Urbanism for non-Tourists
There’s a common line among urbanists and advocates of car-free cities to the effect that all the nice places people go to for tourism are car-light, so why not have that at home? It’s usually phrased as “cities that people love” (for example, in Brent Toderian), but to that effect, mainly North American (or Australian) urbanists talk about how European cities are walkable, often in places where car use is rather high and it’s just the tourist ghetto that is walkable. Conversely, some of the most transit-oriented and dynamic cities in the developed world lack these features, or have them in rather unimportant places.
Normally, “Americans are wrong about Europe” is not that important in the grand scheme of things. The reason American cities with a handful of exceptions don’t have public transit isn’t that urbanist advocacy worries too much about pedestrianizing city center streets and too little about building subways to the rest of the city. Rather, the problem is the effect of tourism- and consumption-theoretic urbanism right here. It, of course, doesn’t come back from the United States – European urbanists don’t really follow American developments, which I’m reminded of every time a German activist on Mastodon or Reddit tries explaining metro construction costs to me. It’s an internal development, just one that is so parallel to how Americans analytically get Europe wrong that it’s worth discussing this in tandem.
The core of public transit
I wrote a blog post many years ago about what I called the in-between neighborhoods, and another after that. The two posts are rather Providence-centric – I lived there when I wrote the first post, in 2012 – but they describe something more general. The workhorses of public transit in healthy systems like New York’s or Berlin’s or Paris’s, or even barely-existing ones like Providence’s, are urban neighborhoods outside city center.
The definitions of both “urban” and “outside city center” are flexible, to be clear. In Providence, I was talking about the neighborhoods on what is now the R bus route, namely South Providence and the areas on North Main Street, plus some similar neighborhoods, including the East Side (the university neighborhood, the only one in Providence’s core that’s not poor) and Olneyville in the west. In larger, denser, more transit-oriented Berlin, those neighborhoods comprise the Wilhelmine Ring and thence stretch out well past the Ringbahn, sometimes even to city limits in those sectors where sufficient transit-oriented development has been built, and a single district like Neukölln may have more people than the entirety of Providence.
In Berlin, this can be seen in modal splits by borough; scroll down to the tables by borough, and go to page 45 of each PDF. The modal split does not at all peak in the center. Among the 12 boroughs, the one with the highest transit modal split for work trips is actually Marzahn-Hellersdorf, in deep East Berlin. The lowest car modal split is in the two centermost boroughs, Mitte and Kreuzberg-Friedrichshain, both with near-majorities for pedestrian and bike commutes – but the range of both of these modes is limited enough that it’s not supportable anywhere else in Berlin.
Nor is shrinking the city to the range of a bike going to help. Germany is full of cities of similar size to the combined total of Mitte and Kreuzberg-Friedrichshain; they have much higher car use, because what makes the center of Berlin work is the large concentration of jobs and other destinations brought about by the size of the city.
The same picture emerges in other transit cities. In Paris, the city itself is significant for the region’s public transit network, but its residents only comprise 30% of Francilien transit commuters, and even that figure should probably subtract out the outer areas of the city, which tourists don’t go to, like the entire northeast or the areas around and past the Boulevards of the Marshals. The city itself has much higher modal split than its suburbs, but that, again, depends on a thick network of jobs and other destinations that exist because of the dominance of the city as a commercial destination within a larger region.
Where tourists go
The in-between neighborhoods that drive the transit-oriented character of major cities are generally residential, or maybe mixed-use. Usually, they do not have tourist destinations. In Berlin, I advocate for tourists to visit Gropiusstadt and see its urbanism, but I get that people only do it if they’re especially interested in urban exploration. Instead, tourism clusters in city center; the museums are almost always in the center to the point that exceptions (like Balboa Park in San Diego) are notable, high-end hotels cluster in city center (the Los Angeles exception is again notable), and so on.
These tourism-oriented city centers often include pedestrianized street stretches. Berlin is rather atypical in Germany in not having such a stretch; in contrast, tourists can lose themselves in Marienplatz in Munich, or in various Altstadt areas of other cities, and forget that these cities have higher car use than Berlin, often much higher. For example, Leipzig’s car modal split for work trips is 47% (source, p. 13), higher than even Berlin’s highest-modal split borough, Spandau, which has 44% (Berlin overall is at 25%).
