Albeit a Dutchman, I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area in the '60s and '70s. I found the track housing, wide roads, ubiquitous motorways, strip developments, traffic congestion, and shopping centres utterly depressing and soul destroying. When I returned to the Netherlands in 1971 on a family visit, I realised that cities and towns could be different; they could be vibrant and inviting. Although I had intended to return to the fatherland, I ended up teaching in an international school in the UK from 1986 until 2018. Upon retiring, I returned to the Netherlands, and I now live in breathtakingly beautiful and historic Middelburg. I no longer have a car; I walk, cycle or take the train everywhere. I engage with people everyday. As I walk through the old, charming streets, I feel overwhelming emotion--almost tears of joy. I never felt that way in an American city or town.
I’ve been waiting for someone on RUclips to point out why urbanism is right wing. Things like fiscal responsibility, civilizational pride, and traditional development are all right wing values.
Most people on the right hate urbanism. They are even spreading conspiracies about "15 minute cities" that they don't fully understand. Maybe the right in Europe sees it another way, but the right in the US and Canada seem to love having big cars, living in suburbs and laughs at the idea of taking public transit. They think urbanism is akin to communism or something. That's what it always comes down to whenever I'm in an argument with someone on the right about cities vs suburbs.
I disagree that those values are the domain of only people who think conservatively or are republicans, as right wing tends to be. How they’re implemented and experienced might be different, where fiscal responsibility could be perceived as less public infrastructure to service the same number of people, rather than large swaths of public space that detract from civil pride that people of all political persuasions can have. Traditional developments were based on human scale while allowing for diversity and options, not car-scale based on isolation, car-dependency and a slave to maintenance of underused private space.
@tammielisa I totally agree with you!! I love the urbanism RUclips space but some of the creators are very much on the liberal/progressive side politically and like to condescend the conservative/republican side. To me, urbanism should be a bipartisan issue! I personally am a conservative and love urbanism. I mean if there are republicans that oppose expansion of public transit, let's call that out, but improved public transit is really for an efficient, high quality society. To me, it's just common sense. I also do feel like the liberal/progressive side contradicts itself in wanting public transit but also wanting soft on crime policies. You can't garner public support for public transit if no one feels safe riding it.
The reason ornamentation was removed at the dawn of modernism is not about how "we don't deserve to build beautifully" nor about "asserting control"... well, except maybe for the USSR, since you were assigned an apartment you didn't ask for. "Beauty" was associated with the unequal and oppressive nature of the kingdoms of pre-WW1, where only the wealthy bourgeois and nobility could afford to live in beauty while the remaining peasants were stuck living in shantytowns. Stalinist housing was the same: architectural masterpieces for the rich, tragic ugly things for the poorest. Same thing with American cities. With the critical housing needs after WW2, there was an opportunity to build equally, and so ornaments had to be removed for faster construction time, concrete buildings were making their first appearances at the time. USSR of course putting it all litteral and making the commie blocks (which didn't kill urbanism much... until the people started having cars). Today the message has changed and we really should start building beautiful again, especially since our technology makes it so that the facade can somewhat easily changed without breaking building codes (as long as zoning allows it, where I live somehow brick facades aren't allowed!!???) At the time of modernism in architecture, the mentality was super excitement of the modern age, at least until the flaws started to hit, so I disagree with the notion that modernism was simply due to douchebags elitists architects who decided your beautiful building sucks and that we all should build sterile gray masterpieces. This scapegoating makes watching these videos (as well as The Aesthetic City's) hard to watch sometimes.
I agree that architectural and beauty standards have fallen, but not so much on the causes. It's corporate capitalism that gave rise to big chains where every store looks the same in any part of the country, and put smaller, local, more unique companies out of business. It's the automobile industry that pushed for bigger, wider roads, and sprawling, single-family-home-only suburban development. It's the construction industry that pushed for those homes to be built cheaply, quickly, and uniformly -- beautification was just an unnecessary cost. It was the desire for segregation and fear of "criminal" minorities that pushed white Americans to those car-centric suburbs.
