Beauty in my backyard
worksinprogress.co
worksinprogress.co
One, I am not convinced by the arguments like "modernist architecture didn't become popular until after zoning". I do not think that people in Chicago were making decisions based on zoning in Boston. For this argument to work, I would need to see more specific evidence that for each of a number of cities, downzoning in an individual city took place before modern architecture began to make inroads in that city. Also, ideally this would not be about "modern" architecture but just about "buildings that people thought were ugly".
Second, the article makes several references to how lots of buildings were torn down and replaced throughout history, but we only see opposition to it more recently. An obvious explanation for this is that it is only relatively recently that democratic decision-making (including at the city level) became widespread and entrenched enough that individual citizens could influence such matters at all. Until relatively recently large-scale development was often a matter of backroom negotiations between politicians and wealthy developers who ran roughshod over the wishes of ordinary folks (and before that it was even worse, for instance in systems where most land was owned by nobles). The NIMBY movement can be seen in part as a reaction to this.
Opposition is not really related to aesthetics.
People fight even theoretical housing (zoning). NIMBYs oppose building housing on derelict / ugly lots. Architectural review is used by neighbors to stop housing - not because they’re preservationists - but for a load of unrelated issues and architecture is a convenient veto point.
1: https://www.immobilienscout24.de/expose/169220882?referrer=H...
That's the other big problem with restrictive zoning laws (other than ugliness). It leads to unaffordable housing. By saying that a house must conform with X, Y, and Z you're essentially saying "anyone who doesn't have enough money to pay for X, Y, and Z can't buy a house".
Sometimes restrictions are necessary (e.g. safety rules). Other times they sound good on paper but just end up being elitist (e.g. house must have X number of parking spaces, Y minimum size for rooms, Z minimum outdoor space). Yes, those things are nice to have. But we shouldn't price out people who can't afford them. It's better that someone starting out in life be able to buy a house with smaller rooms, than not be able to buy anything at all. We've become so obsessed with raising standards across the board that we've forgotten that the people we exclude from those standards end up with worse standards.
Also, not everyone has the same priorities. Some people might like their bedroom to be huge. Others might just see it as a place to sleep and would rather spend their money on living in a good location, or some other priority. Restrictive zoning laws remove options by making buildings converge on a limited range of designs.
More than just looking crap in 30 years (agreed they do now) I worry, what about massive renovation required in 15 years?
And that is an insane cost for a small, ugly building.
That is the primary benefit of a flat roof, but it is only a tiny number of buildings that are like this. The vast majority of buildings do not allow roof access. Still I encourage it.
It's placeless architecture and not exactly sustainable since they'll need replacements sooner and a stupid amount of the co2 cost of a building is in it's construction and the fabricaiton of it's materials.
And then there's runoff from the roof with the sun exposure. I kind of expect this will end up a bigger issue than we make it out to be at the rate we're building these.
But the story is wider than this because even when we look at domestic housing, we find that people in general prefer the older housing, and it's not only because of the looks. It's a bigger picture of pervasive enshittification.
Pre-war housing often has higher ceilings and larger rooms. Houses built around the 1930s often have thicker walls as well and just feel better made. Usually they are on more generous plots. By contrast newer houses are built on as little space as the developer thinks they can get away with, are seemingly made of sellotape and cardboard and usually have far smaller rooms with lower ceilings.
Couple this with ugly (and if we're talking post-war, blocky, concrete) town and city centre developments, and it's easy to see why people are turned off a lot of new development.
I also wanted to address this -
> Thus many American, Canadian and Australian cities have seen forests of skyscrapers rising in their downtowns, while their vast suburbs, full of homeowning NIMBYs, remain petrified at low densities.
Well, AFAICT in Australia that's what people want, and with the amount of landmass we have, I don't really see why that shouldn't be allowed to continue. Unfortunately the forces of enshittification are at work here too, with new houses now being built almost to the very edges of much smaller plots, even at the outer edges of the cities.
When I look at the streetcar suburbs of my city (1880s) I see lots are on average about the same size as lots today, and houses were generally much smaller. But the lots were deeper and narrower so how they feel is different.
The idea that ornament is a crime has done more visual damage to our buildings than any other single factor in my opinion, the fact we still regularly poll as preferring Victorian and Georgian buildings is an indictment of those responsible for our stock of them; I prefer those buildings but it depresses me that we've made things worse rather than better aesthetically for the last century or so when we didn't have to.
