The prevalence of this view in the tech community is especially ironic considering that San Francisco was a far nicer city to live in 50-60 years ago (in general, of course - not for every segment of the population.)
There's an architectural movement to come back to these more human-sized city designs too: smaller streets, more mixed use, less emphasis on large (and motorised) transportations, incorporation of structural shading and breeze-shaping, ...
From the perspective of today the problem was that the families living in the small apartments was way too big and did not pay enough rent to maintain the buildings. They just did not have enough rich single professionals willing to pay chic apartments and studios back then. Or student with rich parents seeking a studio downtown.
Rent wasn't high back then.
Of course not. This isn't a call for a return to poverty and disease. It's about the organic neighbourhoods, architecture and street layouts that are gone forever and replaced with centrally planned layouts and homogenous buildings.
One of the reasons I think London is a better city than Paris (in my opinion, obviously - I've lived in both) is that it has, whether through accident or design, managed to retain significant numbers of it's medieval streets and diverse, centuries-old buildings while also embracing modernity.
Where as in Paris you have a rather homogenous city, mostly all built in the same era, in London you can walk a few blocks and be transported through centuries.
Barring the great fire (and I suspect there will have been similar events in paris as well) There was no one architect or style that completely flattened the victorian london.
The strand, which is now a large paris style boulevard was a semi-slum/porn publishing district. Around the houses or parliament was a spectacularly large slum.
https://publicdomainreview.org/2016/06/29/the-secret-history... (warning Victorian porn. NSFW)
This did mean that in the 1920-40s there was a massive expansion into the "suburbs" to escape the slums, poverty and diseases of central london. This is a decline that has only really just reversed in the last 20 years. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demography_of_London)
The crucial thing was that "social" housing was placed in every borough of the city, not just on the outskirts. The highest density of social housing is in southwark, which is opposite both the houses of parliament and the "city". I imagine its the equivalent of building ~80k houses exclusively for the poor in the 6th and 7th arrondissement
Paraphrased from wikipedia on the term fairy tale - is mainly used for stories with origins in European tradition, originally meaning a little story from a long time ago when the world was still magic. Tales were told or enacted dramatically, rather than written down, and handed down from generation to generation.
Wikipedia on Paris - The Parisii inhabited the Paris area from around the middle of the 3rd century BC. This meeting place of land and water trade routes gradually became an important trading centre. The Parisii traded with many river towns and minted their own coins for that purpose. During the 17th century, Cardinal Richelieu, chief minister of Louis XIII, was determined to make Paris the most beautiful city in Europe.
And from this post - Costly confusion, the triumphant vulgarity, the awful materialism that we are going to pass on to our descendants. ... Thousands of people were forced from their homes to make way for luxury buildings that the former tenants would not be able to afford. The overcrowding turned Paris into an “immense workshop of putrefaction, where misery, the plague, and disease work together in harmony,”. One way to successfully quell rebellion then was to to insulate the rich from the poor. The social ills that helped motivate the 1848 revolution did not disappear with the renovation of Paris and the subsequent restructuring of its social life. They may have even been made worse by the stratification of urban life,
A lot of times people talk about particular aspects of a period, or in general, of objects, not absolutely everything that comes with it.
You don't need to bind every thing to its context entirely.