I agree with what you're saying about car infrastructure and suburban development. A detail people tend to forget was that at that time rail travel was slow and inefficient compared to car travel (which thankfully with modern technology can be reversed), and that there was also a major population boom post WWII. There was the unfortunate decision to go with automobile development, but it aligned with the popular futurism vision of the time. Also, you can have chain places look nice too and it's been proven that building beautifully isn't more expensive. It's the architects and those in charge of approving buildings that have caused designs to become stale and trash, and that clearly has its roots in Marxism, as evidence by the entire Soviet block and its apologists. Remember, there was no need for that college of architects building in Barcelona to be so egregious, but it was a representation of their philosophy. I recommend looking into the story of Le Plessis-Robinson in Paris, there's a great video by The Aesthetic City.
If you believe your interior design is good in the USA, think again. It is the worst, even Ikea does it better. Most of what you see is crap, both in design and materials. America shops for design in the old world, not in America itself.
"Hostile environment" This phrase perfectly encapsulates how I feel walking in most cities. Going to most places is a huge pain because it's ugly, cramped, feels dangerous (thanks in part to the cars whizzing by), is loud, and is also dead and soulless at the same time. Going to do anything outside the ordinary is made ten times more mentally draining than it should be just because you're in this butt ugly, terrible environment for 80% of the time. And this is commonplace, it's not just a "few bad apples". Any city in the USA with >50k population is very likely to have similarly oppressive vibes to the city in the video.
Oh, and the frame at 6:09 perfectly encapsulates everything wrong about having to navigate these places. It feels like there's a concrete slab in your face at all times. Also good luck when it's hot outside because the concrete turns what could be a nice, sunny day into a cramped furnace.
Pretty sure that you are misattributing the cause. The problem is car culture. You don't need good looking buildings if you never actually look at them.
I totally agree that car culture has allowed the problem to exacerbate, but it couldn't be the direct reason as to why buildings got ugly suddenly. It's not like the impulse is to make a building ugly as long as people are driving. Bad designs are made deliberately and are charged with philosophy. Also, there are many, many examples of ugly modernist buildings in walkable Europe too. Car infrastructure sucks, but it's not the direct cause of bad artistry.
American cities might be ugly and boring, but European cities are overcrowded hellholes with bad traffic and pollution. The densely packed housing in London were slums before gentrification. Full of fire hazards, disease and poor sanitation. The narrow medieval streets were littered with horse muck from all the carriages. It was harder to avoid people. American cities are built on the ancient Roman model, with wide and straight roads so it's easy to get around in your horseless chariot and take an alternative route without having to wait for your satnav to recalculate. Are they perfect? No. Are they easy to improve eg by building a railway above the road, reserving one lane for buses and cycles or reinstating the old streetcars from our grandparents' time? Yes
Hi Alexander. My friend in Australia, an architect, sent me one of your videos. I live in the neighborhood you show and I can walk to nearly all of the redevelopment you discuss in another video. Can you tell us if you are a city planning student or a student of architecture? I am interested to know. I agree. We have some really ugly buildings. About 2/3 down Ocean, there is a mustard colored building called Aqua Hotel or something like that. "Aqua" painted mustard. I absolutely hate that building. I call it a clown house. Take a look at it and the building next to it. So ugly that it makes me mad. I am all for character but I with our planning department, or whomever would be in charge, would require the buildings to add beauty instead of being eye sores. Also, I agree... the LOGOS building downtown was always ugly. Thanks for the videos.
The further East in US, the better the architecture (Chicago too as a hub of US architecture). You completely miss the reality of older cities (in both US and EU of course) were built long before the auto age, sheer density makes a difference. Newer and many smaller cities in EU are very drab too. Not all suburbs are sprawling either, some are very densely populated, transit oriented. You may have CA POV vs many built on train lines and walkable throughout NE and Midwest next to larger cities like NYC, Philly, Chicago.
Santa Cruz was built over 100 years before cars became mainstream... Santa Cruz never needed to eat up all the land it did. Instead of pandering and demolishing historical neighborhoods to build highways with copycat suburban businesses that put 0 effort into their building design.
