7 Wonders of North America: 7 Most Urban Cores in North America? (Los Angeles, job)

[the resident09]

Originally Posted by elchevere

I get a different vibe...Vancouver is “pretty”, newer and outdoorsy but does not resemble East Coast style at all to me...has more of a West Coast sterile element to it; I much prefer the urban, grittier vibe of Montreal.

Thank you. Which is all i'm saying. It's urban, but doesn't compare to EC/ NE corridor development at all. Apples and oranges obviously, but it's urban core doesn't surpass any of those.

[the resident09]

Originally Posted by bostonkid123

This is a pretty accurate list. Some may move one or two ranks higher or lower depending on which specific neighborhoods you are talking about, but overall, this covers NA pretty well.

If we are to include top 10, then I'd also add the following, in no particular order:

8. Philedelphia
9. Washington DC
10. Vancouver
11. Miami

Also, for a mid-sized city, Quebec City does reasonably well with its downtown/old-town areas that offer some pretty distinct old world urbanity.

You forgot DC.

[bostonkid123]

Originally Posted by OyCrumbler

I don't think that's ugly, but it differs from Vancouver's urban parts in that the buildings aren't as tall. Vancouver in its most urban parts builds very tall and with a continuous street wall at ground level and maybe a few floors up, but then for the high-rise portion recesses in. DC doesn't build high-rises, but they're taller where they meet the pavement. It's two different design schemes. Manhattan is both building all the way up and also doing it with high-rises.

Can we just all agree on this and drop the Vancouver vs. DC competition?

These are two very distinct cities with extremely different histories and development patterns. There really isn't much basis to compare the two on, because they are just so different on every level.

I've spent a lot of time in both Vancouver and DC, both for school and work. As much as I like Vancouver, I don't think it compares favorably as a city with DC when it comes to urbanity. Especially from a street level, DC just feels like a bigger city, with far better architecture, history, and far more interesting historical neighborhoods. On the other hand, I find Vancouver a more pedestrian-friendly, walkable city, despite it being less urban. It has fantastic transit (cleaner, more modern, and more functional than DC), a great network of protected bike lanes, which makes it very easy to navigate on foot (not a fan of DC's massive boulevards and "circles" which often pose safety hazards between pedestrians and vehicles...).

In the long run, Vancouver's never going to have similar type of development as DC or other NE cities - rowhouses and midrises dominating downtown core. Vancouver's real estate and land scarcity are world-famous, and very few developers could afford to build rowhouses or low rises on valuable land when they could get away with building a 20-30 floor condo. I don't think this will change in Vancouver unless there is massive government incentive (like height restrictions in DC).

Lastly, the city is also much more prone to frequent earthquakes (5-6 magnitude earthquakes are fairly frequent like other west coast cities...), hence I'm sure there is a reason why many developments in Vancouver look different from DC and other NE cities given the strict building codes.

[OyCrumbler]

Originally Posted by Differential

Yea but a few streets down and it's back to dystopian office park maze:
https://www.google.com/maps/@38.9020...7i16384!8i8192


I think it's clear in DC due to height restrictions all developers want to maximize the space and height on their lots and that's why you get that style. It's not done for aesthetic reasons or because it's better planning or better for the street level experience.

Anyways I think we can wrap up the discussion on Vancouver vs. DC.

Yea, it does that, but there are definitely breaks in it due to bits of historic architecture and sometimes on side streets you get quaint smaller rowhouse blocks.

The uniform height in places is definitely due to the height limit, but I don't mind it as that uniformity can be appealing and there's variation in the actual look of the buildings themselves and it's often broken up with parks or older, historic buildings. It's also definitely not a maze unless maybe you're talking about the interiors.

Yea, I think the DC / Vancouver discussion sort of ran away with this thread. I think it'd be nice to hear from people who know some of the other, possibly better, candidates. I think no one's going to dispute NYC, CDMX, Chicago, and Toronto. That's four locked down, and I think people might dispute Santo Domingo more out of lack of familiarity. That leaves three to two more slots for Montreal, San Francisco, Guadalajara, Monterrey, Havana, Port-au-Prince, Philadelphia, Panama City along with other mentions for Boston, DC, Vancouver, and LA. That's a lot.

---

I think the idea of doing a Manhattan-sized area isn't too bad with whatever passes for existing more granular divisions in each respective city to build up to that ~22 square miles. I'll do the Chicago community area at one point, and there's maybe an imperfect path to doing so with a further breakdown of CDMX's 16 municipalities (the municipalities don't quite fit into that very well). Havana has maybe a nice breakdown with the 15 municipalities, because the more central municipalities are denser, and thus more urban, and are smaller than the outer municipalities. Beats trying to go down into the 105 wards they're broken up into for now, since that'd be a lot more work.