To be clear, Leipzig is, by most standards, fairly transit-oriented. Its tram network has healthy ridership, and its S-Bahn tunnel is a decent if imperfect compromise between the need to provide metro-like train service through the city and the need to provide long-distance regional rail to Halle and other independent cities in the region. But it should be more like Berlin and not the reverse.
Another feature of tourist cities is the premodern city core, with its charming very narrow streets. Berlin lacks such a core, and Paris only has a handful of such streets, mostly in the Latin Quarter. But Stockholm has an intact Early Modern core in Gamla Stan; it is for all intents and purposes a tourist ghetto, featuring retail catering to tourists and not much else. Stockholm is a very strong transit city with a monocentric core, but the core is not even at Gamla Stan, but to its north, north of T-Centralen, and thus the other tourist feature, the pedestrianized city center street with high-end retail, remains distinct from the premodern core.
Tellingly, these premodern cores exist even in thoroughly auto-oriented cities, ones with much weaker public transit than Leipzig. Italy supplies many examples of cities that were famously large in the Renaissance, and still have intact cores where one can visit the museums. A few years ago, Marco Chitti pointed out how Italian politicians, like foreign tourists, like taking photo-ops at farmers’ markets in small historic cities, while meanwhile, everyone in Italy does their shopping at suburban shopping centers offering far lower prices. To the tourist, Florence looks charming; to the resident, it is, in practice, a far more auto-oriented region than Stockholm or Berlin.
Pedestrian Observations 
The opposition between farmers’ markets and hypermarkets is not purely Italian. It was pointed out to me on Twitter a few years ago that the beloved night markets of Taiwan are, likewise, for tourists; Taiwanese people do their daily shopping at 7-11 and supermarkets. A city is transit-oriented when the supermarkets are walkable, not when the farmers’ markets are.
I like shopping in a nearby street market because it’s easy, for example, to buy exactly the amount of nuts I need for a recipe, instead of a prepackaged set with way too many nuts. But the bulk of my groceries does come from the supermarket.
On the other hand my parents’ neighbourhood in Rio de Janeiro is kind of a supermarket desert, it’s a rare case when the street market is indeed more convenient. Though I expect most of their neighbours regularly drive 20 min to the big supermarkets.
I mean, that’s a technically true observation, but it’s a bizarre misunderstanding of what night markets are meant to be. Of course nobody does their grocery shopping at a night market, because night markets sell street food, carnival games, and inexpensive knick-knacks and clothes. They’re places to grab dinner and kill a few hours, or maybe to get a late-night snack. But they’re certainly not “for” tourists, outside of the few that guidebooks mention. There are plenty of neighborhood night markets that do most of their business with local residents.
Plus many night markets are located on or near day market locations, which ARE for fresh produce and groceries. I don’t have numbers on how much shopping is done at supermarkets vs day markets (if such numbers even exist), but the conventional wisdom is that supermarket produce is more expensive and less fresh–of course, the advantage is that they’re open when people are off work.
I suppose NYC is the big exception– American supermarkets are car oriented enough that they don’t bother serving it except on its auto oriented margins
There are in fact a lot of supermarkets in Manhattan; they just tend to have narrower aisles than in the burbs.
Obviously because Manhattanites are skinny little runts:
Or maybe it’s because the poor little dears are deprived of any Walmarts. Whaddya think adirondacker?
I have no idea why the retailers up here waste so much space on aisles.
Duane Reade is supposedly the world’s best performing retailer, based on sales by floor area. The aisles are narrower and the shelves are taller. There are more people coming in and out of the door too.
when real estate is cheap (cheap enough to put in more free parking than you need even on the busiest day of the year) aisles are something you make large. It is easier to pass someone else in a wide aisle. I’ve been in markets where you cannot pass someone in an aisle so if someone else is there one of you will have to back out of the aisle – even if there is physically enough room to pass, it is socially too close to a stranger. It isn’t a big deal, but still annoying. Large aisles also allow larger carts, and it has been established that most people are shopping one a week or less so they need carts large enough hold that much stuff.
