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Comment by abraxas | Hacker News Reader

North Americans visiting Europe often grapple with why they enjoy European cities more than North American ones. It's often perceived as an architecture issue ("Europe has historical buildings that we don't have") but very few notice that the main difference is the urban scale and the resulting walkability. The Netherlands has plenty of modernist and even brutalist architecture yet every city there is a pretty nice place to be. This is because they know how to scale cities to human centric proportions. The layout of buildings together with the connective tissue of tram lines, bike lanes and sidewalks is what makes their cities alive and safe, not elaborate building facades (although they have some of that as well).

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Important to note is how most cities have two (or more) zones; the old inner city for leisure, tourism, shopping and going out, the suburban areas around it where most people live, and industrial / office building estates where most people work.

Amsterdam is a great example [0] and well-known for a lot of tourists, with the city center being the tourism hub, the zones around it for living, west/northwest for industry/shopping, south for highrise offices and football stadiums, etc. Most tourists won't go that far out though.

[0] https://www.amsterdamsights.com/about/neighborhoods.html

I spent two weeks in Amsterdam South where I rented an apartment. Commuting to the centre on a tram or even cycling there was no problem. Even though the centre is where most tourists hang out, the surrounding neighbourhoods are just as walkable and bikeable as the inner city.

Cities always have many areas. And of course the outer areas are not as good as the tourist focused inner city, but they are generally still pretty good urbanism.

Even European subburbs are generally better, smaller roads, more mixed use, more trees, more dynamics, more commercial and building times mixed in. The extreme separation between building types that became the standard in US zoning-codes simple never happened to the same extent in Europe.

American cities lack medium density mixed commercial-residential areas.

That's pretty much only an Amsterdam thing, and it is limited to a relatively small tourist-centered area. Even inside the Grachtengordel the majority of buildings are homes or offices.

Also, those "suburban" areas in Amsterdam aren't suburban: they are still built with a bicycle-, pedestrian-, and transit-first mindset. Those office buildings in Zuid are built right next to one of the busiest railway stations in the country, and the highly-paid lawyers will arrive at the office by bike from their nearby homes.

If you want Amsterdam's suburbs, you'll have to go to Almere: it was literally built as a commuter city for Amsterdam. And even there you'll have trouble finding areas which don't meet the definition of a 15-minute city.

I disagree that this is the norm and I don't think it's a goal to aspire to.

The nicest places for humans to exist in have a mixed-use basis. Yes some areas are purely industrial and some areas are dominated by retail or offices, that's fine. But fully segregated residential zones are depressing and nonsensical.

Most cities in Europe absolutely do not have suburban zones where most people live. Non-center areas also have their own leisure, going out, shopping places (usually mixed with the residential areas).

The suburbs purely for residential space where you have to go somewhere else for activities do exist, but usually over time they grow their own infrastructure for shopping and hanging out without needing to go far.

It's still very doable (preferable even) to navigate those other neighbourhoods without a car though.

I can’t speak for other cities, but Paris absolutely does not fit that mold: the highest density of people is in the very center of the city (or immediately adjacent cities), where the tourists are. Suburban areas can’t possibly house “most people” because they’re way sparser.

> It's often perceived as an architecture issue ("Europe has historical buildings […]") but very few notice that the main difference is […] the […] walkability.

I'd say both. We do have the history on show both because we have more of it, and sometimes the stuff from eras when the US as we think of it¹ existed tends to be better preserved despite the effects of WWI and WWII. But we also have it easy to get to, often safely on foot, in our cities².

> This is because they know how to scale cities to human centric proportions.

Not wishing to put us down, but I'd say a fair chunk of that is historical accident. A lot of cities started out as smaller settlements that grew and merged, meaning there is a spread of housing, shows, workplaces, etc around the whole city because it used to be in each individual part before they merged over time. America's cities on average started at, or at least very quickly gained, a larger scale, and grew from the inside out rather than by several insides growing until their outsides merged.

Some European cities made the mistake of doing away with some of that and converting to a state closer to that of US cities, and many current efforts are more about returning to their roots than being newly person friendly.

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[1] essentially from the point the founding fathers went to find somewhere they could be prescriptivist about people's, lives because they weren't getting away with that as they wanted to over here, and perhaps a little before that

[2] though there is a fair amount of it that isn't as easy to get to unless you drive

The “Founding Fathers” generally refers to the politicians who were around during the revolutionary war (starting 1775). What you are describing in your [1] seems to be more a reference to the Pilgrims and Puritians (the early North American colonists who showed up around 1620).

The Founding Fathers also did a lot of controlling of some people’s lives (in that they enslaved a lot of people), but they didn’t have to go anywhere to do that.

Anyway, if you want to walk around some history in the US, you can do that in Boston. As you mentioned, a huge factor in the walkability of a city is just having the right population density before cars were invented. The oldest European areas in the mainland US (Spanish areas, in Florida) aren’t super walkable as far as I know.

Yeah, my I had a little brain-o there and was meaning the Pilgrim Fathers not the Founding Fathers.

Maybe it is a Northeast US thing or something, but it this mystery could also be resolved by visiting a college town, observing that it is quite nice and walkable without too many historical buildings…

Alternatively: go on a cruise. Everything you want, neatly packed into a single easily walkable building.

Not all European cities live up to the stereotype. I've been to Germany a couple of times; most of the cities I've stayed in were quite nice, but Stuttgart came across as an American-style car hell and Frankfurt seemed quite dirty. (Berlin has a strange charm to it, actually, from a combination of modern architecture and historical preservation.)

They don't. Larger cities have many loops of busy highway belts embracing the city, and plenty of tunnels, parking lots and emissions (ie Madrid, Rome, Paris...). But there's always a sizeable walkable urban area, usually proportional to the overall city-size. Even Stuttgart has a nice downtown walking area [1] and a usable public transport system [2].

But, as a fun notice, Stuttgart could be somewhat of a "Detroit of Europe", being the home of Porsche and Mercedes-Benz, so there's added incentive, and pride, to be a car city.

[1] https://maps.app.goo.gl/aQCEYkc3oWsKpD9F7

[2] https://www.travelstuttgart.com/transport-in-stuttgart.html

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