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Comment by ethanbond | Hacker News Reader

Well… most towns/subdivisions with zealous planning suck. The best cities in the world appear to be very organically grown. Maybe this is an illusion?

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Half of Polish cities were rebuilt using central urban planning and came up awesome (build quality aside). There were a few rules:

- 5-10 min walk to kindergarden/school and local stores - 3-5 min walk to a bus stop - tons of green space - taller buildings but varied in size and angles so that there is both ample space and variety

This is my place I lived in when studying: https://goo.gl/maps/VQqNEY8rcjScsGFg6 (not even the greenest one)

And this is my place where I grew up (street view not available because cars not allowed)

https://goo.gl/maps/Q3MwszTjQDqqNFS28

I literally had no streets to cross when I had to go to an elementary school, and literally 1000 other kids had 1-2 small streets to cross at most, walking 10-15 min or less.

There's also the classic - Nowa Huta, a former city and now part of Kraków, built next to Tadeusz Sędzimir Steelworks (formerly Vladimir Lenin Steelworks) - "nowa huta [stali]" translates to "new steelworks".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nowa_Huta

Here's how it looks:

https://goo.gl/maps/5v8zZHpPtZ7Cik7b7

I'm linking to a traffic map, because it's best at highlighting the structure of the place. See the big roads forming straight lines, crossing to form distinct cells? This was intentional, top-down design. Zoom on a cell, see how it's made from apartment blocks surrounding shared, green communal areas.

It's currently the greenest place in Kraków, and despite having a reputation of a dangerous place in late 90s[0], it's one of the nicest and most family-friendly areas in the city.

The urban legend I grew up with goes, this cell-based design is partially for defensive purposes: during a ground conflict, spaces between outermost apartment blocks form choke points and could be barricaded to close off the sub-district.

There's another, less happy story that I've heard - that the steelworks and the city of Nowa Huta were purposefully placed by the Soviets on the most fertile soil in the area, destroying it in the process, in order to get the Poles to urbanize more and generally to spite them. I haven't found a confirmation of this - it might be an urban legend, but it's one that's widely believed over here.

[0] - Since taken by other districts; last I heard, Kurdwanów was the prime "hot zone". By "dangerous" I mean "you can get robbed at knife point" and "you can get beat up by hooligans". The joke goes, hooligans that lived in Nowa Huta have since grown up, started families, and don't have time for petty crime anymore.

And a lot of old issues about how drab they were are due to how long it took for the green areas to flourish properly after the building spree. These days it's much easier to "kickstart" the green areas.

I have also been seeing more mural art put up on these old tower blocks buildings. A giant blank wall is only ugly if you have no imagination.

Indeed, in the places that lacked decoration it's nice to see them added.

A bit of a problem however is when original detailing gets removed on n the estates that did have it, often replaced with cheap pastel Styrofoam insulation.

Oh absolutely! I was surprised to find that the communist city planning in Poland made for extremely livable cities. The block apartments may not have much going for them architecturally, but they are arranged around beautiful parks and gardens, wonderful public spaces dotted with stores and markets. The best way to describe the planning philosophy is US college dorm life on a big state campus. It's even common to have a canteen in the center of the neighborhood just like you would a dining hall. The only sad thing is that as car ownership expands, the green space keeps getting eaten away by parking lots since these areas were designed for car-free living with excellent transit links to the rest of the city.

> Maybe this is an illusion?

It's a virulent meme. Planned towns are bad. Organic growth is good. Planning is tyranny, is oppression, is taxation. Please read "Seeing Like a State". Organic growth is freedom, is markets, is good.

It's not entirely wrong, just extremely misleading. Urban planning doesn't have to create complete, inflexible designs, managing every tiny bit of life. And outside some failed experiments[0], it almost never is.

Think of planning towns as growing gardens. You work with the forces of organic growth, not against them, but still nudge and direct them to create a result that's better[1] than what would be there on its own.

[0] - Some planners got high on cybernetics/system thinking, in an era we could not computationally support designing complex systems - then others used this to push political ideologies; mix in power struggles and regular corruption, and of course it fails. What's annoying is that it gets painted as "planning bad", "cybernetics bad", "central bad", instead of recognizing the incentive failures in the mix.

[1] - Better according to the gardener. Nature optimizes for its own thing. It's important to remember that natural, organic growth rarely optimizes for the benefit of individual units, whether plants or people.

