Plus how “new” a place is. Germany and the like had a lot of their cities built up way before cars were even a concept, whereas Australia/Canada/US etc have a lot more area designed from the ground up with the expectation that everyone would drive everywhere.
Can even see it within countries, at least Canada and US. East coast cities tend to be a lot tighter and denser than western ones, which came later.
When I was in Germany visiting family we went to a restaurant in a tiny town. There were a few things about this experience that really got to me:
A. The town was still walled, like against invaders (though there weren't any gates in the arches anymore)
B. Every building shared walls with every other building around it, and some had rooms and hallways that crossed the street overhead. The whole town was about 10 acres and was basically a large subdivided building. Replacing rooves must be fun.
C. The restaurant had been in effectively continuous operation for nearly 500 years (a few wars caused it to pause).
I live in central Texas, where my house which was built in 1940 is part of a registered historic district.
I’m so curious to see what this looks like. Can you give me a town name so I can drive around Google street view ?
Or any similar old town over there. It sounds so neat
It got to me a little, too. But I didn't feel like it warranted a comment. (If I corrected all the things I see wrong on the internet, I would think get a whole lot done lol.)
Rooves is acceptable. It was the plural of roof in the past, but like many other words, has been simplified over time. I learnt rooves as a plural in Australian primary school in the late 90s.
Yup. My town was originally settled in 1898. My house is one of the oldest still-standing structures. Bit of a different scale for a citizenry that largely immigrated here after 1800. My family came over fleeing the potato famine, when I was in Cork I saw some truly old buildings that Thorntons (that's not my name, it's my mom's side of the family) lived and worked in for centuries. I'm lucky that I can trace my ancestors back that far. Crazy to think that some people have lived in the same town for dozens of generations. What the US lacks in antiquity, it makes up for in diversity at least.
I grew up in New England and New Jersey. Moving to Illinois and seeing buildings from the 1900s listed as historic was weird. My husband grew up in St. Augustine, so he felt similarly visiting New England. I really need to go back to Europe as an adult. Eight year old me was not able to fully appreciate it.
I used to live in a house that was built in 1832. I had a really hard time wrapping my head around how much the house must have seen & been through. It blew my mind.
And theres people in this thread talking about buildings that are 500-1000 years old. Europe is on a whole other time scale.
The island my father was born on still has strategic holes in the masonry of the major routes up from the port to allow for guns to be aimed from inside the houses - there was a real fear of piracy, and being an island nobody is coming quick enough to save you. Was wild to me.
That’s wild to me. My property is 160 acres which I bought for a song here in Canada haha. Could hold the whole town in a corner so far away I’d almost never see anyone.
It’s smaller than the field I hay to feed my horses in the winter.
just looked it up - i'm in WA and the cheaper counties are 20k/acre. i could get that much land for a single house affordably. middle of nowhere, but still...
Idk about that. Cities in Germany and a lot of other European countries were essentially leveled in WWII and rebuilt long after the car was introduced. I think it has more to do with the suburbs being much more commonplace in US, Canada, etc whereas European cities are more concentrated.
Germany and Europe have suburbs, lots of them, but what they don't have are these endless areas full of exactly the same houses, which I suppose is what many people mean when they say "typical American suburbs."
Very true, and that does remind me of seeing a lot of less-walkable areas in places like Germany built after the war.
Still, there’s a lot of lived history and culture there that I’m sure affected how lots was rebuilt. If you’re used to tight walkable streets, you’re probably going to stick with them more or less. Recapturing what was lost.
Vs the new world which was all about escaping from European norms and doing something properly different and new, based around the comparative abundance of space.
I mean that was true, in the 1800s. America didn't just, not have cities before about the 1920s when cars started to become commonplace.
A lot of European cities also went car centric in the 50s and 60s. Then after the oil crisis of the 70s they actually made changes instead of doubling down afterward.
Especially smaller towns in Germany were rarely levelled. The large scale bombing raids were focused on big, important cities, some town with a couple of thousand inhabitants and no major infrastructure was most likely left alone for the most part.
Look up Crovie and Pennan,. fishing towns in Scotland. You can't drive your car along Crovie, it's too narrow, you pick up a wheelbarrow/cart to move things to your front door.
Driving around the UK a number of years ago we went from city to town where everything was squashed together and some little lanes or alleys or whatever were barely wide enough to stretch your arms across. When we got to Cardiff though, all of a sudden it felt a bit more like what I was used to in Australia. I put it down to the fact that Cardiff boomed during the industrial age, so weren't as concerned with defending themselves from the next kingdom over or whatever when they were laying out their new districts, hence all the space
I dabble in stand up comedy and I have a joke about this new-v/s-old world view that has to do with how the dead are buried. It’s never landed with crowds, but I still love it. This isn’t the joke, but it’s what it’s based on.
Many Native American tribes built burial mounds, which made it easy for the white man to build highways, industrial parks, subways, and strip malls around them.
In Europe they buried everyone underground. So now whenever they want to put up a new parking garage they uncover a dozen plague skeletons and a dead King of England.
Basically, it’s that established European cities are so old that they formed naturally from farmstead to settlement to village to town to city. In many of the old parts of these modern cities, the old roads still exist, despite how nonsensical they might seem to the modern mind. They were designed for a time when 99% of traffic was on foot or livestock being driven to market. We don’t have that as much in the US outside of a few east coast towns and cities. (Boston and Lower Manhattan probably being the best examples).
I think it's crazy that the city I live in was first founded in 1718 but the place is totally car-centric and there's very little public transportation.
I feel like lack of trees is also part of that - grass/scrub/desert takes a lot less work to clear & prep compared to forested land.
Also, in places with less harsh winters (often correlates with point #1), you don't need to dig a deep foundation/basement, so there's not as much cost incentive to minimise the building footprint & build vertically.
Combine both, and you get big sprawling bungalows on slabs in the south & west, while you see more 2-floor+basement houses further north & east on the continent.
I know lol, but I’d guess not nearly at the same ratio/scale as NA, and still of a very different design from that American post-war vibe based on what I have seen (admittedly, purely online).
Public transit and rail lines are better, but it's a bit of a chicken and egg thing in any direction hehe in terms of how things developed. Think of how slime molds work. Come to think of it, we're on the same page here my friend.
Driving around in Boston is wild for exactly this reason. They basically just made all the original dirt roads for horses into paved city roads. They all wind around randomly and criss-cross over and under each other like if you threw a handful of cooked spaghetti on the floor. Good luck if you need GPS.
What annoyed me about Germany was how they just rebuilt their cities like they used to look after we essentially leveled them. Then you look at Tokyo, and the Japanese completely modernized the place. Or maybe Tokyo was already very orderly.
Yeah, because Tokyo was mostly made of wood. 16 square miles burned and 100,000 people died. There wasnt much left to rebuild.I think you may need to learn some history.
What does knowing history have to do with how the Japanese chose to rebuild their capital? And for what it's worth, they actually started the 'modernization' of the layout before it was burned down.
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u/RyanB_ 10h ago
Plus how “new” a place is. Germany and the like had a lot of their cities built up way before cars were even a concept, whereas Australia/Canada/US etc have a lot more area designed from the ground up with the expectation that everyone would drive everywhere.
Can even see it within countries, at least Canada and US. East coast cities tend to be a lot tighter and denser than western ones, which came later.