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by seadan83
1185 days ago
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@unity, my original statement was this:
"My knowledge is that European urban planning was very similar and car centric until the late 60s." I think the citations quoted above from multiple sources generously support this. Again, that is not at all saying that all of Europe was rebuilt in the 1950s-1960s willingly and entirely to be car centric. But, the _planning_ of new construction/reconstruction were similar during that period in both the USA & Europe (and Europe by-and-large stopped their new constructions in that style around the early 1970s while the USA by and large did not). There is even a mention in one of the quotes of a lot of that construction having been torn down. I'd say Warsaw, Prague and Paris are all great examples. Warsaw was completely rebuilt and downtown is car centric (looks very much like an American city). Prague was somewhat unscathed and has a very historic layout, Paris is a mix of reconstruction and historic urban planning. The point remains that there was a pretty specific car-centric urban planning style that dominated in Europe in the late 1940's-1960s. All that is to say - European urban planning was also, at one time somewhat recently, largely car centric. It is really notable that stopped being the case and is an example for US cities - that they can also transform away from being fully car-centric. |
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That's where you go wrong. There isnt 'urban planning' in Europe because there isnt any space to plan anything. What could be called 'urban planning' in Europe is laying out subway tracks, maybe demolishing a run-down shanty neighborhood to build apartments. Thats it. Naturally there is no way to plan anything around cars. The most you can do is to eat up a little sidewalk in the biggest avenues in the biggest cities to make one more lane for the main street. And that's what was done for ~80 years.
> I think the citations quoted above from multiple sources generously support this
They dont. You moved on to 'urban planning was like that' argument from 'built like that'.
> European urban planning was also, at one time somewhat recently, largely car centric
Repeating it wont make it so. It wasnt, and still isnt. Aside from some part of Germany that rebuilt its destroyed cities and built autobahns, entire Europe was about tiny cars and tiny streets, leave aside any phenomenon like suburbs.
You cannot extrapolate from 'Le Corbusier and his friends liked cars and wanted to demolish cities' to 'city planning was like that'. If city planning was really like that (if it actually existed that is), then Le Corbusier and his friends would get their way and entire cities would have been rebuilt.