Commieblocks were built to house the millions of people that needed housing after WW2, since the Germans destroyed so much of the high-population western portion of the USSR. As such they were cheap, easily constructed and intended to be replaced after a few decades of use by more beautiful housing complexes. Unfortunately, just like in the west, soviet architects were hit by modernism and went in much the same direction as their contemporaries. Soviet urbanism was, however, still mixed-use and walkable on account of low car production and ownership. You really shouldn’t include political statements like ‘Soviets built block housing because communism evil’ if you want your point to spread, especially if it’s so easily disproved by looking at what was built in the 20s and 30s USSR. Early Socialist Realism architecture is beautiful, adopting certain aspects of classicism and using them in new ways to create beautiful spaces and buildings. I think that any modern socialist movement should include both urban revival (ie the creation of mixed-use, walkable urban environments) and architectural beautification. Cars are a cancer which has ruined our cities, lead to degradation of the environment and aid in fostering the hyper-individualist consumer culture we are shackled by today. Modern structures care only for those few inside them, leaving all outside to stare and blank glass, concrete and steel, and are terrible to heat in winter and cool in summer leading to massive energy consumption. Walkable urbanism with beautiful architecture inspired by local traditions is the way forward.
You make it sound like western architects followed Soviet architects into modernism. This is patently false, Miss van Der Rohe, le Corbussier, Frank Lloyd Wright and many more paved the way into modernism well before or at the same time as Soviet modernism. Your explanation of the philosophy is also wrong. It was never about generating human suffering, though that is what it has produced. It was a rational approach to building, of adopting newly invented structural technologies and expressing them cleanly and openly. This has evolved over time into bastardised funky shapes and a contest to create the ugliest building possible. Misguided though they were, the initial idea was noble. It has fallen as the philosophy of modernism has progressed.
I think it is kind of weird you are showing the edge of town when getting into Santa Cruz. The rest of the town is more attractive than down by the highway
Ocean St and Water St is within walking distance of downtown and are the nearest major roads for thousands of people! Outside of historical downtown and a couple of small pockets, the main streets are pretty bad.
Maybe the beauty of American cities is situated in their attempt to express an ideal -- our values of equality, freedom, and diversity. Our cities are a metaphor of this “Americaness” -- where anyone could feel like they belong. On the other hand, the beauty of European cities originates in their attempt to express social class distinctions and a pronounced hierarchical scheme of who belongs there and who doesn't.
No. American cities are ugly and awful because short-term commercial incentives are top priority. Even if we pick a super simple element like _sidewalks,_ it goes like this: America builds for a very clear hierarchy---cars are at the top; everything else is given no care. Large, dangerous thoroughfares designed for speed of the car at the expense of everyone else. If you don't own a car, America does not care about you. Skinny sidewalks for the residents, and wide open, car-exclusive roads for everyone else, resident or not, for any who want to pass through. The land is designed for cars to the detriment of people. That's how America builds, and it's awful. And this is the ubiquitous design across the country. You do not belong unless you have a car, which of course, lines the pockets of the manufacturers that provide them, and as long as money is changing hands, that's the American way. Europe designs sidewalks to be pedestrian-prioritized. Often, cars come up to sidewalk level at crossings, not the other way around. Land is geared towards people first, and cars are guests. Roads are not built like race tracks; they are built like people live there. Sidewalks are often designed with disabilities in mind, like wheelchair users. Many of their greatest cities utilize traffic calming and public transport, and this is more agreeable to the people because of their shared identity with their nation. (But in America, everyone is hyper individualistic, so everyone drives their own 2-ton combustion machine in and out of the city, to and from work, every day, no matter what. Parking is largely free or cheap, because suburbanites expect it to be. And all the drivers never bat an eye at the 40,000+ deaths that occur every single year in the country, yet they all buy their teenagers new cars just so they face a 1 in 103 chance of dying every time they get behind the wheel.) In America, you need a car in order to feed your kids; you either have a car and can participate in society, or you don't and you get forgotten about. In Europe, social class on public transport has no hierarchy---everyone uses public transport, from rich to poor. And their skinny transport lanes and wide sidewalks demonstrate this love for the people, the person, the pedestrian. Their cities are walkable, not made for the four-wheeled machine. Europe has places people live in. America has places people drive through.
