The Aesthetic City
3 HN mentions · mentioned in 3 months, 2024–2025
13:28 · 3.1M views · Feb 3, 2023
A look at Le Plessis-Robinson, a French suburb transformed from modernist urbanism into traditional mixed-use fabric with local-style architecture, green space and a more balanced housing supply.
HN cites it in housing and urbanism threads as an example of a dense, beautiful neighbourhood built in recent times.
3 comments from Hacker News
Except that many European cities copied US cities in their development styles, and then later reversed them. So we absolutely do know how to reverse it. > But it is nice to live in the Mission and take the techbus to Mountain View and handwave all the hard trillion dollar problems and say let the poors eat cake. Which is effectively how these discussions seem to go. Every study shows that the poor are hurt the most because of car centric development. Here is a guide on how to improve American cities that are surrounded by lots of suberbia: - Remove/close all highways that go across the city, only keep the ring road. People will simple reclaim those space for recreational uses as soon as cars are gone. - Increase price of parking space or eliminate them completely. Most parking in city is not used by residents anyway. - Redo even if its with paint and few concrete bolders, the city streets according to Dutch street regulations. Massively increase safety for everybody. - That frees up lots of space for bike lanes (as US cities tend to have far to many car lanes). This is actually a benefit to the history of US cities, we can't do that in some of the older dense cities. - Change your zoning code and other access regulations, so proper urban development is actually allowed to happen. The US could adopt something like Japan zoning laws. A heavy use of mixed use and allow living in almost any zone. The US has a hilarious amount of commercial development land that completely underut
I am from the (possibly naive) believe that beauty will change the world. So if you want to present any changes, it has to be beautiful. Ethical and logical arguments only work if people already desire your vision and are only used to rationalise their emotions. this video
With mixed zone neighbourhoods with 30.000+people/km² you get everything for daily needs in Walking distance and close by metro. There is also a 120 years old concept for such neighbourhoods. [LINK] Also can be done in today s time: this video