The future of American cities

[Mountain man]

Every day our city governments are having to resolve issues that arise that may not have been around yesterday. Cities are having to constantly evolve, no one 100 years ago would have imagined that American cities would look the way they do now. Starting in the 1800’s cities were full of dense small highrises, then they slowly evolved to mecca skyscrapers (of course because we learned better techniques to do so) then post war cities evolved creating big sprawled metros (prime example is sunbelt cities). This was a result of affordable cars and an image that everyone could have their own mansion and land. Now cities are evolving back to big dense centers as we see how sprawled does come with its own issues. The point here being that cities are constantly evolving due to issues that never existed in the past. The direction I ‘m heading with this post is what problems or solutions are we seeing starting to arise that could directly impact our cities in the near to long future ahead? (besides just climate change issues that we beat to death)

Cities were once dense and low rise- cities evolved to taller buildings due to better understanding of infrastructure- cities evolved to sprawled metros due to the affordable car- cities are starting to evolve again due to issues that come with sprawl- cities will next evolve into __ because of ___…

What are we starting to see emerge that could alter our cities in a major way, kind of like how skyscrapers changed the face of our cities. Is there something in the future that we could see that has the potential to completely change the face of our cities?

This does not have to be limited to just American cities, I just used American cities as I have never been out of the country and don’t fully understand their norms and structures.

[James Bond Agent 007]

Just one word: Plastics.

[sopas ej]

Originally Posted by James Bond Agent 007

Just one word: Plastics.

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[llamaorama]

I suppose self driving cars will have a profound impact.

Good: Reduced need for parking. Flexibility in lifestyle, you don't need to own a car to use a car sometimes. Ability to tame traffic in areas where that is a good idea. Ability for people in small cities to commute to big cities for jobs.

Bad: Maybe less demand for transit and infrastructure, more long distance commuting from the sprawliest of suburbs. Fights over who owns the street, is it a public space or a passageway for cars.

Ugly: self driving delivery vehicles will be nail in the coffin for brick and mortar retail and suburbs with a lot of big box stores will turn into vast ruined grayfields. May actually be a good thing if redevelopment is on the table.

-Ability to turn streets into commodities and put tolls and fees on the use of even the smallest lane or alley. Will pedestrians and cyclists be seen as freeloaders? If the presence of a bike rider or a pedestrian wanting to cross the street greatly reduces the throughput of toll-paying cars on a public street to an extent than can be easily quantified in dollars as an opportunity cost will you still be able to argue in favor of cyclists and peds being able to use streets? If you can charge for use of streets, will suburban developments still rely on public entities to maintain them, or will totally private developments not have public easements at all? Again, will they allow non-car users? What happens when a large share of an entire metropolitan area, like Houston or Atlanta in the future, is comprised entirely of private roads? Imagine a whole city of gated communities. They could keep out the riff raff, and concentrate it in older established areas.

[Austin55]

I think self driving cars will exasperate the current trends. Urban areas can become even more pure and urban with less parking/roadways while suburbs will sprawl even further. The in between areas will continue to falter.

[dubu]

Way into the future all the buildings in suburbs will be around ten stories. Then the sprawling houses turned back to farm and forests. We will be low on metal and will have to use wood.