@@Brindlebrother …on one level you got this right! But isn’t it all about jobs, jobs, jobs at all costs. People need work or an economy can and will suffer; and then we won’t be a super power; and then we’d get invaded like all those beautiful European countries keep doing. Can’t compare the USA to those “tiny little” countries that have no room for cars-where they can’t seem to get along with each other and speak a different language every few feet it seems and keep letting dictators bully them and guess who gets to keep saving them from themselves? The USA!
@@dolittle6781 You've demonstrated your bias for the car. Europe could have had the 'room for cars,' (and they do still build far too much for the car) but they acknowledge how wasteful and inefficient cars are at moving people, so they lean away from doing so. It's not as though they don't have the car because they cannot; they don't build exclusively for the car because car-dominance is an awful way to build, which is why American cities are so ugly, congested, noisy, and inefficient, all of which puts the USA on the track to lose its 'superpower' status. Let one thing go wrong with oil, and the entire economy will be in shambles, because it has only built for the car and nothing else. Meanwhile, Europe has a more robust way of moving people, because it has invested in _options._ Bus, tram, train, taxi---and the private automobile, more expensive, but still an option. If USA wants to remain a 'superpower' forever, then it must move away from the car. And it will. It's just a matter of time. But it's always important to push for that change sooner rather than later.
Albeit a Dutchman, I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area in the '60s and '70s. I found the track housing, wide roads, ubiquitous motorways, strip developments, traffic congestion, and shopping centres utterly depressing and soul destroying. When I returned to the Netherlands in 1971 on a family visit, I realised that cities and towns could be different; they could be vibrant and inviting. Although I had intended to return to the fatherland, I ended up teaching in an international school in the UK from 1986 until 2018. Upon retiring, I returned to the Netherlands, and I now live in breathtakingly beautiful and historic Middelburg. I no longer have a car; I walk, cycle or take the train everywhere. I engage with people everyday. As I walk through the old, charming streets, I feel overwhelming emotion--almost tears of joy. I never felt that way in an American city or town.
America: Strip mall infinity loop.
😂😂😂😂😂
I’ve been waiting for someone on RUclips to point out why urbanism is right wing. Things like fiscal responsibility, civilizational pride, and traditional development are all right wing values.
Most people on the right hate urbanism. They are even spreading conspiracies about "15 minute cities" that they don't fully understand. Maybe the right in Europe sees it another way, but the right in the US and Canada seem to love having big cars, living in suburbs and laughs at the idea of taking public transit. They think urbanism is akin to communism or something. That's what it always comes down to whenever I'm in an argument with someone on the right about cities vs suburbs.
Yet it's the right-wingers who oppose any denser urbanist development as being part of some sinister WEF/Agenda21 (((conspiracy.)))
I disagree that those values are the domain of only people who think conservatively or are republicans, as right wing tends to be. How they’re implemented and experienced might be different, where fiscal responsibility could be perceived as less public infrastructure to service the same number of people, rather than large swaths of public space that detract from civil pride that people of all political persuasions can have. Traditional developments were based on human scale while allowing for diversity and options, not car-scale based on isolation, car-dependency and a slave to maintenance of underused private space.
@tammielisa I totally agree with you!! I love the urbanism RUclips space but some of the creators are very much on the liberal/progressive side politically and like to condescend the conservative/republican side. To me, urbanism should be a bipartisan issue! I personally am a conservative and love urbanism. I mean if there are republicans that oppose expansion of public transit, let's call that out, but improved public transit is really for an efficient, high quality society. To me, it's just common sense. I also do feel like the liberal/progressive side contradicts itself in wanting public transit but also wanting soft on crime policies. You can't garner public support for public transit if no one feels safe riding it.
Pedestrian pride is not a thing, that's not registering with the left 😮
This is soul crushing!! I really hate my country today!!
ugly modern architecture
The reason ornamentation was removed at the dawn of modernism is not about how "we don't deserve to build beautifully" nor about "asserting control"... well, except maybe for the USSR, since you were assigned an apartment you didn't ask for.
