Comments on: What I’m reading today

By: payton

payton — Sun, 15 Aug 2010 19:03:54 +0000

Any city that's grown three- or four-fold in population since 1950, and had large postwar resettlement programs as well, will house most of its population in bland postwar housing. It's one thing to look at Chicago or Pittsburgh, which reached their current boundaries and populations in 1920 and where most people live in human-scaled neighborhoods (that's just how things were built back then) -- and quite another thing to look at Atlanta or Toronto or Brisbane, where almost everyone lives in suburban sprawl since those cities have seen their fastest growth in the postwar years. Some estimates put only 5% of the housing in such post-1950 cities within "walkable urban" quarters; much suburban housing has no access to transit, shops, even sidewalks. By that standard, kids walking to school from their boring tower blocks in Sengkang (only one in nine American children walks to school) looks like quite an achievement.

By: Ponder Stibbons

Ponder Stibbons — Sat, 07 Aug 2010 17:37:10 +0000

Well, I don’t know if Duany admires Singapore unilaterally, but he did say that it was liveable, which I thought to be a strange claim coming from a New Urbanist. Very few people live in Chinatown, Arab Street, or the human-scaled part of Tiong Bahru.

As for the value the government sees in those places, it’s mainly for the tourists. They aren’t interested in providing the same kind of environment for “ordinary people”, because it wouldn’t be “efficient” to do it on a mass scale. That is, the value they impute has nothing to do with liveability — they simply recognise that tourists like places that feel authentic. For the masses, it’s just more generic suburban malls.

By: payton

payton — Sat, 07 Aug 2010 07:49:46 +0000

Indeed, the physical planning of Singapore -- which was largely done along (American) modernist lines, with high-speed arterials and large blocks, gigantic integrated podium/tower complexes, little consideration for cyclists, landscapes substituted for streetscapes, and rigorous separation of uses -- leaves much to be desired. However, from a broad policy perspective Singapore gets certain really big things (and road pricing is HUGE, i.e., politically impossible elsewhere) right. The government also appears to understand the value of more human-scaled places like Chinatown, Arab Street, and Tiong Bahru estate -- even if those urban design lessons haven't quite sunk in as they plan megastructure-reliant places like Marina Bay. Planning is a vast field encompassing many aspects of urban life, and to say that I (or Andres Duany) "admire" something unilaterally (you're welcome to see my comments on Singapore over on Flickr) is to take far too simplistic a view of the matter.

By: Ponder Stibbons

Ponder Stibbons — Fri, 06 Aug 2010 23:37:42 +0000

I was going to leave a comment here on how surprised I am that there are New Urbanists who admire Singapore's urban planning, but it became rather long, so I turned it into a blog post.

By: New Urbanists Who Admire Singapore’s Urban Planning « One Less Car

New Urbanists Who Admire Singapore’s Urban Planning « One Less Car — Fri, 06 Aug 2010 23:31:24 +0000

[...] August 6, 2010 Singapore , Urban Planning Leave a Comment I just learned, via this blog, that they exist. I’m frankly astonished. I suspect few of these admirers have actually lived [...]