118 Comments

The point about the shared lawn without much to do in that lawn, vs having tons of restaurants, cafes, bars, and stores in a neighborhood being incredibly freeing, is something I think a lot of urbanism activists in the US miss. There's a really strong anti-business segment of the US urbanism crowd that is vehemently opposed to shared spaces that people pay to use. I think that daily life in Tokyo really shows how business and good urbanism are absolutely not enemies.

In addition, something almost completely missing from the urbanism discussion in the West, is integrating industrial uses in dense urban environments. I work at a small industrial company, and it's so nice to be able to walk not only to my office, but also to my company's labs and workshops in the same neighborhood. Not every industrial building is an oil refinery or a rocket static firing range. Even though a sizable lab or workshop, or small factory or warehouse does present a longer than optimal blank wall to the street, they can fit well enough, and people working jobs that aren't office or retail should be able to live and work in nice neighborhoods.

Though on the topic of safety, I think improving the safety of US cities is very important. Even though NYC is fairly safe by US standards, it could be an order of magnitude better and still be short of world leaders. I really enjoyed your article a while back about Professionalizing the Police, and would be interested in hearing a more complete argument in why and how to improve safety in US cities. It feels like the safety debate in the US was stuck between the "law and order" types with mostly bad ideas about how to improve law and order, and "defund the police (literally)" types whose only response to legitimate safety concerns is gaslighting.

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Hard to change the crime statistics in US without a wholesale set of changes that id say are hard to imagine. Its not just the guns and/or inequality. American culture has always been violent. From Hollywood to “fuck around and find out”, it doesnt matter the race or ideological position, people seem more inclined to violence.

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The increasing poverty, unemployment/low paying jobs, corruption, and social atomization has helped the police to be increasingly violent, authoritarian, and corrupt themselves towards the poor and working classes.

This creates a conundrum for those groups. They want and need more police, but the police who are feared, are often unaccountably abusive to everyone acting like another gang. It is not true everywhere, it is still often enough.

Policing needs real, permanent reform, including accountability for their actions, which most of the police do not want.

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As a European who has lived all over the US for the past 14 years, this is what frustrates me: there’s clear market demand for mixed use development, since the cities and neighborhoods where it exists are always the most expensive to buy or rent a home.

I’m not just talking about New York and San Francisco, but the cute little historic main street of any American town you choose, where mixed use is grandfathered in. Why does modern planning prohibit the sensible kind of living that our ancestors figured out a thousand years ago?

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There were significant negatives to living in a denser part of Seattle - mainly harassment by the homeless and mentally ill plus people shooting up by the dumpster half the times I took out the trash, but the best part of it was living directly across the street from a grocery store. I think we could get a lot of benefit by subsidizing high rises on top of and immediately adjacent to grocery stores, because it is so nice to just spontaneously decide what you want for dinner and be able to buy all the ingredients in less than a 3 minute walk. Especially if you forget an ingredient and realize that halfway through cooking it!

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I don’t think the thousand years ago version is very popular. It’s the 1870s-1880s version that is most popular, as far as I can tell.

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You can still find the 1000-year old version in the core of some smaller European cities. In the large cities, the core has been redeveloped.

In fact, there is a concept called a sleeping beauty town, a place that was once economically important, but lost its economic base and was never redeveloped. A good example in Britain is the town of Rye that used to be on the seacoast, but now the seacoast has shifted/silted up two miles southeast. An American example is Williamsburg, VA. It sprang into being as the capital of colonial Virginia but lost all economic relevance when the capital moved to Richmond. It was redeveloped as a historic site and tourist attraction in the 1920s by a partnership of local leaders fueled by the bucks of John D Rockefeller Jr.

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It always strikes me as weird when people talk about exclusively residential areas as “neighborhoods”. To me it doesn’t feel like a “neighborhood” unless you see your neighbors, which requires at least a strip of small shops in walking distance or something.

I sometimes like to say that many Americans treat their car like a hijab - it’s embarrassing to be seen in public without being shielded from view by this covering. You can go to a private space and take it off, but walking down the street with your face visible feels risky.

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I definitely grew up in what i think would count as a "neighborhood" without a strip of shops in walking distance (though there was a public park) and where folks had pretty large yards. I think people just saw each other outside and were more outgoing in general, plus their kids would interact both directly and at school which facilitated a lot of geography-based interaction, both serendipitous and scheduled.

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I think the school interaction, which leads to interaction outside of school, likely helps a lot. When I've lived in a mostly residential area, I've felt like I'm surrounded by all these empty boxes, because I rarely saw the people that lived in them. The first few weeks of covid were nice that way, because people actually went for walks and bike rides in the neighborhood and it felt like I lived in a place with people - but by June 2020 that disappeared again.