"Beauty" was associated with the unequal and oppressive nature of the kingdoms of pre-WW1, where only the wealthy bourgeois and nobility could afford to live in beauty while the remaining peasants were stuck living in shantytowns. Stalinist housing was the same: architectural masterpieces for the rich, tragic ugly things for the poorest. Same thing with American cities.
With the critical housing needs after WW2, there was an opportunity to build equally, and so ornaments had to be removed for faster construction time, concrete buildings were making their first appearances at the time. USSR of course putting it all litteral and making the commie blocks (which didn't kill urbanism much... until the people started having cars).
Today the message has changed and we really should start building beautiful again, especially since our technology makes it so that the facade can somewhat easily changed without breaking building codes (as long as zoning allows it, where I live somehow brick facades aren't allowed!!???)
At the time of modernism in architecture, the mentality was super excitement of the modern age, at least until the flaws started to hit, so I disagree with the notion that modernism was simply due to douchebags elitists architects who decided your beautiful building sucks and that we all should build sterile gray masterpieces. This scapegoating makes watching these videos (as well as The Aesthetic City's) hard to watch sometimes.
I agree that architectural and beauty standards have fallen, but not so much on the causes. It's corporate capitalism that gave rise to big chains where every store looks the same in any part of the country, and put smaller, local, more unique companies out of business. It's the automobile industry that pushed for bigger, wider roads, and sprawling, single-family-home-only suburban development. It's the construction industry that pushed for those homes to be built cheaply, quickly, and uniformly -- beautification was just an unnecessary cost. It was the desire for segregation and fear of "criminal" minorities that pushed white Americans to those car-centric suburbs.
I agree with what you're saying about car infrastructure and suburban development. A detail people tend to forget was that at that time rail travel was slow and inefficient compared to car travel (which thankfully with modern technology can be reversed), and that there was also a major population boom post WWII. There was the unfortunate decision to go with automobile development, but it aligned with the popular futurism vision of the time.
Also, you can have chain places look nice too and it's been proven that building beautifully isn't more expensive. It's the architects and those in charge of approving buildings that have caused designs to become stale and trash, and that clearly has its roots in Marxism, as evidence by the entire Soviet block and its apologists. Remember, there was no need for that college of architects building in Barcelona to be so egregious, but it was a representation of their philosophy. I recommend looking into the story of Le Plessis-Robinson in Paris, there's a great video by The Aesthetic City.
If you believe your interior design is good in the USA, think again. It is the worst, even Ikea does it better. Most of what you see is crap, both in design and materials. America shops for design in the old world, not in America itself.
So true.
Notice that the "ugly" building you are showcasing from Barcelona have a very caracteristic Picasso frieze
"Hostile environment"
This phrase perfectly encapsulates how I feel walking in most cities. Going to most places is a huge pain because it's ugly, cramped, feels dangerous (thanks in part to the cars whizzing by), is loud, and is also dead and soulless at the same time. Going to do anything outside the ordinary is made ten times more mentally draining than it should be just because you're in this butt ugly, terrible environment for 80% of the time. And this is commonplace, it's not just a "few bad apples". Any city in the USA with >50k population is very likely to have similarly oppressive vibes to the city in the video.
Oh, and the frame at 6:09 perfectly encapsulates everything wrong about having to navigate these places. It feels like there's a concrete slab in your face at all times. Also good luck when it's hot outside because the concrete turns what could be a nice, sunny day into a cramped furnace.
Pretty sure that you are misattributing the cause. The problem is car culture. You don't need good looking buildings if you never actually look at them.
I totally agree that car culture has allowed the problem to exacerbate, but it couldn't be the direct reason as to why buildings got ugly suddenly. It's not like the impulse is to make a building ugly as long as people are driving. Bad designs are made deliberately and are charged with philosophy. Also, there are many, many examples of ugly modernist buildings in walkable Europe too. Car infrastructure sucks, but it's not the direct cause of bad artistry.
Cheaply made building still is ugly and hazards with fire spreading
You’re not a hater these places actually are that bad. Keep doing what you’re doing I support it!