In Manhattan land is not cheap so you will start to look at how you can better use it. Smaller aisles if you can get away with it. Fill shelves to the ceiling even though it isn’t safe for most people to get something off the high shelf.
@Henry Miller
Whoosh … as the trope goes.
Just because the English term is “night market” – one shouldn’t think that 夜市 is a place to buy dried goods and detergent. A more accurate translation might be “street fair” – as they’re a mix of quickly-prepped meals, games, and desserts. Their frequented by both locals and tourists, with the mix very much depending on what neighborhood you’re in.
If you look at the second Chinese character in the term – https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E5%B8%82 – you’ll see that “market” (in noun form) is just one of its many possible meanings.
Not true, they are everywhere in Paris, because all of it existed pre-auto era. The huge advantage Paris has over many other cities (London, Rome) is that Haussmann fixed that access problem of premodern cores while leaving most of the local scale intact. And it is the mix of big access routes with regular streets and narrow lanes and arcades etc that works so well together. As we’ve discussed here before, NYC’s grid doesn’t work particularly well for any one group, ie. even for cars nor, with its long blocks, for pedestrians (or tourists). Limited attempts to fix this structural problem was creating arcades as pedestrian thru-ways at ground level, such as “6 1/2 Avenue” (linking 51st – 57th streets) but that is a huge job of negotiating property rights and “who pays” etc so it hasn’t made much progress. At least the problem is recognised by Americans:
It is a factor in why Melbourne is sometimes lauded over Sydney because Melbourne’s Hoddle Grid had lots of narrow lanes which were for nightsoil carrier access, and they today are filled with cafes & street-art etc. Sydney destroyed its old city including laneways and most of it can’t be differentiated from most American cities except at harbourside.
But anyway, I think the concept of ‘touristed’ zones can be confusing. Paris may get more tourists than any other city but it wasn’t specifically designed or modified to accommodate them. It works for tourists because what works for dense walkable urban zones will work very well for tourist zones. The most heavily touristed zones (parts of Leftbank, the Marais) haven’t changed their streets for centuries, even the Champs Élysées. The reality is that anywhere within the 20 arrondissements is ‘good’ for tourists because it’s good for locals. Even parts of the Petite Couronne are old and have a similar structure which makes them walkable even if their lower density works against it. Remember that at any given time tourists only represent one in 8 residents (and lower when considering many workers who commute into Paris).
About traffic: though Paris has lower traffic per population, it is very high on many of its streets due to the sheer density, residential and business. Only in some areas is it a real problem (neglecting air quality) and even there it doesn’t really work against walkability, which is not to say the pedestrian experience wouldn’t improve with lower traffic. That’s why arguably a good time to visit is actually peak tourist time, ie. July-August, because there are far fewer Parisians and therefore far fewer vehicles (of course 2 in 3 boulangeries closed, etc); well, I say that as a resident when I found the calmer lower traffic to be nicer but tourists competing for everything might be a different experience (but then who cares!). I’ve said it here before that Hidalgo risks going too far because removing all vehicles risks transgressing one or more of Jane Jacob’s cardinal rules for lively streets. I had wondered at closing the riverside expressway (Voies Pompidou) because it seems to carry a lot of traffic over fair distances at fair speeds that otherwise might be on the main Parisian streets; however so far it doesn’t seem to have been carmaggedon. I think the same for the Peripherique which to me would seem impossible to close down given its function; indeed it is another feature of Paris that I reckon helps the city function so well even though its surface streets are limited (even post-Haussmann). Indeed the first proposal for an underground railway was for commerce–provoked by the impossible chaos around Les Halles–and if that had been built …
I think I’ve said this here before, but Florence is really awful, though between my first visit (early 80s) and second (sometime in early 90s) it finally did pedestrianise its inner core. Imagine what it was like prior–shockingly bad in summer, and worse, very little provision for pedestrians (residents or tourists), no public seating except in expensive cafes etc. Rome is only better (than Florence or Venice) because it is bigger, but in general the Italian summer experience is terrible. Incidentally Stanley Tucci’s recent foodie fest of his homeland hasn’t convinced me otherwise.