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The global aging demographics also means there are fewer neighborhoods with kids at all. And in neighborhoods with kids there are fewer of them, so the few kids around have less incentive to go outside and play in common areas since they are more likely to be playing by themselves.

A friend of mine lives in a small beach town that has experienced this over the past decade. At this point, not a single person in his neighborhood has children. (I mean, they have children, just the children are all adults now and live elsewhere.) Some developer is actually building a big 50+ community down the road from him and it drives him crazy because he thinks the local council needs to be getting more families in town, not more old people.

Another friend lives in a different small beach town. The average age is something like 55. There's not even a public school in town any more, so they have to send their two kids to the next town over.

That said, beach towns do offer a very compelling public space with the beach itself where you get a community of swimmers, surfers, etc, etc that a mere park probably wouldn't draw.

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That’s interesting. It kind of depends on the environment. I would say that the worst of both worlds is like my neighborhood in Seattle, where everything is single family on lots that are less than 1/5 of an acre. Because your yards kinda suck (the steep topography doesn’t help), you don’t spend much time outside (luckily at least in the summer there is great nature near the city and in some city parks), but you don’t get the benefits of density like frequent transit or the ability to walk to a grocery store. Not to mention everyone parks on the street which is both ugly and unsafe (my poor neighbor’s fence keeps getting destroyed by cars). Most of the yards are fenced in all around, which is kind of strange. But in MS where most lots are an acre and many people have backyard pools, it’s pretty nice to spend time outside. There’s wildlife - foxes, deer, geese, ducks, owls, hawks, and lots of different birds. It’s not the kind of community that’s being discussed here and is avowedly car centric - neither my mom’s neighborhood nor the arterials surrounding it have sidewalks, much less bike lanes. But it’s peaceful having a cup of coffee on the back porch and listening to/watching the birds do their thing. Here in Seattle it’s just crows and steller’s jays. When I move again I want it to be to a rural area close enough to city amenities but far enough away that I feel like I’m in the country.

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I'd previously though that US suburban sprawl was reminiscent of Islamic urbanism in its lack of public spaces and dendritic street layouts, but likening cars themselves to hijabs is a new one. 😉

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I live in Saigon, which has a thriving 24 hour culture, where you can find people sitting out cafes 24 hours a day.

(There are maybe 8-10 cafes within a 5 minute walk of my house.)

While obviously weather and culture are part of that, a big part is just that people have very little living space. Multi-generational homes and single resident occupancy means a lot of people live in the equivalent of a dorm room. Obviously you're going to prefer meeting friends at a cafe.

American homes, by contrast, feel more like a self-sufficient citadel ready to withstand a month long siege after a stop at Costco. I think there's a reason why preppers are overwhelmingly an American phenomenon.

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Curious that you use the old name for the city. Is that common for residents? Publications always use the official name, but it’s had to change the name of a city.

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Publications here don't always use Ho Chi Minh City. The official city bus is called Saigon Bus. The official city ferries are called Saigon Water Bus. The official tourist development group is called Saigon Tourist. Government newspapers refer to it as Saigon in headlines

https://tuoitre.vn/du-di-dau-cung-ve-sai-gon-tan-huong-mua-xuan-em-dem-20240206213813309.htm

Movies (that all have to pass government censors) call it Saigon.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=NFKVh-oJmSc

Think of it this way: do you always call it Washington DC, to show your respect for a founding father? Or do you usually shorten it to something else because that's a mouthful?

Sài Gòn is 2 syllables. Thành Phố Hồ Chí Minh is 5 syllables.

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I did not know that. I only see Ho Chi Minh City used in US newspapers.

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So many Americans are afraid of turning their cities into Manhattan that they accidentally turned their cities into LA

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That’s a great point about noise, and one of the least appreciated benefits of the switch to EVs.

Still think that Tokyo, at least, is desperately short of neighbourhood parks with greenery, which would be a major impediment to me enjoying life there.

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Tokyo's not bad, it's Osaka that needs more parks...

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I also wonder if Japan has less residential age-segregation than English-speaking countries, both because the Japanese people don't see their home as an investment in the same way, and also because older Japanese people aren't so eager to flee the city in search of rural peace and quiet?

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One of the striking things to me was how japanese small towns really felt like Mayberry. Sure you could drive everywhere but there was so much you could walk to as well. It was quiet but it wasn't dead.

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Reading this made me think of how nice it would be to have a little coffee shop or something in my residential neighborhood.

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A grocer. Like, convenience stores are great and usually not far but it'd be great to be able to get produce quickly within a 5 min walk.

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We have one (and a small grocery and dry cleaner) and it’s fantastic.

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I like that a lot.

As an urban planner.

