some existing centres can support a store (where the shop owner owns it already and it just ticks over) where it wouldn't be something you'd build commercially nowadays (where developers would want a modern commercial rent, rather than just ticking over, for better or worse).

> * Most 'traditional cities' couldn't be built for anywhere near the same cost as a modern development.

Why is this? E.g. The author points out that narrow streets should be cheaper to build and maintain.

I grew up in suburbia, lived in a typical American city, and now live in a traditional city abroad. My best guesses as to why building a traditional city is more expensive are 1) construction might be more expensive because of the constrained space; 2) lots of roads are cobble stone rather than pavement; 3) maybe infrastructure (e.g. fire hydrants etc)

Are there other more important reasons? I really can't figure it out.

Yes. Its not insurmountable like some of the other points (assuming you throw money at it), but its definitely there. A few examples:

* Most of the examples are hand built of stone. Which is beautiful and lasts forever (by contrast most suburban homes have a ~40 year lifecycle) but costs a fortune nowadays because of the scarcity of material, labour and transportation costs. This goes for the streets as well as the buildings.

* Complex topography is hated by builders. Much cheaper and easier if its dead flat. Also difficult angles. Much easier if everything is square. This is a big one.

* Topography and small streets cause problems for access. Once the street is there, no chance you can get a bulldozer in. Or a cement truck of a large size. You might get a small crane but it will be very difficult. Getting your bathtub delivered or even getting your plumber in and out (when most of his tools and pipes are in the van, which is parked where?). This is a big problem for ongoing maintenance/repairs as well as initial construction (particularly if you aren't building out of stone to last forever).

So if you imagine the same places built square, flat and with cheaper materials you might come close to a more typical construction cost. But its not going to be anywhere near as attractive.

> by contrast most suburban homes have a ~40 year lifecycle

Living in Germany this is kind of mind-boggling for me. Does that mean each generation has to practically rebuild the houses of its parents?

> Much cheaper and easier if its dead flat.

Don't several story buildings pay for themselves as you can sell / rent more flats using basically the same amount of infrastructure?

> Does that mean each generation has to practically rebuild the houses of its parents?

Yes. In part its disposable consumerism but also its likely that something built in a period of rapid change (as suburbanism often builds houses on fields) may also be required to change itself after some time. In my area its common to see inter-war single-storey cottages rebuilt anew (knocked down completely with a new structure built from scratch), subdivided into two lots or amalgamated with others to build a block of apartments.

> Don't several story buildings pay for themselves

I mean dead-flat as in no steps in the ground floor within your building. Not as in 'single storey'.

> by contrast most suburban homes have a ~40 year lifecycle

Does that mean each generation has to practically rebuild the houses of its parents?

It might seem wasteful, but it's not so bad when you have plenty of space and the preferred living locations change over time. There are many houses in Detroit that were in a sense "overbuilt". Actually 40 years is pretty pessimistic even for crappy American stud-and-drywall construction. Recently I saw the home where my mother grew up. It's ready for tear-down, but it's over 100 years old. (Technically it's lathe and mud rather than stud and drywall, but they amount to the same thing.) I'm not convinced that it should be rebuilt any stronger than before, or indeed whether it should be rebuilt. (It's in a really sketchy section of Toledo OH.)

>by contrast most suburban homes have a ~40 year lifecycle

Do you have a source for this number? It seems quite a bit lower than I'd expect.

Its a rough figure I've been told - it probably depends on where you are living and the standard of construction. Every component will of course wear at a different speed and some (kitchens and bathrooms especially) sooner. Often roofs need a lot of work after 40 years or so and sometimes cheap walls too. Theres books dedicated to this kind of stuff. See the following link for some examples: http://www.thisoldhouse.com/toh/m/article/0,,216991-2,00.htm...

I hear twenty years as the standard figure for an asphalt-shingle roof. But I live on a street with houses that are in some cases 80 years old and more. And the Washington suburbs are full of bungalows built in haste 60 years ago and still functioning--with a new roof, maybe, and with additions, but with an original core.

Bathrooms and kitchens don't so much wear out as go out of style. The grout gets crummy in the bathroom, the porcelain wears, and then a generation that watches cooking shows doesn't want the galley kitchen and electric stove of 1950.

