Quote:
Originally Posted by Doady
I am not in favour of wholesale demolition of neighbourhoods, not even of post-war neighbourhoods. I'd rather see piecemeal organic growth of cities instead of huge masterplanned communities everywhere.
Wholesale demolition of existing neighbourhoods happened a lot in the USA during the 50s and 60s and you probably know how that turned out.
No, new developments should be focused on adding to or enhancing existing neighbourhoods, not replacing them. Being confrontational only leads to confrontation (i.e. NIMBYism).
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Well, a couple of issues with that:
1) First of all, all the 19th century neighborhoods that people love so much were master planned as well. The streets of terraced housing all over London were built en masse. In fact, you can’t get a nice street of rowhouses or terraced flats
without building whole neighborhoods at once.
This is a “master-planned” neighborhood, built by the Grosvenor estate in the early 1800s:
https://goo.gl/maps/qYodwBZWAiQ2
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eaton_Square
This sort of development is also capable of sustaining much higher densities (assuming equivalent square footage per residence) than postwar development, even with highrises.
Onslow Gardens was also planned:
https://goo.gl/maps/b2JppRVD4gN2
And Cadogan Square:
https://goo.gl/maps/HstCvVEmW6n
And Holland Park:
https://goo.gl/maps/amfmnzpVYR42
And Ladbroke Square:
https://goo.gl/maps/vrrge4Gw7Zt
The reason that the most desirable, intact neighborhoods in London have a consistent look, but all look a bit different from each other, is that they were
all planned developments. And planned privately - whatever aristocratic family owned the land (which at the time might have been farmed or used for grazing sheep) simply hired an architect and developed it.
Or, you know, most of central Paris.
The problem in the 1950s and 60s wasn’t the idea of large scale development. It was that people lost their minds and decided they were going to build cities that were fundamentally different from the way people had been building them for thousands of years, which was stupid and didn’t work.
2) Postwar development was so absolutely piss poor, not just architecturally but from a planning standpoint, that you can’t fashion a decent neighborhood without bulldozing and starting over. It would be like trying to shoehorn a real pre-war neighborhood into Schaumburg’s mess of cul-de-sacs.
I mean, look at this:
https://goo.gl/maps/anc6xQiEHMr
Above - the Jubilee line passes right under it, and it would be one stop from Canary Wharf and three stops from London Bridge:
https://goo.gl/maps/AUhiFmPWjat
Or for a denser version - this could be redeveloped into both denser and better looking, more desirable neighborhoods. But it needs to be replaced whole blocks at a time, at least:
https://goo.gl/maps/XEUMDWJoWm82
To do anything with these, you don’t just need to replace the structures, but completely alter the road layouts, etc as well. You need to get rid of the pointless cul-de-sacs (it doesn’t need to be a grid, but roads should
go somewhere) and reconnect them to the urban fabric of the city.
In fact the more investment and piecemeal development goes into them, the more difficult it will be to actually fix them.