So for Havana, the 15 municipalities are like so:


So with these, let's try:
Plaza de la Revolución, 2 on the map, 5 square miles
Centro Habana, 3 on the map, 2 square miles
La Habana Vieja, 4 on the map, 2 square miles
Regla, 5 on the map, 3.6 square miles
Diez de Octubre, 9 on the map, 5 square miles
Cerro, 10 on the map, 4 square miles

That gets you to 21.6 square miles, but the smallest next municipality (also densest) is Mariano, 11 on the map, and at 8 square miles blows our 22-23 square mile "budget." So either go too much one way or a little bit under the other, or you start going into wards. If you go into wards, then Miramar in Playa, 1 on map, an obvious addition as it's dense, home to various embassies, and immediately adjacent to the blob highlighted above.

Anyhow, those ~21.6 square miles gets you somewhere between 800K-900K people. That's dense. That's about the population of San Francisco in less than half the land area and that's with the primary CBD and governmental offices of the country, a working port, industrial centers including a refinery, and a decent amount of public space.

[Joakim3]

Originally Posted by Vincent_Adultman

Great list overall but I don’t think Baltimore belongs at #10. Guadalajara is far more urban. You could even make a case for Quebec City or Seattle being above Baltimore. I have t been to Monterrey or Havana but it’s hard to imagine they are less urban than Baltimore either.

Guadalajara, Monterrey & Havana are definitely more urban than Baltimore/Seattle from an overall city wide lvl, but there all de-centralized. None of them have anything even remotely comparable to Baltimore or Seattles comparatively gargantuan downtowns.

Which brings us to Baltimore vs. Seattle. It really comes down to if one thinks Seattle's significantly larger downtown outweighs Baltimore's near endless supply of row-homes that radiate miles upon miles unimpeded from it's Harbor.

Quebec City while extremely urban relative to its size, imho is not in the same urban weight class as Baltimore or Seattle.

[jessemh431]

Originally Posted by the resident09

Thank you. Which is all i'm saying. It's urban, but doesn't compare to EC/ NE corridor development at all. Apples and oranges obviously, but it's urban core doesn't surpass any of those.

Originally Posted by elchevere

I get a different vibe...Vancouver is “pretty”, newer and outdoorsy but does not resemble East Coast style at all to me...has more of a West Coast sterile element to it; I much prefer the urban, grittier vibe of Montreal.

How is Gastown PNW vibes? Gastown is much more east coast style. And Chinatown and Yaletown for that matter.

[elchevere]

Just seemed cookie cutter, faux/fabricated to me...a “clean and safe” vibe...Denman Street and Kitsilano has a little more of the vibe I prefer...Yaletown was my least favorite area. Overall, do not get an East Coast vibe.

Originally Posted by jessemh431

How is Gastown PNW vibes? Gastown is much more east coast style. And Chinatown and Yaletown for that matter.

[MarketStEl]

Originally Posted by elchevere

Just seemed cookie cutter, faux/fabricated to me...a “clean and safe” vibe...Denman Street has a little more of the vibe I prefer...Yaletown was my least favorite area.

Here we go again.

That part of Vancouver looks like it was all built at the same time. There's no variety in the streetscape - the building style is uniform, or the buildings damn near identical, both up above and close to the ground.

This is where incrementalism comes in.

[elchevere]

Agreed...this is one reason why I really liked Portland...some of the newer areas have been architecturally integrated with existing structures, giving the impression they have been around a lot longer than they actually have...if Vancouver were a MLB stadium it would be more new Yankee Stadium and less Camden Yards (definitely not Fenway or Wrigley)..

Originally Posted by MarketStEl

Here we go again.

That part of Vancouver looks like it was all built at the same time. There's no variety in the streetscape - the building style is uniform, or the buildings damn near identical, both up above and close to the ground.

This is where incrementalism comes in.

[the resident09]

Originally Posted by jessemh431

How is Gastown PNW vibes? Gastown is much more east coast style. And Chinatown and Yaletown for that matter.

Gastown (a small portion of Vancouver) does appear to have that style of urbanity yes. However, I don't see where it can be claimed as "more urban" than the most urban parts of any of the East Coast cities. It's at best equal, and even then doesn't appear to have the same character as most EC cities.