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Am I'm the lone wolf who prefers living in your typical Midwestern American suburb?
i'm happy living in a safe quiet subdivision and be within a short distance from the city where i can do "city stuff".
No, you're not. I sometimes feel that way, too, when I read these forums, but in the real world most people do like living in these places. After all, that's why we live here! People that do want urban living go down to the city core and buy a condo or rent an apartment.
And contrary to what others are saying, these suburbs are not going to go away. How would that happen, bulldoze them against the wishes of the residents and property owners? Yeah right. And sure gas will get more expensive over time, but that doesn't mean the sudden end of suburbs- people like this lifestyle, and the solution will be cars that get better and better fuel economy or eventually run on alternate fuels that are not horrendously expensive.
I am somewhat familiar with the area around Frankfurt, the area just north, actually.
The way the Germans seem to do suburbia is they expand old villages and market towns, adding new streets and neighborhoods to prexisting built-up cores. So you sort of have this "pepperoni pizza" diagram...the "pepperoni slices" are the built up areas around the old village/town cores, and the "cheese sauce" is countryside...farms, orchards, open space of various types.
The anology breaks down a bit the closer you get to Frankfurt, but this pretty much describes how they are accomodating suburban growth. Some of the villages have douled and perhaps trippled in size since WWII, but the growth isnt "sprawl" in the US sense of the word. Its a lot more planned and condensed...and theres better public transit and accomodation for pedestrians and cyclists.
This happens to some extent in US cities as well. There are many suburbs of Denver that were once totally independent towns. For example, Golden was once the territorial capital of Colorado. There are several suburban cities here that are county seats for their own counties, not all of which are part of the metro area: Golden, Jefferson County; Boulder, Boulder County; Littleton, Arapahoe County; Brighton, Adams County.
Pittsburgh has a lot of mill towns and former mill towns that also function as suburbs.
Goes on for miles with nary but a Cricket Club for interruption. You'd never find that level of sprawl in Vegas. Reminds me a little bit of the sprawl ones sees in Sacramento in say El Dorado Hills, CA, or maybe Monte Clair, NJ.
The rapid transit line, sidewalks, and actual town centers are also rather different from las vegas.
Autocentric is part of the sprawl's definition (I know you don't believe that). If you wish to say the English one is autocentric, that is fine ... but equating this measure to that of the Vegas example is incorrect.
Hardly Las Vegas. And yes, some American suburbs have that but generally many of the normal shops in American suburbs that have walkable centers are scattered further out in strip mall areas. The UK, and the London area in general has far fewer of these.
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Goes on for miles with nary but a Cricket Club for interruption. You'd never find that level of sprawl in Vegas. Reminds me a little bit of the sprawl ones sees in Sacramento in say El Dorado Hills, CA, or maybe Monte Clair, NJ.
Most of it is still denser than Las Vegas. Such as:
Funny you chose near Croyden; I met a few people from there a week and a half ago. I saw some of the photos of their house. Detached but lot is small. The commuter rail frequency and coverage there is better than any commuter rail in the US. Perhaps similar to BART but less auto-oriented and denser statMaybe Las Vegas is typically this dense:
Montclair certainly isn't. Sure, some British suburbs are similar to American ones, there's definitely overlap, especially British suburbs that aren't in London. But traditional "high street" shopping areas are far more common in the UK. You also picked a location on the outer edge of London, it's more sprawly than most of London.
The rapid transit line, sidewalks, and actual town centers are also rather different from las vegas.
Autocentric is part of the sprawl's definition (I know you don't believe that). If you wish to say the English one is autocentric, that is fine ... but equating this measure to that of the Vegas example is incorrect.
Like almost all of the West, Las Vegas has sidewalks. That London area is definitely auto-centric in the sense the vast majority drive to get around, but with the very good transit and actual town centers it creates a very different pedestrian environment than Las Vegas.
Still, in the density sense western suburbs, especially coastal Californian ones like the Bay Area seemed the closest to newer, autocentric British suburbs. Houses close together even if they are bordering rural land. Eastern suburbs would gradually transition to rural with larger lots, something that doesn't exist in Europe with a few exceptions. Here's a large lot exurb of Paris.
Unusual and probably something only the wealthy could afford. It's 22 miles north of the center city, 22 miles north of say, Chicago would not be the edge of the city.
Eh. Not impressed. Street level photos don't tell you anything. There may be suburbs in Europe but they are the exception not the norm. Suburbs and sprawl are not the same thing and there's nothing over there on the scale of LA or Atlanta. In the United States 80 to 90% of the population lives in the suburbs. In Europe its the opposite where 90% of the population lives in the cities and in rural villages. Less than 10% reside in American-style suburbs.
Paris is surrounded by sprawl? lol. In Paris the suburbs are where the ghettos are located. These are where they put the housing projects, the least desirable areas to live. And they are not low-density. There is no such thing as low-density American-style sprawl in France.
In francophone areas, banlieues are the "outskirts" of a city: the zone around a city that is not necessarily under the city's jurisdiction.
Banlieues are translated as "suburbs", as these are also residential areas on the outer edge of a city, but the connotations of the term "banlieue" in France can be different from those in English-speaking countries. The "suburbs" in the United States, for instance, are generally associated with low population density, detached or semi-detached housing and middle and upper class inhabitants.
In France banlieues are more frequently areas of low-income apartments and social housing. Thus, the equivalent of most housing in the banlieues in the United States would be "the projects". In the UK, the equivalent would be a "council estate".
The posters on the UK forum loved this Massachusetts street I posted, some said they wished they could buy a house there. Very different from what they can find in England:
Btw, long stretches of detached homes are rare in London. Generally, they're interrupted by semi-detached housing which is the most common housing style.
Spain probably has the least sprawly land use and being a poorer country, you've seen the sprawl collapse since the real estate bust since it's actually not sustainable there versus here in America where it is and there never was nearly the same level of collapse.
It's rather silly to mention suburbs in Europe as one entity, Europe has many things in common relative to the US, but it's still composed of different countries with their own histories and cultures. To point an extreme example. Spanish outer suburb:
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