There is a whole world of nuance that I’m going to ignore right now by making this simple generalization: As a rule of thumb, places create wealth. Examples of non-places are vehicle lanes, parking lots, freeways, as well as medians, retention ponds and all other sorts of landscaped buffers (often lumped together as “open space” in planning parlance) that serve to separate places from each other and mitigate their impacts on each other. This nomenclature was introduced to Strong Towns by longtime contributor Andrew Price, and I keep coming back to it as a way of thinking about the world, because of its simple but profound implications.Ī place is anywhere that people want to be and might linger-a building containing homes or businesses, a library or school, a sidewalk, a public square, a park, a farm.Ī non-place is anywhere that people aren’t going to linger-either it’s devoted to getting them from place to place, storing their vehicles, or it’s the filler in the landscape between our places. Americans just did it first, and bigger, and more completely. The Suburban Experiment didn’t only happen west of the Pond. Only they do it while also reminding us that the world isn’t so simple as “Europe good, America bad,” a mindset which some U.S. The latest round of these memes also make another point: they highlight exactly the same thing about car infrastructure that Mouzon was highlighting. And if your goal is to make a misleading point, you can certainly do that.ĭoes the fact that any such comparison is at least a little cherry-picked mean the two-maps, one-scale juxtaposition is worthless? Hardly. You can literally put any two cities in the world into those two boxes if you’re not concerned with whether the images you’ve chosen are representative of their places. Now we have the freeway outside of Florence, Amsterdam, or Barcelona, contrasted with the walkable gridded core of Atlanta, Los Angeles, or Miami Beach.Īt surface level, this meme is an amusing critique of cherry picking. (True story: A friend of mine living in Orlando once unironically described her home a 15-minute freeway ride from where we were standing as “Just down the street.”) The human brain is wired to understand distance in units of time-how often do you say, “It’s a few minutes away?” Because of this, when we’re moving along a freeway at 70 miles per hour, or even a stroad at 40, it becomes incredibly difficult to intuitively grasp the actual amount of ground we’ve covering. And yet, that profound difference in scale between the traditional and automobile city is something those who don’t spend their days staring at satellite maps are rarely given occasion to contemplate. Whatever “ human scale” is-one imagines medieval Florence qualifies-it sure ain’t our modern highways. Supersize that to the scale of a metro area like Atlanta’s, with all of its similar freeways and subsidiary feeder stroads, and you have a place where the actual destinations people want to get to are pushed so far apart by all this road space that it becomes inconceivable to travel between them without a car-necessitating even more land-hogging car infrastructure, in a vicious cycle. The result: the same land area that could accommodate a bustling urban district of tens of thousands (Florence in 1425 had an estimated population of 60,000) is easily consumed by a single interchange. Speed requires wider turn radii, wider lanes, wider medians and shoulders, and buffer space to separate people and buildings from that fast, deadly traffic. Mouzon’s graphic is intended to make a point about the gargantuan amount of land consumed by automobile infrastructure, particularly when it’s intended for high-speed driving.
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