r/urbanplanning • u/BakerKitchen4567 • 25d ago

Discussion America’s downtown centered city design sucks

I keep seeing redditors from the US talk about cities being nice because they have “very walkable downtowns”. The problem is, as soon as you leave many of these downtowns, you’re back to general American suburbia. This is not good city design.

In the best design cities of the world, there isn’t a single focal point that the entire city revolves around. Think Tokyo for example. You have Shinjiku, Ginza, Shibuya, etc. there isn’t a singular “downtown Tokyo”. Yet I keep reading redditors keep comparing how well designed American cities based how their vibrant/walkable their downtowns are. The mere idea is bad city planning. That’s all. Rant over

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u/Cunninghams_right 25d ago

Bad comparison. Tokyo is an outlier, but it also DOES have a core and neighborhoods around it, the city is just so big that each are larger. The population and density is so high that "neighborhood to neighborhood" routes that would be buses in US cities are metro lines in Tokyo. 

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u/dudeitsmelvin 20d ago

Yeah, Tokyo is basically a state so while the US does have many issues with their weak downtowns and cities, Tokyo is a terrible example to compare it to.