You Can Take It With You
thedeletedscenes.substack.com
You Can Take It With You
Again, I want to be very clear that these neighborhoods are not some hell on earth, and anyone from the rest of world would be smitten to have the chance to live in them. As I wrote above, if an average African, Asian, or Latin American asked my advice I would tell them to move there. It would be downright weird of me to tell them otherwise, given ... See more
Chris Arnade • A brief foray into Dallas, missing Kampala, and some thoughts on over-tourism
Brian Wiesner added
“The American dream was Every man gets his castle ,” Todd Gannon, the head of architecture at Ohio State University's Knowlton School, told me. Above all else, the suburban life is one of independence, a self-contained homestead where the American family can realize its desire and potential, unperturbed by others. Even the family car gets its own b... See more
Ian Bogost • Revenge of the Suburbs
Brian Wiesner added
Suburbs are about the leisurely conquest of space, an alternative to the uncomfortable density of the city. They seem to run free from history itself, offering a sense that nothing was there before. But the illusion of tranquility frays at the edges: the neurosis required to maintain so neatly manicured a lawn, the pristine sidewalks that nobody wa
... See moreHua Hsu • Stay True: A Memoir (Pulitzer Prize Winner)
andrea and added
Modern development, where the public sector leads and everything is built to a finished state, is a bad party. When someone buys that new house on the cul-de-sac, they don’t want more development around them. To the contrary; new development merely means more traffic, more people using the park, more taxes.
Charles L. Marohn • Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Rebuild American Prosperity
Critics of suburbia, by contrast, worried that its dull uniformity would do corrosive damage to the American psyche. In the words of the American urbanist Lewis Mumford, writing in 1961, suburbia was “a multitude of uniform, unidentifiable houses, lined up inflexibly, at uniform distances, on uniform roads, in a treeless communal waste, inhabited b
... See moreTom Standage • A Brief History of Motion: From the Wheel, to the Car, to What Comes Next
sari added
One of the weirdest things about modern urbanism, and the Microwave Economy in general, is that we build the opposite of what we like. We adore Europe’s narrow and car-less streets, but build skyscraper-lined cities with sterile shopping malls and six-lane roads, where pedestrians are always on edge. But the Microwave Economy is most visible in arc... See more
David Perell • The Microwave Economy
dane cads added