60 Years of Urban Change (2015) | Hacker News Reader

60 Years of Urban Change (2015)

iqc.ou.edu

29 pointsinamberclad23 comments

More dramatic imagery of this effect is found at http://theoverheadwire.blogspot.com/2010/02/parking-bombs.ht... - "Parking Bomb" is an apt description.

See also: "The Suburban Experiment"

https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2015/1/7/americas-suburb...

The southeast US, the region where I grew up, just makes me sad, especially now that I'm living in the northeast.

Looks like some places like Nashville and Atlanta actually had density, but it was wiped out in favor of highways.

One of my biggest dreams is to move back down south (because fuck winters here), but I've gotten so accustomed to having good public transit and the possibility of living (and not struggling) without a car.

Boston makes me sad, too. Look at the giant chunk that was torn out for the Government Center. You can see how windswept and barren it looks from space.

The entire old West End neighbourhood was destroyed.

Before: http://thewestendmuseum.org/wordpress/wp-content/gallery/urb...

After: http://thewestendmuseum.org/wordpress/wp-content/gallery/urb...

I recommend visiting The West End Museum if you are in Boston.

The comparisons for the northeast are the most depressing. Huge swaths of cities were simply destroyed, and some of them never recovered.

http://iqc.ou.edu/2015/01/21/60yrsnortheast/

As a european, its pretty funny to see cities where the streets are so parallel

http://www.anycerda.org/web/imagen/1266923209.foto1.tbl_fich...

The Romans laid things out in a grid.

Except for Rome itself which was rebuilt very hastily after the sack of Rome in 390 BC. But everywhere they went, particularly for military encampments, they brought the grid with them.

Parts of the some European cities (e.g. Edinburgh's New Town) have regular parallel streets - just not quite at the scale of US cities:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Town,_Edinburgh#/media/Fil...

What's interesting to me is how little has changed. The biggest thing that changed in most of those cities is that there's big ugly highways cutting through the middle of the city now.

People should check out the Earth Explorer site from the USGS:

https://earthexplorer.usgs.gov/

It has a huge number of high-resolution aerial photos for large swaths of the country going back to the 1930s, and not just urban areas. The interface is really clunky but once you get the hang of it you can find an enormous amount of data.

I couldn't find mention of it but I'm sure the OP site obtained their photos from there.

One thing I noticed is that it looks like (maybe being fooled by the older b&w) most of the cities shown have increased their greenery. That is, they seem to have gained trees —a good development.

Not intentionally trying to be a downer, but look at Albuquerque.

So much space reserved for parking cars.

Land was cheap. At the time the population was less, the suburbs were less city-like and suburbs had a larger share of the population/money relative to the cities. It made sense to reserve the space so that those people could come to the city to work, shop, go to the dentist, etc, etc. Times have changed and that's not economically viable anymore or at least not on the same scale. Better to develop the land for some other use. If reserving the same amount of space for people to park made economic sense today we'd still do it.

Wow. This is some perfect alignment.

I stopped reading this article after the first example of Denver. I would not trust this article not being mostly propaganda because, if one looks in detail at the first pair of photos, they are not close to displaying the same area. One third of the right of the 2014 photo shows where the grid changes directions with a very large N-S road. The one on the left from 1953 is shifted far to the left to where this part of Denver is not in the picture. It is hard to tell if even the scales (also not shown) of the photos are the same.

Edit: I decided to look at the rest of the photos after writing this comment and it is obvious in some of the other photos that the author somehow thinks it is useful to have photos of before and after that don't even overlap at all. Oakland, for example, has maybe 10% overlap with one showing mostly west Oakland and the other showing the Lake Merritt area. Maybe my browser is just not displaying things right. I'll interpret these strange before and after images that way and move on.

> Maybe my browser is just not displaying things right.

Yah, there should be a slider... Initial view shows left half of the area from before, right half from after, and you drag the slider to change the ratio. You might want to reconsider your browser choice if it also failed to display the "how to use" instructions at the top right.

Thanks for the info. Works great in Chrome.

"Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity. But don't rule out malice." - It's more than likely your choice of browser, these photos are very well aligned, but your hostility worries me.

I agree. "I'll interpret these strange before and after images that way and move on."

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