People have different preferences, and different kinds of places are strengthened or weakened by different kinds of development. A pastoral scene is strengthened by pristine nature. An urban scene is strengthened by people and culture. However:
a) Permitting systems are biased towards preferences for lower intensity; it is asymmetrically easier to block buildings than to force them through.
b) People who would prefer to live in more intense settings are just as harmed by low-intensity settings as you would be by higher intensity. Their preferences are just as important. There has to be a sorting. But…
c) Postwar suburban sprawl, with its quarter acres and strip malls and pedestrian hostility, is the near universal law of the land. Even in those places that are crying out to be more urban, like the vacant lots within or the slightly lower intensity suburbs neighborhoods encircling the cores of our thriving cities. Even though there is so much diversity in preference and place-appropriateness, the space of what can be built today is extremely homogeneous. The iconic neighborhoods, vistas, differences the character of the built environments of different places mostly comes down to how much is left, of which eras, prior to the disastrous suburban mania we’re stuck with today.
> An urban scene is strengthened by people and culture.
Not so fast. Rome wasn't strengthened by the Visigoths.
More to your argument, while London is arguably unchanged by the addition of 1k or even 10k people, it is changed by the addition of 100M or even 10M. Maybe it's still good, but by a different definition.
Forward reference: adding 10M people to London will necessarily destroy many of the "iconic neighborhoods" you're so fond of below.
> Even in those places that are crying out to be more urban, like the vacant lots within or the slightly lower intensity suburbs
There's a huge difference between a vacant lot in Manhattan and the burbs, which aren't "slightly lower intensity".
> the cores of our thriving cities
Our thriving cities where?
> The iconic neighborhoods, vistas, differences the character of the built environments of different places mostly comes down to how much is left, of which eras, prior to the disastrous suburban mania we’re stuck with today.
There's a typo in the above that I can't error-correct.
That said, the suburbs didn't cause urban decay. As to the vistas, you're only counting urban vistas, and nothing that has happened in the suburbs has affected the NYC skyline.
I get that you want to live in an "iconic neighborhood", whatever that means, but the other residents of those neighborhoods get to vote too, and many of them have decided "the hell with that." More to the point, what happens in suburbs has nothing to do with how those neighborhoods have fared over time.
The suburbs encircled the places worth caring about. Now we can’t have any more of the places worth caring about because to do so would threaten the historic fast food joints on their peripheries. Which almost no one even likes, but “almost no one” is all it takes to prevent a change under current rules.
Of sprawl we can always print more. Of places worth caring about we’re stuck forever with whatever we had before we the automobile. That’s bad!
London’s role as a center of civilization and culture is more important than its role as an architecture museum. I wouldn’t advocate zero museum pieces, but London could find some set of museum pieces to preserve that are consistent with non-museum districts actually serving the needs of people who live and work in the area.
BTW, you do know that typical suburb lots are closer to 1/8 than 1/4 acre, right? (Atherton and Greenwich are NOT typical.)
> The suburbs encircled the places worth caring about.
How do suburbs keep SF from thriving?
Apart from giving people someplace else to go that is.
When people leave cities for suburbs, they're saying that they prefer suburbs to cities, that they don't prefer what you assert that they prefer, that those "iconic neighborhoods" don't serve their needs. (Those neighborhoods are just as walkable as before.)
> Now we can’t have any more of the places worth caring about because to do so would threaten the historic fast food joints on their peripheries.
You're seriously arguing that McDonalds in Daly City doomed SF? It wasn't Long Island that destroyed Penn Station.
> London’s role as a center of civilization and culture is more important than its role as an architecture museum.
You're ducking the question of what 10M more people would do to London.
And you gave up on the "iconic neighborhoods" which were so important just a couple of messages ago.
>When people leave cities for suburbs, they're saying that they prefer suburbs to cities
Indeed, forget iconic. Places whose design is merely not utterly deranged are so rare in North America, yet so desired, that your choices are to be extremely wealthy or else to consume very little of them. You can't get the extra bedrooms to raise kids in reasonably hospitable urban settings because adults wiling to pay $2500/mo outnumber them.
People leave for the suburbs because they're cheap. They're cheap because they're abundant. They're abundant because of a comprehensive suite of restrictions and subsidies designed to make them so.
Wander down the El Camino Real. An endless ribbon of stroad, fast cars, parking lots, strip malls. A place whose sidewalks are a farce. A place that makes it very clear you are not mean to be outside your car except in the smallest doses. A place no one really likes driving, either. That's a choice. All that mileage could instead have the character of San Francisco's loveliest neighborhoods. Could be a place worth caring about. Could be community and home and identity and leisure. If you allowed it.
a) Permitting systems are biased towards preferences for lower intensity; it is asymmetrically easier to block buildings than to force them through.
b) People who would prefer to live in more intense settings are just as harmed by low-intensity settings as you would be by higher intensity. Their preferences are just as important. There has to be a sorting. But…
c) Postwar suburban sprawl, with its quarter acres and strip malls and pedestrian hostility, is the near universal law of the land. Even in those places that are crying out to be more urban, like the vacant lots within or the slightly lower intensity suburbs neighborhoods encircling the cores of our thriving cities. Even though there is so much diversity in preference and place-appropriateness, the space of what can be built today is extremely homogeneous. The iconic neighborhoods, vistas, differences the character of the built environments of different places mostly comes down to how much is left, of which eras, prior to the disastrous suburban mania we’re stuck with today.