Look at pictures of the streets of Gamla Stan and then compare to anywhere in Paris. Paris does not have a preserved medieval core, and even historic areas like Ile de la Cité have wide streets by premodern standards and a lot of relatively new things. The Latin Quarter has a handful of streets that Haussmann didn’t touch, but otherwise, it’s a 19th-century city, which is profoundly different from what I’m talking about.
Florence is still pretty bad. The parts near the Ponte Vecchio are pedestrianized, but within walking distance you can already find narrow streets with a car lane and a meter or so of sidewalk width. I’ve been trying and failing to find transit ridership data for it and for Bologna; the tramway in Florence had 100,000 passengers/day before corona, which is pitiful for a metro area of that size (around a million).
It seems to come down to definitions. In your original post you talked of “premodern cores” not medieval. If you insist on medieval then maybe Gamla Stan wins, I don’t really know. I can’t find an area for it but it looks about the same or smaller than the Marais which is similarly old and quite untouched by Haussmann–even rue de Rivoli narrows down to the old St Antoine. I note too that the Palace in Gamla Stan is 18th century and many of the buildings are of similar age but built on older bones, so again equivocal.
However, I agree that Ile de la Cité was the medieval core and that much of it has gone, the only remnants being Notre Dame and the St Chapelle and those houses on the north-east corner with their tiny medieval streets. By focussing only on the Cité you have chosen the most extreme case of Haussmannisation because it was indeed an utter shambles from all eras; and the 4 big thoroughfares that traverse from left to right bank dominate the perspective which also means it would inevitably be the most intensively revised.
If we’re talking premodern core then no. Pont Neuf, construction begun 1578, finished 1607, and the buildings around it (Pace Dauphine) were built at the same time, yet it all looks very modern. The reason is that it was a turning point in bridge design, not only for being built of stone for the ages but very wide and with wide sidewalks (IIRC the first purpose-built in the world). No accident that it is the oldest still-standing bridge in Paris, along with Pont Marie to Ile St Louis all of which is 17th century and was totally untouched by Haussmann. The pre-modern Paris inspired cities everywhere long before Haussmann. I’ve said it before, that Haussmann (or his boss) didn’t so much modernise as implement much earlier plans, eg. that you can see in the Pont Neuf of Henri IV. (The modern part of Haussmannisation was what was under the roads, the sewers and gas pipes.)
Most city functions moved off the island quite early because it wasn’t suitable any longer, and spread both north and south. The Louvre and the Sorbonne were both 12th century.
Actually he did minimal intervention on Leftbank, essentially only Bvd St Germaine, Bvd St Michel and later rue des Ecoles. Really most of it is well and truly pre-modern. Perhaps partly due to stalled plans or low prioritisation; I mean look at the tiny medieval rue Dauphine that leads into the gigantic Pont Neuf!
The reason you inverted the reality is that the perspective from those main boulevards and from Place St Michel looks quite modern. But the vast majority of the Latin Quarter is premodern and quite a lot is medieval (even if added to over the centuries like Gamla Stan). It may be ‘ahead’ of the equivalent of other European cores but that is the story of Paris.
At any rate the real point is about traffic-free zones, walkability and tourist zones. The Latin Quarter and Marais actually support your case. For all of my time n Paris rue St Andre des Arts and Francs Bourgeois (neither were Haussmannised) were a kind of awkward but successful mix of hordes of pedestrians and cars. My point is that what is critical for successful urbanism is the type of mix you get in these places (and all throughout Paris), i.e. a few big roads providing thoroughfares within a dense network of regular streets and alleys (plus all the rest, high density, Metro transit). The most fully pedestrianised zones like the Les Halles area are not the best zones (even if Place Georges Pompidou gets more visitors than anywhere else in Europe). Walkability doesn’t require it. That’s all I’m saying. But I feel it is important because planners today do seem to have odd ideas, such as big open (green) spaces that count as pedestrian but are dead zones … well you know my usual argument. It’s why the Anglosphere seems to have such trouble in producing good zones–because they tend to see it as black and white.
“often in places where car use is rather high and it’s just the tourist ghetto that is walkable.”
