"Building Living Neighborhoods" https://www.livingneighborhoods.org/ht-0/bln-exp.htm Christopher Alexander (of Pattern Language fame) > Our goal is to help everyone make our neighborhoods places of belonging, places of health and well-being, and places where people will want to live and work. This has become possible through the use of Generative Codes, Christopher Alexander's latest work in the effort to make possib…
Do you know where that Gurdjieff quote comes from? I've not heard it before.
Streets with Nooks and Crannies Are Beloved and Endangered
111–120 of 148 posts
Re: Streets with Nooks and Crannies Are Beloved and Endangered
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
"get a reality check, this isn't going to work". If I gave out free hot tubs then there would pretty quickly be a hot tub shortage. The problem is that parking is the leasing of public land for insanely low amounts for private property storage. You are forcing everyone around you to pay for your private property storage because you don't feel like paying for it yourself. After all, can I pay the council the £100 a ye…
I'm not defending parking on street parking, and I am not saying we should force developers to add parking (I just find the fingers-in-ears ignoring of the issue frustrating), but with respect I think your views on the parking are a bit maladjusted. That's because you could use your same argument about any public service. We pay for it in spades through income and council taxes. Deliberately semi-quoting your argumen…
Re: Streets with Nooks and Crannies Are Beloved and Endangered
#113As often is the case, cars are the elephant in the room. In the alley? We have rebuilt our urban spaces for cars instead of people. Now we wonder at what we've lost but have trouble connecting it to the automobile because t's ubiquitous and most of us can't imagine it otherwise.
This is why it seems surprising to see an article like this in The American Conservative. I'd think those folks don't wan to give up their cars for anything.
Oh the irony.
Re: Streets with Nooks and Crannies Are Beloved and Endangered
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ideas that have stood the test of time might be better than a flash in the pan craze.
Key word there being "might." It could also be that the new thing is way better than the old thing. Being traditional does not make something right. After all, slavery has been around for probably tens thousands of years, and only in the past few hundred has the common moral fabric largely agreed that it is a Bad Thing.
Re: Streets with Nooks and Crannies Are Beloved and Endangered
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's almost as if 'Modernism' refers to a specific (albeit vaguely defined) style, and not to the property of being new itself. They're not ranting against semiconductors or antibiotics (both also relatively modern), are they?
Of course not, but these are not relatively modern. They're now part of traditional fabric of society for current conservatives. I think it's more apt to look at how conservatives of the time felt about new and paradigm shifting advances. They led the charges against the scientific revolution when it threatened to subvert authority & mechanisms of control, strongly opposing Copernicus, Bruno, Kepler, Galileo, and New…
About as modern as the steel-and-glass/nookless style he criticizes, that gained prominence after the World Wars [1,2].
Ignoring the guilt-by-association/ad-hominem part of your post, what do you find so lacking in his critique? I'll grant that it's a long-winded way to say "it's ugly, sterile, and unpleasant to live in", but I'd say that's a valid (if subjective) complaint. What sort of critiques did Jane Jacobs and Christopher Alexander make? I'm very curious.
Re: Streets with Nooks and Crannies Are Beloved and Endangered
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why not both? It seems to both be more profitable for the developer and better for the environment.
Because there isn't enough space. 4 or 5 parking spaces is the same footprint that a 1 bedroom apartment would consume, then multiply that by the number of floors which is often between 4 or 8 in the outer parts of "central" London. So 4 to 5x25000 for parking spaces, or 4 to 8x650000. Underground parking is possible but rare - you see it more these days, but then it costs significantly more than just a tarmac lot ou…
I think this is a pretty poor way of thinking that leads to US style cities where there are these "dense" urban areas that have oceans of lifeless areas and greatly increased cost due to the amount of space taking by car parking/storage areas.
Re: Streets with Nooks and Crannies Are Beloved and Endangered
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
On addition some narrow alleyways are a bit dangerous —they are narrow and in the event of emergency they can find themselves blocked off (when fire escapes empty to them, as they usually do).
Tokyo seems to do just fine with innumerable tiny alleys that can only accommodate humans or the occasional bicycle. It’s all about balance.
Re: Streets with Nooks and Crannies Are Beloved and Endangered
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sheesh, these “conversations”. Just “eliminating” parking at new developments does not eliminate the _need_ for parking. People still have to get to work, school, the grocery store. We had that happen near us 30 years ago by a developer who used a similar argument. A golf course was developed into 13,000 apartments with virtually no parking. Overnight, the surrounding neighborhood’s streets were changed. Once they ha…
I agree with the idea of impact fees being used to fund public transit but your first suggestion sounds very confrontational for a few reasons: First, why are only the people who "got there first" allowed to use the public streets for storing privately owned items? Second, why not require that people who do have parking are only allowed to own as many motorized vehicles as can fit in their parking and cannot use the…
Re: Streets with Nooks and Crannies Are Beloved and Endangered
#119Ken: Alcoves, yes. Sometimes.
Yuri: There are not many people around in these alcoves at Christmas time. If I were to murder a man I would murder him here. Are you sure this is the right word, alcoves?
Ken: Alcoves, yes. It's kind of like nooks and crannies.
Yuri: Nooks and crannies, yes! Perhaps this would be more accurate. Nooks and crannies rather than alcoves. Yes.
Re: Streets with Nooks and Crannies Are Beloved and Endangered
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree with the idea of impact fees being used to fund public transit but your first suggestion sounds very confrontational for a few reasons: First, why are only the people who "got there first" allowed to use the public streets for storing privately owned items? Second, why not require that people who do have parking are only allowed to own as many motorized vehicles as can fit in their parking and cannot use the…
Tokyo manages this problem before it ever becomes a problem: you can't register your car to a Tokyo address unless you can prove you have a parking spot. It could be a spot in your front yard (in this case probably the entire yard) or a rented space in a parking garage. If you can't afford a parking spot at market rate, then you can't afford a car.