The Rise of “Movie-Set Urbanism”
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The Rise of “Movie-Set Urbanism”
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Re: The Rise of “Movie-Set Urbanism”
#2I love StrongTowns. They do a great service in bringing many different political dispositions together for common, practical goals of simply better living.
Often times, what they advocate for can be championed by Distributists, Libertarians, and Socialists alike. Because usually what divides these camps is mostly questions of scale and not the actual end goals.
Re: The Rise of “Movie-Set Urbanism”
#3I’m not sure this is totally a rip from Hollywood or a kind of modern Potemkin city.
I see this in old districts too. Facade in the front parking in the back. Strip malls are the inverse. With strip malls it looks ugly but you can tell at a glance if there is parking. The older form you don’t know till you drive around the back on a typically one-way street.
The modern take is like the Emeryville Bay Street shopping center or Santana Row in SJ/Sta Clara. It’s obviously artificial but people like it. In addition at least Santana Row integrates housing into the mix.
Re: The Rise of “Movie-Set Urbanism”
#4I love StrongTowns. They do a great service in bringing many different political dispositions together for common, practical goals of simply better living. Often times, what they advocate for can be championed by Distributists, Libertarians, and Socialists alike. Because usually what divides these camps is mostly questions of scale and not the actual end goals.
Probably the best fit are geolibertarians. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geolibertarianism
Re: The Rise of “Movie-Set Urbanism”
#5Been seeing these kinds of developments pop up a lot lately. The research triangle of NC is getting a lot of these with all their rapid development, and I've seen them around where I live currently.
The problem is they are really nothing more than a bandaid. They don't solve infrastructure problems, and they still encourage people to get into their cars (creating traffic) and driving to some place else far from their homes.
My point is, I don't see the purpose. They look fake, they feel fake, and I still have to drive there. It's not encouraging walking that much. It feels like a theme park, but at least at Disneyland they still pull the parking way outside the main park.
Re: The Rise of “Movie-Set Urbanism”
#6If you want to see real, “movie-set urbanism” go check out some of the newly gentrified neighborhoods in LA, like Highland Park. It looks like a set designer did a week’s research in Brooklyn and came back with some kind of illness that causes people to open terrible restaurants.
By contrast, long standing neighborhoods like the fashion district in downtown LA, Lincoln Heights, Monterey Park, are so vibrant with amazing businesses and food that serve their local communities. It’s night and day.
Re: The Rise of “Movie-Set Urbanism”
#7The second example just seems to be a shopping mall without a roof.
Re: The Rise of “Movie-Set Urbanism”
#8I think he's barking up the wrong tree. The problem isn't "movie set urbanism", it's just boring, old "too much parking". Too much parking creates sparseness which reduces walkability. But putting parking behind stores ("movie sets") creates a human scale street space.
While organic urban growth should be cherished, there are extreme cases, like most American towns and cities, where urbanism needs to be forcefully bootstrapped. In this case, we're artificially accelerating the evolution of a neighborhood and skipping over the early rural and suburban forms, going straight to a small urban core. I can see the long term hope of infilling those parking lots with more buildings as the town grows outwards.
Re: The Rise of “Movie-Set Urbanism”
#9Reminds me of Facadism as part of the larger pattern of cargo culting trends in development to try to gain the benefits of the "new way" without deeper changes resulting in nothing really different.
On the parking issue and related housing shortages I wonder how viable an attempted rail primary based housing development project to a major city would be in the US for NIMBY dodging. Apparently that is fairly common in Japan along with new rail line loops receiving housing developments and subway/train station centered commercial districts. In theory existing neighborhoods would scale up and add public transit as density rises but in practice they complain like hell over any changes. Optimistically successful examples could give a kick in the pants to NIMBYs as their property value drops anyway due to the competition of a new area and they realize commutter trains aren't the devil or a waste of money but reduce road traffic.
Re: The Rise of “Movie-Set Urbanism”
#10So his issue is people needing someplace to park their cars?
They arranged the buildings in an aesthetically pleasing way to disguise all the parking, I say bravo.