American cities might be ugly and boring, but European cities are overcrowded hellholes with bad traffic and pollution. The densely packed housing in London were slums before gentrification. Full of fire hazards, disease and poor sanitation. The narrow medieval streets were littered with horse muck from all the carriages. It was harder to avoid people. American cities are built on the ancient Roman model, with wide and straight roads so it's easy to get around in your horseless chariot and take an alternative route without having to wait for your satnav to recalculate. Are they perfect? No. Are they easy to improve eg by building a railway above the road, reserving one lane for buses and cycles or reinstating the old streetcars from our grandparents' time? Yes
Hi Alexander. My friend in Australia, an architect, sent me one of your videos. I live in the neighborhood you show and I can walk to nearly all of the redevelopment you discuss in another video. Can you tell us if you are a city planning student or a student of architecture? I am interested to know. I agree. We have some really ugly buildings. About 2/3 down Ocean, there is a mustard colored building called Aqua Hotel or something like that. "Aqua" painted mustard. I absolutely hate that building. I call it a clown house. Take a look at it and the building next to it. So ugly that it makes me mad. I am all for character but I with our planning department, or whomever would be in charge, would require the buildings to add beauty instead of being eye sores. Also, I agree... the LOGOS building downtown was always ugly. Thanks for the videos.
Please read “Why Beauty Matters” by Dr Roger Scruton!!
You don't appreciate the beauty or ugliness of a city until you walk it. From the car, things look okay 😢
It looks nihilistic af. The sunny weather actually makes it more soulless.
The further East in US, the better the architecture (Chicago too as a hub of US architecture). You completely miss the reality of older cities (in both US and EU of course) were built long before the auto age, sheer density makes a difference. Newer and many smaller cities in EU are very drab too. Not all suburbs are sprawling either, some are very densely populated, transit oriented. You may have CA POV vs many built on train lines and walkable throughout NE and Midwest next to larger cities like NYC, Philly, Chicago.
It's city built for cars - you expect something else than big, multilane higway through the middle?
Santa Cruz was built over 100 years before cars became mainstream... Santa Cruz never needed to eat up all the land it did. Instead of pandering and demolishing historical neighborhoods to build highways with copycat suburban businesses that put 0 effort into their building design.
so true
how hideous
I think you should interview Sebastian Treese, he is an architect that is currently teaching at an American university about classical architecture
oh man... I live so close to Santa Cruz, the traffic is insane
eh
Commieblocks were built to house the millions of people that needed housing after WW2, since the Germans destroyed so much of the high-population western portion of the USSR. As such they were cheap, easily constructed and intended to be replaced after a few decades of use by more beautiful housing complexes. Unfortunately, just like in the west, soviet architects were hit by modernism and went in much the same direction as their contemporaries.
Soviet urbanism was, however, still mixed-use and walkable on account of low car production and ownership.
You really shouldn’t include political statements like ‘Soviets built block housing because communism evil’ if you want your point to spread, especially if it’s so easily disproved by looking at what was built in the 20s and 30s USSR. Early Socialist Realism architecture is beautiful, adopting certain aspects of classicism and using them in new ways to create beautiful spaces and buildings.
I think that any modern socialist movement should include both urban revival (ie the creation of mixed-use, walkable urban environments) and architectural beautification. Cars are a cancer which has ruined our cities, lead to degradation of the environment and aid in fostering the hyper-individualist consumer culture we are shackled by today. Modern structures care only for those few inside them, leaving all outside to stare and blank glass, concrete and steel, and are terrible to heat in winter and cool in summer leading to massive energy consumption. Walkable urbanism with beautiful architecture inspired by local traditions is the way forward.
You make it sound like western architects followed Soviet architects into modernism. This is patently false, Miss van Der Rohe, le Corbussier, Frank Lloyd Wright and many more paved the way into modernism well before or at the same time as Soviet modernism.
Your explanation of the philosophy is also wrong. It was never about generating human suffering, though that is what it has produced. It was a rational approach to building, of adopting newly invented structural technologies and expressing them cleanly and openly. This has evolved over time into bastardised funky shapes and a contest to create the ugliest building possible. Misguided though they were, the initial idea was noble. It has fallen as the philosophy of modernism has progressed.
