In Tepid Defense of New York City
I'm not a huge fan of NYC, largely because it's so dirty and expensive. I will say this, though: New York is a model for environmentally responsible living. Lots of New Yorkers don't have cars. They live in a fairly dense environment. They have taken a page from Chicago's book and built vertically. The fact that they live in a horribly polluted environment that will probably take years off their lives (seriously) is mostly not their fault.
What I don't understand is why NYC's design hasn't been replicated elsewhere. I understand why you wouldn't want to copy certain aspects of it, but overall the idea of a dense city center linked to outlying residential areas by mass transit seems like a good one.
This is especially true because if you were starting from scratch, you could build a much better mass transit system. New York's subways were first built by competing companies, and the lack of a cohesive design is obvious (it's even more obvious when you know that different lines use different gauges of rail, so that some cars don't work on some lines). New York also has to deal with a lot of suburbs that contribute little in the way of taxes but drain off high-income residents and contribute to lots of congestion. A newly designed city could avoid some of those problems.
Meanwhile, planned cities like Irvine, California have apparently been quite successful. With so much money sloshing around, why doesn't someone buy up some land and develop a big, new, highly dense city? Ideally you would control a huge amount of land, to limit free-riding on your borders, but either way it seems quite feasible to me. Is it that it's nearly impossible to assemble large tracts of land in good locations? Is it that the new city's voters might expropriate some of the value you've added to the city?
I was thinking about this while reading a piece in the NYTimes with a title no article could live up to. If we're going to reduce our carbon consumption, better-designed cities would seem to be a major tool at our disposal.
What I don't understand is why NYC's design hasn't been replicated elsewhere. I understand why you wouldn't want to copy certain aspects of it, but overall the idea of a dense city center linked to outlying residential areas by mass transit seems like a good one.
This is especially true because if you were starting from scratch, you could build a much better mass transit system. New York's subways were first built by competing companies, and the lack of a cohesive design is obvious (it's even more obvious when you know that different lines use different gauges of rail, so that some cars don't work on some lines). New York also has to deal with a lot of suburbs that contribute little in the way of taxes but drain off high-income residents and contribute to lots of congestion. A newly designed city could avoid some of those problems.
Meanwhile, planned cities like Irvine, California have apparently been quite successful. With so much money sloshing around, why doesn't someone buy up some land and develop a big, new, highly dense city? Ideally you would control a huge amount of land, to limit free-riding on your borders, but either way it seems quite feasible to me. Is it that it's nearly impossible to assemble large tracts of land in good locations? Is it that the new city's voters might expropriate some of the value you've added to the city?
I was thinking about this while reading a piece in the NYTimes with a title no article could live up to. If we're going to reduce our carbon consumption, better-designed cities would seem to be a major tool at our disposal.
posted by James | 6:43 PM
2 Comments:
I'm going to take years off your life.
What do you mean "New York's design"? Have you ever been to Tokyo? They've taken the idea a lot further, without the dirtiness.
I think the history of planned cities show that most of them have been failures and that successes are the exception. Not that you couldn't try. The New Yorker recently had an article about Domino’s Pizza mogul Tom Monaghan and his attempt to do just that, albeit with "Catholic values".
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