I'd add that in middle-ring Tokyo _everything_ is small: very diverse land use and activities (not especially pretty) often referred to as fine-grained: tight buildings, minuscule shops and restaurants, narrow streets, narrow sidewalks, narrow at-grade railroads, narrow rail stations and crossings with boom gates -- all of which our 'first world' standards would prevent -- and a powerful and prevailing sense of neighborhood and family and civic life.

It's a bit like the older parts of all cities.

A bit like the Boston that Jane Jacobs described.

But creating a spontaneous feeling of a lived-in neighborhood seems to be incredibly hard in contemporary affluent cities where the scale of buildings, streets, everything, is fairly gross.

It's interesting that Tokyo's dense and efficient rail network is owned by multiple private companies running separate lines and stations which interconnect in many ad hoc ways.

One other thing, regarding housing demand and supply in Tokyo: the population of the metro region is shrinking. The problem for metro planners in Tokyo (and elsewhere in Japan) is that there's already more of everything than is needed.

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Metro Tokyo population is shrinking? I thought it was still increasing.

“ Tokyo is the only prefecture whose population is projected to grow from 2020, increasing 2.5% to 14.40 million.”

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You're right. There are formal and informal urban boundaries. I was referring to the Tokyo metropolitan area, which has a population of about 38 million and counting (down).

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Might Sapporo and other cities in Hokkaido be useful for providing lessons for American planners, given that they were built in the 19th century and thus have street grids that aren't too dissimilar to those of Texan cities?

https://urbankchoze.blogspot.com/2014/06/sapporo-relevant-japanese-model-for.html

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Japan sounds lovely. City dwelling is not for me - I get drained by the hustle and bustle - but making city dwelling closer to the Japanese model as you describe it would certainly, I think, make it better for those who enjoy it.

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Honestly probably the healthiest view of it

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As a kid I thought trains and cars were both cool - I grew up in Jersey where the train is how you get to Philly and NYC and my dad rode it to work, so it was normal to me. But I LOVED cars.

Then I went to Japan and...trains are better. I still like both - which makes me only mostly urbanist - but the way Japan designed itself around trains was just so pleasant. The way everything happens at the convenience store, the way your little apartment feels cozy but you do your living in the town - it did feel better. Even the smallest towns are typically connected to the rail network and centered on the station - except maybe Shikoku, where they're centered on a bus stop. But they all have a nice little downtown plaza of restaurants that everyone can walk to, and some people drive or bike. It's just so well designed to live in and enjoy. You describe it and capture it so well.

And yea, I loved Japan. I am an American, and have settled and put roots down here, and there are a ton of things culturally and personally that make me prefer living here. But man I'm so happy I got to live there and I'd love to export so much of that Japanese mindset for how a town and city are built back this way.

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Some people have the experience of a vacation where they get a small pricey hotel in the downtown area of a city and go out to eat every night. Imagine that, but not expensive, so it's all the time!

Another case of the heuristic "abundance feels like doing what a rich person does without being rich."

See also Matt Yglesias' commentaries on being an urban parent. You have all these parks and playgrounds, shows and activity spaces, well beyond what you can fit in your home and with way more connections to other local parents.

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Great post! I've lived w/o a car in both WDC & SF, and it was great, just as you describe Japan. And my son & daughter have lived in Chicago & Sommerville, MA, without cars, enjoying the same warmth & convenience. Where I live now, an inner WDC burb, if could walk to shopping & restaurants, if I could safely cross a major thoroughfare. Sadly, I can't. We drive the two blocks! But there's space around the corner big enough for an ethnic grocery; so I have my fingers crossed.

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Noah's point about the Large-Scale Retail Store Act is really interesting. I remember American negotiators trying to get that legislation relaxed in the 1990s, based on the (probably deluded) idea that it was a "non-tariff trade barrier" and that large chains would sell more imported US products.

Even if you're an admirer of the free market, it seems possible that the law has increased economic efficiency on net, because as long as it's in place they can't use zoning to exclude small stores. (In other words, the alternative to this regulation would be other, worse forms of regulation.) Someone should try to model that idea more rigorously.

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Your description of a Japanese neighborhood sounds exactly like my experience of Greenwich Village, where I lived 1968- 1975. It also reflects the key points made in the classic study of urbanism: "The Death and Life of Great American Cities" by Jane Jacobs.

https://archive.org/search?query=%22Death+and+life+of+great+American+cities%22&and%5B%5D=mediatype%3A%22texts%22

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Enlightening article. I'd add that Manhattan, like Tokyo, has accessible, communal green space in the form of Central park, which is 840 acres (out of 15,000) in the middle of the island.

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In the interests of full disclosure, Mr Roberts basically lives across the street from Central Park. When I lived on West 9th Street in NYC, Central Park did not feel all that accessible.

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Fair.

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If you detected a whiff of envy, you'd be right!

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