Designing Urban Places that Don't Suck (a sense of place)

Comments · 2.2K

• PA

  @panguin7803 · 3 years ago

  I've been walking for mental health recently. Have to cross a highway to get away from my home, and the pedestrian light turns green at the same time as the car turning lane at the intersection I walk. Some lady in one of those giant trucks yelled 'Nice one' at me for walking when my light turned green because she was turning. I often feel hated for being foot traffic, and clearly this is a sentiment shared by many.

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• LU

  @lucadelnegro7621 · 3 years ago

  After watching this video, it is very easy to understand why everyone but especially North Americans love Disneyland and theme parks in general

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• TS

  @ts9749 · 3 years ago

  I live in Canada but I am originally from Eastern Europe. It absolutely strikes me whenever I ask for directions in Eastern Europe and people tell me “okay, so walk up to 5th elementary school, head right until you see 3rd polyclinic and then as soon as you see the statue of X historical figure you’ll know you’re there”. Your mind space is occupied by places, not streets :)

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• LB

  @lb2791 · 3 years ago

  THIS! The first time I went to north america, I had such an overwhelming feeling that I had no words for. A friend explained the concept of places to me, and that the US is mostly made up of non-places. The only places for the most part are peoples homes and the insides of buildings. But moving between these feels like putting on a space suit and moving in a rover through the inhospitable landscape of another planet. It's not made for people.

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• EN

  @EnishLord · 3 years ago

  I think another factor in the "Every place is the same" feeling is that in the US almost every shop is some sort of chain. With all the branding and box construction that comes with putting up a building the cheapest they can. Every big box store brand has the look that they want for their building to maintain their "brand", and that goes for all the chain restaurants. All the places feel the same because they are all built to look the same, because corporate America feels that the identity of their businesses is more important then the identity of the town or city that they are built in.

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• KL

  @Kleavers · 3 years ago

  Imagine how soul crushing it must be if your entire nation looks like an open air shopping mall for cars.

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• _D

  @_ddoraemon_ · 3 years ago

  This is such a well worded video for me. I am from Paraguay, a small country in South America, currently studying Architecture and Urbanism. But it breaks my heart to see us as a developing country people taking "inspiration" from the most famous country a.k.a. the U.S. and steadily going into a car-dependent society with no sense of place. Not only because of the many reasons you already know but also because in this country THE HEAT is such that in a normal winter day we can have +35ºC of heat (in summer you can only imagine and pray). Yet we keep cutting trees to add a new lane. I do not know if studying Urbanism is going to be in ANY way useful because I feel so hopeless, how can I change my city alone... I will try. But hurts.

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• IM

  @ImSomethingSpecial · 3 years ago (edited)

  Interesting fact: Eisenhower actually hated how the Interstate Highway System turned out because it was nothing how he envisioned. He never intended for Highways to cut through cities or even for normal people to mass use them. He envisioned it mostly for military use and economic use, so things like truckers. He more or less wanted the Autobahn copy and pasted into the U.S.

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• NO

  @NothingIsKnown00 · 3 years ago (edited)

  It’s a tragedy that America is built for driving a car to a mall, consuming some product, and driving the car home. Places that are only built for transactions, not life. I lived in Seattle and the city had great places. But every time we needed to drive to one of those shopping planets I felt dead inside.

  191

• YA

  @Yavin4 · 3 years ago

  The whole point of Northern American urban design strategies is to put people in one of three places, their house, their car, and their job. That's it. You're in one of these three places over 95% of your life. You're rarely outside. Rarely around other people in a social setting. You're rarely around beauty which is purposeful to communicating to people that beauty has to be purchased in the form of a car or a house.

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• SH

  @shlubbers1778 · 3 years ago

  Cookie cutter suburbs/houses have the same issue. A lot of times they can be really beautiful and functional homes, but their sense of place is overpowered by a sense of normalcy as they are copy and pasted around a sea of asphalt.

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• JE

  @jettbridgerab3388 · 3 years ago

  I once decided to take a two hour walk to get to the nearest provincial park. On the way, I found little to no shade, a sidewalk that ended, and then found myself walking on the side of the road where I got flipped off multiple times. The park was beautiful but the journey there was not something I’d ever do again.

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