Maybe instead of urban planning, you need "urban philosophy".

American urban philosophy is the car and the road and segregation. Everything else is secondary.

American suburbia is just Conway's law on a massive scale.

I think it may indeed be an illusion. Paris, for example, was extremely planned.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haussmann%27s_renovation_of_Pa...

This is fascinating! Thanks for sharing. It’s hard to tell what the specificity of the planning was… it seems to have included the street layouts and the below-ground infrastructure, but unclear on the facades and the shop/business distribution?

I didn’t know about this but it makes a lot of sense. Those enormous boulevards are clearly not original nor unplanned.

The 19th century equivalent of driving freeways through poor districts in American cities.

Even the facades in Paris were planned to the point that there were regulations on color and material and design [1]. Regulations were eventually loosened up somewhat.

[1] https://www.unjourdeplusaparis.com/en/paris-reportage/reconn...

You would have to consider Paris to be one of OP's "best cities in the world", though.

Well Manhattan, for example—obviously at first it developed organically, but the upper part of the island was largely planned, with a strict grid system of streets and avenues and a large park in the center!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QaIOfgz8FVY

Planning works great for public utilities- roads, libraries, parks etc. The moment we cross that are have a planned bank, grocer, retail I think it falls apart. The grocery shop needs guarantee on revenue to be setup, and then they will slack off because they won’t need to compete or innovate. People will realize once the HOA bill runs in to several hundred dollars and have to deal with shitty services. In the real world, depending on the area, one grocery chain will die and another will take its place.

Alternatively in the real world, one grocery store will die because a Wal*Mart opened an hour away and is replaced by an hour's drive instead of a brief walk to pick up groceries because people can't resist a dollar cheaper and ten more in gas.

No, that’s not how the real world works. People go to the Walmart and deal with that misery because groceries for the week cost $100 instead of $200.

People on a budget absolutely pay attention to the cost of gas.

That absolutely is how the real world works. I'm not well-off myself, I keep track of prices, and this recently happened in my own town.

Yes, the shoppers went to Walmart. No, they didn’t pay a net of $9 extra as a result of that choice.

No, you either didn’t read what I wrote or you haven’t been living on a budget. Poor people don’t waste more money on gas than they save by going to Walmart.

They go to Walmart because it’s significantly cheaper to do weekly shopping there than even other big retail grocery outlets, let lone little ones. My parents absolutely fucking hate going to Walmart but they go there weekly because it’s $50/week difference just for the two of them vs Kroger.

You’re both not wrong. I’ve seen both. I’ve lived both. One of my earliest memories was being chastised by my family for spending a tiny fraction more than the lowest price on something; same brand, twice the volume, didn’t have a shelf life, wasn’t over budget. I got in trouble as a poor kid in a poor family for listening to advice my family had given me to shop smart.

I also got the same in reverse for being less thrifty and more considerate.

Big shrug emoji. I know poverty so much it scares and traumatized me. I appreciate that not everyone does, but I also don’t think it should be represented as something uniquely rational.

Poverty is duress. People make all kinds of good decisions because they have survival instincts, and all kinds of bad decisions because they have a bunch of incentives. They often do both and everything in between in a single outing because, yep, gas is expensive. And they’re tired. And the world is hard and expensive.

I definitely have been living on a budget, having been literally born into poverty and never quite able to move up a level. It's been with me my entire life and I assume it'll continue to be so for the rest of it. Kroger's a rich people store; there are plenty of stores that aren't that have been actually driven out of business by Wal*Mart.

Because their prices weren’t competitive, it’s that simple. Shopping at Walmart is not fun. People flock there because it’s cheaper than everyone else.

You’re suggesting that poor people lose more money by going to Walmart than they would shopping locally, which is just ridiculous. It implies poor people have no basic math skills on a average, which isn’t the case.

Walmart doesn’t crush local competitors with shitty warehouse lighting and angsty employee vibes. They do it by being far cheaper with their massive logistics.

Poor people shop where the money will go the furthest, full stop.

> People on a budget absolutely pay attention to the cost of gas.

People on a budget do for certain levels of "on a budget". If you only have $5 to buy food (and no credit) and a full tank of gas, it doesn't matter if it costs more in the long term. You burn extra gas now or your kids don't eat.

I find this pretty insulting to the average persons intelligence and out of touch with the pricing realities in many locations.

