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Quote from the article:
City design and street layout also matter. Los Angeles is surprisingly dense, with more than 3,000 residents per square kilometer. But much of L.A. is designed for cars rather than people. L.A. has higher transportation emissions than more pedestrian-oriented cities of comparable density like Baltimore and Seattle. “L.A. isn’t designed to be walkable and get [Angelenos] into alternate modes of transportation, despite being relatively dense,” says Gately. Another possible problem is excessive segregation of uses. Even relatively dense residential areas sometimes lack interspersed stores that allow for shorter shopping trips to be made on foot. End Quote:
Also Ft Worth is not a suburb of Dallas. It is it's own city and always has been.
Plano & Richardson are suburbs of Dallas, and both are on their way to becoming cities, with major business corridors and net in-migration from other cities for work as part of Dallas' relative decline.
IMO, once a suburb has major net in-migration for work, then it has to have amenities (museums, zoos, symphony, perhaps a regional airport, etc) to make the jump from suburb to 'city'. Both of these lack that, so they haven't made the jump yet.
That's a definition of a city? Jeez, Aurora, CO has >300,000 people, but no zoo, is closer to DIA than Denver, so has no need for an airport of any kind. They probably have a museum, even very small towns do, and I don't know about a symphony. They do have an arts center that has plays. I don't get this definition. Does Ft. Worth have all that?
I don't get this definition. Does Ft. Worth have all that
Yes it does. It has it's own airport (actually multiple commerical/industrial and personal aviation in addition to DFW regional airport). It has it's own museums, zoo, arts district, and (minor league) sports teams.
However, is Aurora a city? If so why? What is your definition?
My opinion is "no", as it doesn't seem to have much business presence in the city, resulting in net migration out for work. Per wikipedia (been there before, but barely remember it) the tallest building is 13 stories, and lacks a central business district. Sounds like it was on the verge of jumping to 'city' in the early '80s, but fell back for whatever reason.
In the same way, Orange county CA cities are not direct suburbs of Los Angeles. They also have their own airports, CBDs, small zoo, aquarium, and employment corridors.
And why all these things? They are amenities and they draw suburbanites into the main city, and they aren't sustainable without considerable population. Denver does have a zoo for the people in Aurora to use. Maybe it is somewhat arbitrary, but it makes more sense than arbitrary city ages or population.
Last edited by TheOverdog; 04-15-2015 at 01:26 PM..
Yes it does. It has it's own airport (actually multiple). It has it's own museums, zoo, and arts district, and sports teams.
However, is Aurora a city? If so why? What is your definition?
My opinion is "no", as it doesn't seem to have much business presence in the city, resulting in net migration in for work. Per wikipedia (been there before, but barely remember it) the tallest building is 13 stories, and lacks a central business district. Sounds like it was on the verge of jumping to 'city' in the early '80s, but fell back for whatever reason.
Ft. Worth has major-league sports teams? Lots of cities do have airports. Broomfield Colorado has one.
Aurora is organized as a city. It has the University of Colorado Health Science Center, with all the attendant employment that goes with it. I don't know why the height of buildings is important. Boulder has a height limit, so as not to block the mountain views. Is Boulder a city?
You did add many caveats to the original post, but what you were really asking here was not "can suburbs be cities" (since of course many are - Mesa, Arizona has over 450,000 people!) but "can suburbs be urban."
The answer is of course yes. Most "urban suburbs" tend to be places which were built out prior to WW2. However, there is nothing stopping modern day TOD and new urbanism from making urban areas in the suburbs. Indeed, the DC area is actually doing a pretty good job turning formerly suburban areas near transit lines into something which approximates a walkable urban core. It looks kinda bland and sterile compared to historic architecture, but it's better than nothing.
If you want urbanization, you must build transit first basically, and then the denser built structure comes. This is exactly what happened historically - the areas where subways were first built tended to not be particularly dense, but everything surrounding them tended to pretty quickly fill in over time. So I suppose this means you could urbanize segments of the suburbs (mostly formerly commercial/industrial areas where no one is around to complain and you only need to buy out a few property owners), but the bulk of it due to the way that development spread out everywhere will not change its fundamental form.
This is not true at all. NYC (ie, Manhattan) was already built out and fairly dense when the first subway line began in 1904. Brooklyn was the fourth largest city in the US at the time it was annexed by NYC in the 1890s. In Europe and Asia there were large, dense cities long before there was any kind of mass transit.
As urban populations grew and forced people to either live in older, crowded places or further away from job centers, the demand for some kind of "mass transit" grew. The earliest form was "horse cars": horse drawn trolleys. Then came street railways (trolley/street cars) and later subways and buses. In the US, subways were relative late-comers on the mass transit scene.
