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Comment by nayuki | Hacker News Reader

Okay? The elephant in the room is that bad urban design is bad for your health: Car centrism, parking lots, stroads, endless sprawl, etc.

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Right, and a lot of bad urban design, is "good" architecture.

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It reminds me of what urbanist Jan Gehl calls 'birdshit architecture', which is stuff that looks good from a bird's eye view or a rendering but is totally impractical in practice. Prime examples include gigantic plazas or lawns without any sort of trees or seating, so you can't really stay in them because they're too windy and the sun is overbearing, they're totally empty (and probably unsafe) as a result, and they just extend your walking distances.

Bonus points if the paths are totally fenced in because they're not where people actually want to walk and they end up trampling the lawn full of desire paths.

I forget what it's called, but something like "airplane view" architecture is also bad urban design. It's when centralized planners have lofty goals and design huge neighborhoods and plazas that look good from the air. There are towers, gigantic lawns, and a projection of power rather than chaos. There are various Latin American cities guilty of this. I'm struggling to recall the words and examples, so please help me out!

I believe we are talking about the exact same thing; “bird shit” is a play on words of “bird’s eye view”, meant to convey the planner’s/architect’s lack of thought or contempt of the actual people on the ground.

Le Corbusier

Yeah, American cities full of stroads and parking lots are far uglier than a hypothetical walkable city full of 'bland' architecture.

A big box store with no windows and only a logo for ornament is pretty much as bland as you can get.

Yeah, I'd much rather live in a walkable place with unpolluted air with a ton of ugly buildings, than a place with gorgeous buildings that needs ugly, polluting vehicles to get everywhere.

But… those things are inversely correlated? Walkable cities tend to be dramatically more beautiful and ugly gigantic POS buildings are the ones surrounded by acres of parking lot and highway…?

I agree I’d take your tradeoff if presented but I think the real world tradeoff is even sillier and more obvious than the one you propose.

Tokyo is the complete opposite of what you describe, “ugly” per the article but walkable and lively. No acres of parking lots either.

I wouldn't describe Tokyo (outside of some of the hyper-commercial/hotel districts) as meeting the article's definition of "ugly?"

Tokyo is an extremely organic city.

I don’t agree with the article and its definitions, it seems poorly sourced and to be advocating for English towns as the apex of civilization. That said, the photos provided and the descriptions focus more on the style of the buildings than urban form: “monotonous straight lines of modernist architecture” vs “historical architecture such as ‘Church’, ‘Castle’, ‘Tower’ and ‘Cottage’ made places look more attractive and get better ratings for their beauty.”

Typical Tokyo streetscape is heavy on modern blocky buildings, like this: https://sanpoo.jp/upload/yutenji-sanpo/yutenji_106.jpg

A "walkable" city has everything you need within walking distance. A "beautiful" city is devoid of modernist architectural monstrosities. A "lively" city is full of people.

I would argue there is no strong correlation here. A city can be walkable and ugly, lively and unwalkable, beautiful and unwalkable, beautiful but not lively...

And then there’s the public transit factor. I’m not sure how much of Tokyo is walkable by that definition unless you also factor in the subway.

When most people say walkable they mean safe to walk in. The trains don’t make it unsafe, and other than commuting you can do a fair amount using just walking or a bike because of the preponderance of small businesses that are safe to walk to. And you walk to and from the train station.

This is mostly meant to contrast to non-walkable spaces, where to walk to a store in an American suburb often means walking in a 3 ft wide path next to 55mph traffic and the crosswalks for said road are a half mile apart, if you’re lucky. The safe paths are circuitous if they exist and the pedestrian signals, if you can get a green one, may take minutes to cycle to and give you thirty seconds to cross 6+ lanes.

I think most people mean walkable to be more than maybe a half dozen square blocks of restaurants and small stores that aren’t really connected to anything else though. Bunch of examples in Silicon Valley.

Sure, bigger than a mall. The main point is that transit enhances walkability, they don't really compete in the absence of other factors (like transit in a highway median)

A lot of former communist block cities have places that are just giant ugly concrete block buildings, with beautiful walkable parks and 15 min city accessibility.

Definitely an interesting counterpoint!

I second that. I grew up in a commie block that was just painful to look at, but within 10min walking distance with only streets without through-traffic(because it was either impossible or just pointless) there was:

A school, playground, clinic, culture centre(which doubled as a movie theater and a regular theater), supermarket(s), pharmacy a dentist an indoor pool (still active, even though it's tiny) and several other things I won't bother mentioning because the list is already quite long.

But to me the most important part of that experience was that there was space between the buildings - green space at that - and the buildings themselves had mostly a total of four(including ground) floors, with a few higher units here and there.

The issue is that many opponents or people who are on the fence will think of higher density as concrete jungles or commie blocks. You also need to sell them an aesthetically pleasing vision. People are emotionally first and will then find logic to justify the emotions

That’s kinda fair, but a lot of the architecture hated on actually looks nice. I like the 5 over 1s, for instance.

I believe a lot of the hatred of 5-over-1s is because in a lot of American towns and cities, that 20th century architecture they would've contrasted against is just gone. When everything is surrounded by post-1970s functional modernist architecture, minimalist modernism just feels like it's simplifying (often seen as cost reducing) things even further. Plus a lot of the materials they use make it feel even cheaper. Featureless fiberglass or plastic panels haphazardly jutting out of grey painted stucco and concrete with no sense of visual balance exudes "budget" in the same way that buying counterfeit "ADJDAS" pants does.

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