I have two local grocery stores. One is in town and the other the next over. Both are less than 3 miles. The prices are between 2-4x compared to me driving 30 miles in either direction to visit Cost Co/Walmart.

I don’t mind paying more for local or the convenience but I quite literally can’t afford to more than double my grocery budget for the month. So I only buy perishables locally for the most part.

The economics of this are problematic in both directions, but I still need to put food on the table.

Doesn't zoning largely let you choose where private businesses go? Maybe you can't select exactly where to put the bank versus the grocery store, but you can select categories of businesses, to create the feel you want.

(I'm not sure whether zoning is a "good" thing or not in general, but there are certainly lots of successful towns and cities with zoning rules.)

You can try, but there are failure modes.

* People don't want the things that are specified in the master plan, so there's no tenant that would be both legal and viable.

* Businesses are protected from competition (for their space, and for their niche in the area) so they charge too much and deliver too little.

* People want things that aren't in the master plan, and they aren't allowed to exist. (The politically engaged majority can get the plan amended with enough work, but these top-down designs can miss the long tail of niche interests, none individually powerful enough to get itself on the agenda).

I feel like 1 and 3 means your "master plan" just sucked all along. >:)

It's certainly a hard thing to get right, though.

The solution in most of the world is to not create too detailed plans, and often to minimize the amount of zones with pretty much all of them having multiple uses.

This means for example that people obsessed with house prices can't stop a grocer from existing within walking distance.

Rather than national businesses that take the profit out, how about an accommodation for small business owners to live in the community as well? But not subsidize them so they actually have to be viable businesses.

In many cities, there are plenty of first floor shops with the proprietors living upstairs. It seems that collectively, they'd keep the planning and policies in favor of active and vibrant lifestyle, focus on keeping crime in check, promote community cohesion.

I am one hundred percent certain that both the locatelli grocer that has almost nothing I want to eat in it ever and has nothing but mexican standoff intersections with people walking around really slow, and the 'california' grocery that I really have to work hard at not just eating all the food in inside the store are both heavily planned, in terms of where exactly they are and all of the ridiculously excessive lighting and product placement inside of the stores. There is some vague pretension to a capital market and some vague notion that some of the great many retail businesses which are essentialy a second form of rent extraction may go out of business, but by and large it would seem extremely clear that there is a great deal of planning going on with information that business people are not supposed to have access to. Whether or not there is a viable alternative to said situation is a more complicated question, but there is no question that there is not some kind of innovation() support system where if you just figure out how to build a better mousetrap or run a better grocery store or sandwich shop, you will succeed and grow.

() or even just hard work and reliability

Instead of mandating a grocer, mandate that the first floor of buildings be for retail. Let the owner lease it to whatever business he wants to.

In a small neighborhood, that would shatter the illusion that you never need to leave, at which point the distant walk to your car for actual shopping becomes a problem. (Or, alternatively, the lack of delivery services because they can't actually reach both your home and the place they shopped using the same mode of transportation.)

Walkable neighborhoods don’t need to be small, and they can have car traffic - it’s more about how you design that car traffic.

This is a main corner and main street in neighborhood near my home place. It has car traffic, but it is perfectly walkable.

The main street has ground floor dedicated to commerce.

https://goo.gl/maps/W46KUsJtAtto2yUE7

You have a bus stop with buses getting to city center every 3-5 min, and the supermarket store around a corner has literally all grocery things I needed when I lived around (it’s the size of 3-4 medium Wallgreenses)

The post I was responding to suggested that it wasn't necessary to arrange for at least one grocery store in the walkable neighborhood, and that leasing to retail establishments could be entirely up to the building owners. I was observing that if that results in no grocery stores located in the neighborhood, that would make the neighborhood much less walkable.

(Even if there's one in walking distance, hopefully it has an excess of carts and doesn't mind them going home with people...)

And unless you want to go out for groceries far too often, you're going to end up with a quantity of groceries that's incompatible with taking a bus. You'd need a car, or a bike trailer for a very dedicated cyclist, or a delivery service and the ability for them to deliver.

For a grocery store, it's location location location. A grocery store is going to want to be located there. It'll happen organically. I've lived in Europe, there always seems to be a grocery store of some sort nearby. Nobody centrally planned it.

What's "far too often"? If it's a pleasant 5 minute walk, why wouldn't you want to go out for groceries every day?

