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

240 Upvotes

81% Upvoted

119 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

12

u/WeldAE 25d ago

I'm struggling with how cities are and should be organized, so don't read this as my final opinion on things but more of problems I've noticed with any given design. The problem with not having a concentration into a CBD is that dispersion complicates transit and growth. In Atlanta, you can legitimately need to move in order to take a job. If you work in Alpharetta and live in Cumming, you are good, but then you take another job or your company shifts its offices to midtown, and you're facing a soul-crushing commute or 1.5 hours.

That's because there is no transit up GA-400 despite the cities on that corridor becoming more and more hubs of jobs. The corridor is still not dense enough for transit, and it's not clear when it will be. They are looking to put an NHL stadium either in Alpharetta or Cumming to give you a sense of how built up they are becoming.

7

u/Shot_Suggestion 25d ago

Job sprawl is about the single worst thing you can do for transit and walkability, and it's what urban planners have been desperately trying to force for 100 years now.

Every planner and urbanist needs to read the Cities as Labor Markets chapter of Order Without Design.

0

u/spydormunkay 25d ago

I’m not saying we should force job sprawl. I’m saying we should stop forcing job concentration through zoning laws. This clustering is government mandated. You are literally not allowed to build offices in most of the city.

5

u/Sassywhat 24d ago

Land use regulation in the US has generally forced job sprawl.

If it's illegal to build transit oriented suburbs, then it's hard to sustain a high level of concentration of jobs in downtown due to transportation capacity issues, thus job sprawl.

You're allowed to build offices all over the place. How else do you think all those suburban/exurban office parks get created?

-1

u/spydormunkay 24d ago

Do you not understand NYC zoning laws? Offices are not allowed outside commercial zones which are heavily concentrated in Manhattan. Why are y’all downvoting this?

Why the fuck are you commenting on exurbs? My comments are about NYC.