I think the idea that Seattle is so much more walkable than Los Angeles comes from this:
Seattle has nicer, more upscale neighborhoods directly adjacent to downtown, while their analogs in Los Angeles (Westlake, Chinatown, Expo Park, Historic South Central, Boyle Heights) are largely immigrant neighborhoods with retail that exclusively caters to their extremely low incomes. I mean, up until a couple years ago Downtown LA was a no-go zone while Downtown Seattle has been steadily getting nicer and nicer - tourists go to the downtown core of Seattle while for a long time nobody went to DTLA as a tourist (unless going to the Convention Center) and instead spent time at theme parks, beaches, and parks outside the core. This has largely shaped perceptions about the two cities, which are really not that significantly different in layout (as cities both essentially built in the streetcar suburb fashion), especially after you move out of that 20 square mile area that makes up Seattle's core.
RE: Bellevue - If you made it apples to apples and compared similar satellite cities in Los Angeles to Bellevue - places like Glendale, Pasadena, West Hollywood, Beverly Hills, Santa Monica, etc. - the Southern California cities are much more walkable, transit oriented and traditionally laid out for walking and transit. Bellevue seems to have more height, and seems to me to resemble a more walkable Century City or maybe the high rise areas of West LA near Olympic Blvd.
Which is why saying Bellevue is more walkable than Los Angeles and its core is pretty silly.
Quote:
Originally Posted by TheOverdog
Quote from the article:
Quote:
Originally Posted by TheOverdog
City design and street layout also matter. Los Angeles is surprisingly dense, with more than 3,000 residents per square kilometer. But much of L.A. is designed for cars rather than people. L.A. has higher transportation emissions than more pedestrian-oriented cities of comparable density like Baltimore and Seattle. “L.A. isn’t designed to be walkable and get [Angelenos] into alternate modes of transportation, despite being relatively dense,” says Gately. Another possible problem is excessive segregation of uses. Even relatively dense residential areas sometimes lack interspersed stores that allow for shorter shopping trips to be made on foot. End Quote:
Looking at that graph, Los Angeles is barely higher than Seattle on that graph - in fact the cities LA is closest to include Seattle (and Detroit), not the famously car-oriented Sun Belt cities like Houston and Atlanta, or even Denver. And even that is comparing a 500 square mile city with cities that have much smaller city limits (80 square miles in the case of Seattle). Take LA's inner 80 square miles and it would definitely be higher than Seattle and Baltimore.
Take LA's inner 80 square miles and it would definitely be higher than Seattle and Baltimore.
Maybe so, but LA is not 80 sq miles, it's 503 sq miles, and the fact that it used annexation extensively to sprawl doesn't change that fact. If I picked the most walkable portion of Houston and compared to it LA, it'd probably be equally walkable too. Seattle could have been 503 sq miles too, if they had used annexation. It's metro is 8,186 sq mi. So that seems like a weak excuse.
Maybe so, but LA is not 80 sq miles, it's 503 sq miles, and the fact that it used annexation extensively to sprawl doesn't change that fact. If I picked the most walkable portion of Houston and compared to it LA, it'd probably be equally walkable too. Seattle could have been 503 sq miles too, if they had used annexation.
Why not compare the entire urban areas of both? Perhaps proportionately to total population? This chart a poster made may help:
Since Seattle's urban area population is 1/4th of Los Angeles, it actually does slightly better on a % scale. Except it's just for the "core", whatever that exactly means, so most suburbs (the interest of the conversation) might not be counted. Unsure.
Maybe so, but LA is not 80 sq miles, it's 503 sq miles, and the fact that it used annexation extensively to sprawl doesn't change that fact. If I picked the most walkable portion of Houston and compared to it LA, it'd probably be equally walkable too.
It most certainly would not. You might not be aware of how dense and urban LA is in the core. yes it is more car centric than traditional urban cities but it is every bit as dense in the core as your Boston's, Philly's, DC's and slightly below Chicago and SF - in other words way ahead of Seattle.
Quote:
Originally Posted by TheOverdog
Seattle could have been 503 sq miles too, if they had used annexation. It's metro is 8,186 sq mi. So that seems like a weak excuse.
The Seattle urban area is over 500 square miles, so the comparison is easy. Compare 500 square miles of Seattle urban area with they city of Los Angeles. Los Angeles would be well ahead of the Seattle urban area in terms of walkability and density - simply because suburban areas of the Seattle metro (i.e. Bellevue) are significantly less dense than outer areas of Los Angeles (which in most other cities would be suburbs, but LA annexed them).
Perhaps you are not aware of how dense LA's core is. in the land area of Seattle (80 square miles), Los Angeles has around 1.5 million people - Seattle has 650,000. Maybe that makes it apparent how much more densely populated Los Angeles is, and why I laugh at people from smaller cities who want to say LA is not a real city. Puhlease.
Last edited by munchitup; 04-15-2015 at 07:11 PM..
Let x be mileage to city center. Take (90-x)/90 multiply by center city population. If the population of that city exceeds this it escapes being a suburb. Aurora is, I believe, 10 miles from central Denver. It would have to have about 600K people not to be a Denver suburb.
Aurora IL is 40 miles from downtown Chicago. It would need well over a million people to not be a suburb. I think this is a good rule of thumb.
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