[adreamingsoul]

I think this comparison is interesting. I recently relocated to Norway from Portland, OR and find the design and use of space in Oslo to be excellent. However the way space is utilized back in Portland isn’t that efficient and/or is poorly designed.

[noobermin]

The same force that enables suburbs is the same force that leads to wasted space in America: cars, cheap oil, and large swathes of land.

[microcolonel]

Also extremely intrusive urban planning, which put into place minimum parking capacity, minimum house sizes, single-family dwelling zones in the middle of what should have been highly developed cities, residential neighbourhoods with no commercial space (and thus very few amenities), etc..

[kartan]

> Also extremely intrusive urban planning

I agree partly.

In most European cities there is a lot of planning and regulations to follow. Barcelona Example (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eixample) is an example of 19th-century planning.

In most Europe, you can't build a tall building in a rural town, a skyscraper without the proper open space around it or a factory in a residential neighbourhood. But, those rules have been more sensible to the city needs and have had less pressure from car makers. Old towns are usually compact and easy to walk because they predate cars. Cities have very good public transportation systems as cars were too expensive for most of the population. Living in the city centre has been seen as a luxury. At least for me, "suburvio" (a suburb in Spanish) has always had a negative connotation. Nobody wanted to live in the outskirts of a city.

So, I agree that American cities are, in general, poorly designed. And public transportation is almost nonexistent. The problem is not urban planning but that the cities are designed for cars, not for humans. Carmakers had too much power for too long. Urban planning worked really well to achieve its goal: to sell more cars.

[microcolonel]

> The problem is not urban planning but that the cities are designed for cars, not for humans.

That is part of urban planning here. Public transit simply can't be both good and cheap at these densities, which were mandated explicitly by urban planners. You complain about height limits, but there are many places which you can't (or recently couldn't have) house more than one family in a certain amount of space by law.

There are lots of post-car places where you can get around great on foot, it's just that a lot of the post-car places in the U.S. and Canada have many layers of planning and regulation which make you dependent on a car.