Please don’t quote Peterson that’s so cringe
I think it is kind of weird you are showing the edge of town when getting into Santa Cruz. The rest of the town is more attractive than down by the highway
Ocean St and Water St is within walking distance of downtown and are the nearest major roads for thousands of people! Outside of historical downtown and a couple of small pockets, the main streets are pretty bad.
He could have just as easily shown Mission street, another central location, and the exact same points would have still been conveyed.
Good architecture ain't gonna increase the birth rate - just look at the European stats.
Maybe the beauty of American cities is situated in their attempt to express an ideal -- our values of equality, freedom, and diversity. Our cities are a metaphor of this “Americaness” -- where anyone could feel like they belong. On the other hand, the beauty of European cities originates in their attempt to express social class distinctions and a pronounced hierarchical scheme of who belongs there and who doesn't.
No. American cities are ugly and awful because short-term commercial incentives are top priority. Even if we pick a super simple element like _sidewalks,_ it goes like this: America builds for a very clear hierarchy---cars are at the top; everything else is given no care. Large, dangerous thoroughfares designed for speed of the car at the expense of everyone else. If you don't own a car, America does not care about you. Skinny sidewalks for the residents, and wide open, car-exclusive roads for everyone else, resident or not, for any who want to pass through. The land is designed for cars to the detriment of people. That's how America builds, and it's awful. And this is the ubiquitous design across the country. You do not belong unless you have a car, which of course, lines the pockets of the manufacturers that provide them, and as long as money is changing hands, that's the American way.
Europe designs sidewalks to be pedestrian-prioritized. Often, cars come up to sidewalk level at crossings, not the other way around. Land is geared towards people first, and cars are guests. Roads are not built like race tracks; they are built like people live there. Sidewalks are often designed with disabilities in mind, like wheelchair users. Many of their greatest cities utilize traffic calming and public transport, and this is more agreeable to the people because of their shared identity with their nation. (But in America, everyone is hyper individualistic, so everyone drives their own 2-ton combustion machine in and out of the city, to and from work, every day, no matter what. Parking is largely free or cheap, because suburbanites expect it to be. And all the drivers never bat an eye at the 40,000+ deaths that occur every single year in the country, yet they all buy their teenagers new cars just so they face a 1 in 103 chance of dying every time they get behind the wheel.)
In America, you need a car in order to feed your kids; you either have a car and can participate in society, or you don't and you get forgotten about. In Europe, social class on public transport has no hierarchy---everyone uses public transport, from rich to poor. And their skinny transport lanes and wide sidewalks demonstrate this love for the people, the person, the pedestrian. Their cities are walkable, not made for the four-wheeled machine.
Europe has places people live in. America has places people drive through.
"Equality, freedom, diversity" - what a joke 😂😂😂
@@Brindlebrother …on one level you got this right! But isn’t it all about jobs, jobs, jobs at all costs. People need work or an economy can and will suffer; and then we won’t be a super power; and then we’d get invaded like all those beautiful European countries keep doing. Can’t compare the USA to those “tiny little” countries that have no room for cars-where they can’t seem to get along with each other and speak a different language every few feet it seems and keep letting dictators bully them and guess who gets to keep saving them from themselves? The USA!
@@dolittle6781 You've demonstrated your bias for the car. Europe could have had the 'room for cars,' (and they do still build far too much for the car) but they acknowledge how wasteful and inefficient cars are at moving people, so they lean away from doing so. It's not as though they don't have the car because they cannot; they don't build exclusively for the car because car-dominance is an awful way to build, which is why American cities are so ugly, congested, noisy, and inefficient, all of which puts the USA on the track to lose its 'superpower' status. Let one thing go wrong with oil, and the entire economy will be in shambles, because it has only built for the car and nothing else. Meanwhile, Europe has a more robust way of moving people, because it has invested in _options._ Bus, tram, train, taxi---and the private automobile, more expensive, but still an option. If USA wants to remain a 'superpower' forever, then it must move away from the car. And it will. It's just a matter of time. But it's always important to push for that change sooner rather than later.
@@dolittle6781What an absolutely unhinged and delusional take lmao
fascist
...Said the lover of inhuman american ugliness.