American cities are absolutely hideous examples of urban planning, and to use them as an example for anything is idiotic.
That might be the most absurd thing I've heard all week. And considering the week I've had, that's saying quite a bit. Are you seriously going to sit there and tell me that because Los Angeles is a polluted pit, that the whole of America is comprised of crappy cities? Shall we discuss the wonder of traffic control that is Rome? Or London? Shall we discuss the pristine pollution-free metropolis that is Athens? Or the compact, easily delineated town that is Hamburg? Or Berlin? Or Essen?
By contrast, the congested, polluted mess that is Los Angeles, with about a million less people, has an area twice the size, none of it empty space that can be built over in a pinch.
I'm sorry, have you
been to Los Angeles? I'm not about to defend it as an example of what a city should be, but Los Angeles has a LOT of empty space that can be built over in a pinch. Not the majority, certainly, but quite a bit nonetheless, given the size of the city. There are several state parks and a national forest within Los Angeles itself (more, depending on how you define LA's boundaries). And for your information, the "congested, polluted mess" that is Los Angeles is no more congested and
considerably less poluted than a
dozen different European cities I could mention, from Leeds to Athens to Warsaw to Dusseldorf to Barcelona.
Besides, citing Los Angeles as your example of why American cities suck is like citing the Faeroe Islands as an example of "Typical European climate". There are few cities in America as distinct from all of the others as Los Angeles. For one thing, it's the only American city I am aware of that
doesn't have a core, heavily-urbanized, "downtown" that the city radiates around. Oh there
is a downtown in Los Angeles, but it's practically an afterthought. Despite being eight times the size of San Francisco, Los Angeles has a downtown a third as large. There's a lot of reasons for this decentralization, but the point is that Los Angeles is highly atypical (as, by the way, is St. Petersburg). Compare Los Angeles to New York. Compare it to Chicago, to Seattle, to San Francisco. Go to Manhattan and tell me about the "Small business center" and the "miles of single-family homes". Sure, American cities tend to sprawl out like hell, but then so do most large European ones. Paris for instance, and London, and Berlin, and Rome are all massive urban sprawls as large as anything you'll see over here. I'm not gonna say there's no trends in terms of what you tend to find on either side of the pond, but you took (by all accounts) the most beautiful city in Russia, and compared it with (debatably) the ugliest one in America. Would you consider it fair if I reversed that, and contrasted San Francisco with Dzerzhinsk? Or even with Moscow?
Plus, recall if you will the unique circumstances that led to St. Petersburg. The city was literally planned out by one man (Peter the Great), who fought a war and drained a massive swamp so as to build a modern (for the time) city, from scratch. Don't get me wrong, he did a great job, as have those who oversaw the city in the centuries thereafter, but it's hardly the same thing as how most cities are brought about. I love London, for instance, but five minutes of walking around the City of London will convince you (or at least convinced me) that there was
no system of thought involved in its creation. Most European cities grew up organically into what they are today over the course of thousands of years, interspersed in many cases with the occasional "reset button" of being burnt to the ground by Great Fires or rampaging hordes of Mongols/Magyars/Huns/Vikings/Englishmen/Germans/Mercenaries/Greeks/Persians/Arabs/Crusaders/Bombers/Nazis/Scythians/Bandits. The youngest European city is still hundreds of years older than the oldest American one. You can argue that the end result is better or worse, but in all but a handful of cases, the end result has nothing whatsoever to do with urban planning of any sort, unless you are suggesting that the US should adopt Paris' policy (to give an example) of forbidding non-white people from living inside city limits (civic policy in Paris until the 1980s).
Look, I love most of Europe. Three of my five favorite cities in the world are in Europe. And likewise, there's plenty of American cities I wouldn't touch with a ten foot pole: Detroit, Houston, Baltimore, and yes, Los Angeles. But it's absurd to take one bad US city, contrast it with one good European one, and thus claim that Europeans are gods of urban planning, when for the majority of the cities in Europe
had no urban planning in the form we recognize it today for the
vast majority of their existences. Most European cities grew up out of tightly-packed walled fortress-cities, semi-perpetually being besieged by some damned army or other. This gave them a certain flavor not shared by cities that did not have to be constructed with such things in mind, but hardly makes them the result of gifted European urban planning, as contrasted with idiotic American. By that logic, the best thing to do to improve Los Angeles on European "planning styles", would be to have the Mexicans periodically invade and burn it to the ground.
Although having said that, I have to admit that might not be such a bad idea after all...