To be fair, wouldn’t this already be a massive improvement for a lot of places? I live in Toulouse, a thoroughly car-oriented metro area by European standards (one of the worst in France, which is already a very car-centric country outside of IDF), but Toulouse’s walkable/bikeable zone (maybe a 2km radius max from the city center, which is overwhelmingly composed of narrow streets) is not negligibly small, so a car isn’t strictly necessary for many people the way it basically is in an American city of similar size, and plenty of non-tourists live/go to the core. The premodern core also seems to provide enough FAR/density/gravity for radial transit into the auto-oriented periphery to latch onto, even if it’s not always great.
Wait, how is Toulouse one of the worst in France? The modal split in Haute-Garonne is around 12%, same as in Gironde and Alpes-Maritimes and Bouches-du-Rhône.
Provincial cities in France generally have this problem that everyone in the suburbs drives unless they’re very poor, but I think the metro and light rail networks still go way beyond the core? The core has a lot of jobs but the point is that the people who hold these jobs don’t live there.
My experience in Lyon was that the non-rail transit was really bad in the suburbs. In Ecully, just outside the city proper, if you’re 2 km away from the metro station it might as well not be there. I remember the Sunday bus headways were something awful like 1h15.
Hmm my assertion comes from here:
Click to access Les-de%CC%81placements-dans-les-grandes-villes-franc%CC%A7aises-re%CC%81sultats-et-facteurs-de-re%CC%81ussite-rapport-ADETEC.pdf
(page 28), but the methodology for car trips might not be as clear as yours.
I’ve also found this:
https://www.observatoire-des-territoires.gouv.fr/part-des-deplacements-domicile-travail-en-transports-en-commun
If you select “Aire d’attraction des villes (2020)” you get metro-area data, with Toulouse sitting at 12.9% (Lyon 21.1, Marseille 15.5, Nice 17.4, Bordeaux 13.1. Strasbourg 16, Lille 15.6, Nantes 14.4). You can switch to “unités urbaines” to get data on continuous urban zones. In a less qualitative way, Toulouse’s urban sprawl as being particularly bad is repeated pretty often in media.
It’s true that the metro/tram networks in France go beyond the historic center. For Toulouse, there’s a bit of pretty good high-rise-ish TOD going on near the Arènes and Jolimont metro stations and the Cartoucherie tram station. That said, in Toulouse there are metro stations in some shockingly low-density areas…
Anyway, regarding your original post, I’m not sure I’ve understood the formal conclusion. Is it:
“The existing premodern, narrow-street (so pre-Haussmannian) city pattern does very little to induce transit use”? If so, what would be the underlying causes? Insufficient FAR? Insufficient size? (i.e., you can’t scale up this type of development pattern so that it accounts for a large proportion of a metro area) Both? Regarding FAR I have to imagine a lot of these places are in the ~ 2 range, which to me sounds pretty sufficient for outside-core-urban neighborhoods to get reasonable transit ridership no?
My interpretation: vastly different scale. Carfree walkability is fundamentally hyperlocal — that’s why people can take photos of it — and theoretically it can be as small as a single block-length of a single street. Successful transit, on the other hand:
– relies on a geographic scale where people stop bothering to walk or bike;
– means, consists of a social scale that many have trouble comprehending (say, on the order of a hundred thousand people per day per direction);
– to a first approximation it doesn’t matter whether people live and work in condo and office towers, or euroblocks, or something else, only that sufficiently many of them do so within walking distance of a stop.
If you have somewhere to put the heavy rail, there is little in-principle reason you couldn’t cover a large enough area with medieval-style development to have a city of millions, but nobody does this (partly because you kinda need trucks to practically feed the city with garbage and to haul away the groceries produced therefrom). Likewise, in principle you can tile most of a city with superblocks, and this might even be a good and feasible idea, but it won’t impact transit ridership much.
Basil Marte: “Carfree walkability is fundamentally hyperlocal”
Again, this confuses issues. While carfree zones may be walkable (not always), Walkability≠Carfree. So, no, walkability is not fundamentally hyperlocal–which implies short pedestrianised streets etc. That is exactly the error some (Anglosphere) planners make repeatedly; I know it seems contradictory to those pedestrianised streets into malls that are so successful (in the Anglosphere) but that is as much to do with the awful state of those streets before the pedestrianisation (boring blank street facades, miserable sidewalks, prioritisation given to traffic & parking, no public seating etc.).