Modern new builds are bleak things for the most part; oppressively low ceilings, tiny postage-stamp sized windows as the enshittified way to comply with energy efficiency legislation, styling which looks like it was done by ChatGPT, and build quality that makes British Leyland cars look like epitomes of careful manufacturing. While if it were up to me I'd replace our discretionary planning system with a rules-based one and remove a lot of incumbent NIMBY vetos, I can see why NIMBYs exist in such enormous numbers given the race to rock bottom on everything except price when it comes to housing.
And in part it's because - get this - double glazing is considered an expensive luxury, and a new, European invention, rather than just the absolute bare minimum. There are even Australians who believe it's a bad idea all round because it would keep the heat in and make their houses harder to cool.
For the USA, the reasons for zoning were quite different to europe. Each country had different reasons for different times.
In the UK, post war planners were setting out to make a new modernist utopia, or a new haven for personal transportation, or clearing the slums for homes of the future.
Parts of new york's policy was slum clearance, a lot of it was trying to keep "the poors" from bothering rich people.(There are other more distasteful dimensions to that, which are better covered by other people) The last part was about making a shit tonne of money.
I think the other thing alluded to but not explicitly mentioned is that nobody likes new houses. Even less people like houses from 30 years ago. Even less people like houses that are designed to hold people who are "un desirable"
Here’s my pitch for an article: “Why You Not Using Your Democratic Power And Letting The Billionaires Decide On Everything Is Good, Actually”. How much do they pay per sentence?
Your perspective ignores the fact that some of "us, the people" are actually benefiting from this economic machine/collective organization. In industrialized societies, it's been decades that even the people at the bottom of the social ladder have "more to lose than their chains". And no matter how morally responsible ex-colonizing nations are, it is a fact that newcomers have to be somewhat integrated economically and culturally and that no society knows how to do that at the scale of arrivals. It turns out reality is not as simple as our moral world is and it takes time and thankless work to figure out what's happening. Morality is somewhat well-equipped at handling relationships and at maybe detecting the economic/political systems failure modes but it is not well-equipped at solving societal issues.
The truth is that it is easy to attribute merit and blame but har to actually trying to make relevant change. Our vision of History is somewhat biased because we remember people who were responsible for positive change as people with the "right" position but it is often forgotten how much strategy, technical issues they've had to solve fort those to prevail :
https://www.amazon.fr/-/en/Waging-Good-War-Thomas-Ricks/dp/1...?
Yes, I am familiar with the economic rise of postwar Europe/US and how it contributed to wellbeing to not just workers in the west, but also final collapse of those old empires and liberation of those colonised nations from their European masters (what happened after that in many of them is another story). The improved living standards were not just some automatic by-product of economic growth, but series of political decisions made how to share that wealth. This was linked to not strong labour and democratic movements to force that wealth to be distributed more equally. After 70’s you look at purchasing power and living standards stagnating and both political and economical power becoming more and more concentrated on small elite to the point that now you can just bribe the US president to do an executive order you want.
My point is that this sort of pseudo-liberal “Well, Achsually” -technocratism presented by this publication is just a thin veil for business as usual rentier capitalism, that only benefits a very small elite. We have democratic ways to solve these problems, but that will mean some billionaires having to settle for being centimillionaires.
> After 70’s you look at purchasing power and living standards stagnating and both political and economical power becoming more and more concentrated on small elite
Is it the case though ? Probably it was more concentrated than in the decades before but I have a hard time to believe that it's more concentrated now than when we had political posters denouncing the "200 families" that ran the country. Anyways I am against the concentration of wealth and I am even against the existence of billionaires (I believe individual wealth should be capped so that it doesn't become political power) but I think your view of those articles is uncharitable. It is a binary worldview where people are either for labor or mouthpieces for capital and I just don't believe you get anywhere interesting with that approach, imputing motives has little value compared to actually try to respond to the arguments being made
> just a thin veil for business as usual rentier capitalism, that only benefits a very small elite
Trying to figure out how to best organize cities and develop them in the best interest of the public while trying to cap the negative externalities of development is a worthwhile endeavor
EDIT: For the U.S same tendancies but you started from lower concentration and you also sit at 40% now
I'm not sure I took that away from this article so much as "Architects and planners need to stop building ugly-ass monstrosities so people might actually celebrate urban renewal again".
Since they’re mostly talking about the US, the thesis here is wrong. Almost all NIMBYism of the era was borne of redlining and white flight in the post-war era, which drove whites out of the cities to the burbs because there were too many “coloreds.” So basically, Americans were - and still are - racist no matter what SCOTUS says.