For much the same reason I don't want an hour-long commute: I don't want to waste the time. I enjoy taking a pleasant 5-minute (or 20-minute) walk regularly, but I'd much rather spend 90 minutes grocery shopping a month rather than 10-20 minutes every day or every few days.

> And unless you want to go out for groceries far too often

I know carless Londoners whose commute takes them past a grocery store on foot every day. So they will literally go into the store for a single item.

However, you're right that this isn't a good solution for everyone - for example, people who are starting a family. Even if you can fit a week's groceries for one person into a backpack, that's no help for four-person households. Grocery delivery services are widely used in London for this reason. As is moving out of the city in order to start a family.

Zoom Google Maps into almost any town in continental Europe[0] and search for "grocery store" or "supermarket". [1]

Or look at one supermarket and see how many shops they have [2].

Depending on the size of the household and personal preference, people might use these shops every 2-4 days, perhaps using a bicycle or trolley to take things home.

[0] I'm sure there are exceptions, like Arctic areas, mountains, tourist towns, etc.

[1] https://www.google.com/maps/search/grocery+store/@51.8962239...

[2] https://netto.dk/find-butik/?mapData={%22coordinates%22:{%22...}

I live in a London suburb. I don't have a car, or even have a drivers license because I've always lived places where having a car isn't important enough to weigh up the cost and nuisance (to me).

Before delivery services, I'd walk to the grocery store every few days. It was perfectly fine. When I commuted I'd just pop by on the way home from work. There are at least 4 small-ish shops within 10 minutes walk, and half a dozen bigger ones within 20 minutes walk or a short bus ride (that would also coincide with the commute for a large portion of the people living around me).

And I live in perhaps the worst location locally in this respect - I'm pretty much equidistant from three 3-4 different shopping areas, dead centre of a very low density residential area with few shops.

Overall, the key thing to maintain a walkable neighbourhood is simply that enough people who live there actually want to walk. In that case there will be enough shops nearby. The problem occurs when too many of the people in these neighbourhoods like to live in an area that is walkable, but still prefer to use the care.

I think the key to make such neighbourhoods work is fewer parking spaces to explicitly ensure a sufficient portion of the people living in them actually bring foot traffic to the nearby retail spaces. Do that and you get grocery stores without any need for detail regulation.

Where I live the council won't approve planning applications with more than 1.5 parking spaces per living unit on average. It could probably be significantly lower.

But that’s a very good example. The older parts of the city (way downtown and West Village) feel way better than all the more gridded areas.

...I mean, we’ll have to agree to disagree on that! I really like the grid, it’s one of the reasons I like living here. Makes it so easy to navigate.

I’m not disagreeing with the functionality, and personally don’t find the grid to be particularly bad, but do you really think West Village isn’t dramatically more liveable feeling? I suppose this quickly veers into hard-to-define sensations so perhaps the point is moot :)

I do suspect that a lot of people would prefer to live in that part of town over the more modern areas… as evidenced by the especially insane rent.

It’s purely a matter of taste.

I’ve lived in Manhattan for close to thirty years got married here and raised a family here.

What you call a dramatically more livable feeling means different things to different people. Honestly it meant different things to me at 25, 35 and 45. It also meant different things when I was stretched financially and when I was flush.

The village substantially more expensive than e.g. the upper west side? (These places are all outside of my price range so I've never really looked.)

There are also lots of other reasons the tip of manhattan may have been more expensive—for example, it's just the oldest part of the city, so everything started there and expanded outwards.

Yeah, according to Streeteasy West Village is about $1900/sqft and UWS is about $1400/sqft.

...that might not be the best metric, I bet there are fewer super small apartments to be had on the UWS! I know the village has a fair number of places that were built before current laws about minimum square feet per apartment.

I don't know what the right metric would be—maybe median rent or even family income? I guess I also don't really think you can tell much from all this.)

How would you measure this? How do you differentiate "zealous planning" from "normal [?] planning?" This just feels like confirmation bias to me.

Totally ripe for confirmation bias, which is why my comment seemed very uncertain. I’m kind of going from a heuristic of older cities versus newer ones under the (potentially wrong!) assumption that zoning has tended toward more stringency over time.

> The best cities in the world appear to be very organically grown. Maybe this is an illusion?

Which ones do you think were organically grown vs. which have zealous planning?

(It would be nice if you used large enough examples that we could discuss them, as opposed to small towns known only to you.)

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