I think streets are the cheap part anywhere. I would imagine buildings are more expensive to construct with the limited access. If for some reason you were tasked with building a 40' skyscraper in the middle of a farm field, it would be massively less expensive than putting it up in the middle of Manhattan. The logistics complicate everything.

My brother is currently managing the construction of a 60 story tower in NYC, and they have a staging area that is able to fit the base of the crane and a single truck at a time. You often see them unloading pallets of supplies into freight elevators by hand. It's unbelievably complicated to do the simplest maneuvers due to the limited space.

>* Modern business don't work in low desnity environments like this. You simply need to be as accessible as you can to as wide a market (of workers and other businesses you work with) as possible. Maybe once we are all working on the internet it will shift this way - but it hasn't gone far yet.

My impression was that traditional cities are higher density than modern cities. They're less dense than hypertrophic cities like Manhattan, but almost everywhere is.

Paris is 9 times denser than Atlanta, for example, according to Wikipedia. Can you cite any statistics showing traditional cities aren't dense? You might be right, but any place I've looked at that's traditional is also rather dense compared to the median city.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlanta

The examples shown aren't cities of the size of Paris. Paris would be described here as more of the 'hypertrophic city', reliant on public transit, where for the author "When your primary focus is on walking, there is very little need to invest in extensive public transit".

The whole of Europe is full of small towns like the ones used as examples. There has been a big shift in living in the 20th century away from these places as modern jobs have shifted to larger cities.

Your example is right. Perhaps I should have said 'less connected environments' rather than 'low density environments'. Paris is quite dense and connected by public transport. Atlanta less dense, but probably easier to drive around. The amount of people within a 1 hour commute of the centre of either will, however, be hugely higher than the examples shown.

His examples were smaller than Paris, but I think Paris in many sections matches what he was talking about. His emphasis was on small streets.

I picked a couple random areas in central paris on google street view and found this:

  https://maps.google.com/maps?q=Paris,+France&hl=en&ie=UTF8&ll=48.859802,2.360516&spn=0.034502,0.079308&sll=37.0625,-95.677068&sspn=42.089199,81.210938&oq=paris&hnear=Paris,+%C3%8Ele-de-France,+France&t=m&z=14&layer=c&cbll=48.858935,2.357198&panoid=KFedUek_xPdwmoxKOlmqLQ&cbp=12,312.34,,0,3.28

  https://maps.google.com/maps?q=Paris,+France&hl=en&ie=UTF8&ll=48.875074,2.338385&spn=0.034492,0.079308&sll=37.0625,-95.677068&sspn=42.089199,81.210938&oq=paris&hnear=Paris,+%C3%8Ele-de-France,+France&t=m&z=14&layer=c&cbll=48.875074,2.338385&panoid=JTi6slw3B6yserHz2yLGoQ&cbp=12,291.51,,0,11.39

Paris has transit, and large streets, but it has many, many small streets like that.

Yes. Paris is reasonably dense, low-height has some small streets. This matches some of what the article discusses, but not all. I don't think these of themselves are the most important positives of Paris though, which for me include its great metro rail system, 19th century boulevards (such as the famous Champs Elysee) and beautifully designed buildings (even some of the most mundane). Its not a city without fault, either.

True, Paris was renovated in the 19th century to be made more 'hypertrophic' [1]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haussmann's_renovation_of_Paris

The shift happened when Europeans came to the new world and saw it as 'carte blanche' to invent cities, top down, in their image. The Europeans had wanted to do that for a long time in Europe, but had lived with cities that had grown organically. Paris is a great example because they literally dug up half the city to remake it in a grid, after seeing cities in the Americas with similar structures. The trend continued (and maybe even continues) in South America: take a look at Brasilia, which may be the epitome of the type of city the OP detests.

I'd argue that Paris actually represents the epitome of what the OP detests in cities because they actually replaced narrow, winding alleyways with broad boulevards aimed at road transport.

It's also a clear example of why the author's theory that street width is all important is wrong: central Paris is still very walkable with an incredibly strong sense of "place" because of the broad boulevards rather than despite them, whereas plenty of the "walkable" streets he highlights are either cul de sacs in suburban areas or pedestrianised zones in town centres usually accessed by car.

Apologies for off-topic.

My non-HN reading brother is about to graduate an urban design programme and would love a chat about the field (especially getting started). If you have a spare moment it would be awesome if you could send your contact details to me (ib.lundgren at gmail). Cheers!