All of Paris is highly walkable, and as we all know it is far from carfree. And as I have noted, it wouldn’t necessarily be improved by being seriously carfree.
Walkability is related to geographic scale but much more. Streetscape and street activity are critical.
The current thinking on NYC will be interesting to follow: reducing space given to cars (which doesn’t mean complete removal, just less, and less parking etc).
Wait, the new definition of the Nice metro area excludes Cannes and Antibes, which is too restrictive. I was looking at departmental level, which isn’t the best for this, but I don’t think it’s really correct to look at modal split in the Riviera and ignore Antibes, where all the professional jobs are with influence well east of Nice, and Cannes, which is on the TER line to Nice and Monaco.
The formal conclusion is that the main driver of transit usage is production- and not consumption-based. So having a nice pedestrian-friendly core is secondary to having lots of jobs in or near city center, metro (or in smaller cities light rail) and commuter lines connecting them in all directions, and decent residential density near those metro stations with a structure that has the highest density and the commercial uses right on top of the station. Gropiusstadt does that with modernist high-rise development, but the same structure is often done without high-rises.
One of the things that marks UK cities compared to a lot of their European counterparts is the lack of conversion of inner city Industrial districts into inner city residential ones*. This is changing as any visit to Leeds or Manchester would tell you. This basically because the planning system has allowed localities to keep pretending that an artisanal industrial revival is only one more subsidy away (Sheffield is by far the worst offender where a few whinging car repair yard businessmen are valued more than the students who are Sheffield’s only real economic dynamo). Outside London council estates tended to actually sprawl out because land was “cheaper” to develop and Postwar car-brain. People love to quote Thatcher’s “If a man finds himself a passenger on a bus having attained the age of 26, he can count himself a failure in life.” but that was policy before she became an MP let alone PM.
This explicit depopulation strategy of city centre’s is murderous for public transit as much as green belts. London got away because the Tube was already built out and electrification of the mainlines already in motion before 1947. Cars and buses destroy the streetcars and then there isn’t a strong political economy for an EMU based system. Especially given Merseyrail, Glasgow and Tyneside Metro have underperformed (not that anybody in those cities actually understands how much they set themselves up for failure). And its a point of continuity across the entire postwar era. Manchester’s relative success has a lot to do with the mainlines coming up from the South and having the university and the airport closer.
The centre of cities did a report on this, but doesn’t properly engage with the centrality of electrified rail as the bones and sinew of any urban transit network. And the UK context with so many legacy lines, that should mean heavy electric rail rather than dud-trams (Sheffield, Edinburgh) or magic-dream metros (Bristol).
https://www.centreforcities.org/publication/comparing-public-transport-uk-europe-cities/
*Ironically the UK after helping pioneer large scale purpose built industrial districts with Trafford and Park Royal prewar has subsequently built very few and often in terrible locations (Wexham). And people wonder why the UK manufacturing is such a state.
I am pretty convinced the first priority for the north is to fix the station throats at Manchester, Leeds and Liverpool.
Full electrification is the other priority, probably with additional passing tracks at outlying stations as you have hinted at before.
Then you can run more and faster trains on the existing lines into the centre.
I would prioritise that over HS2.
It’s worth pointing out that the really successful Manchester tram lines are the ones to Bury, Altrincham and Rochdale – the ones that are converted heavy rail lines with minimal street running outside the pedestrianised centre. Trams that can run at 80 km/h and encounter no traffic are a very different proposition from 50 km/h and having to stop at signalled junctions all the time.
I think tramlink is wrong infrastructure choice given Greater Manchester’s size (and potential size). I understand why the authorities in Manchester chose it . It is genuinely Westminster’s fault that there is no Picc-Vic tunnel given Manchester is the primary pinch-point for the North of England.
I’m not sure I’d say Picc-Vic is higher priority than HS2, but it certainly is compared to HS3. Which is an utterly ludicrious project given how much capacity potential there is on existing lines if you could just electrify, re-signal and hire people who know how to run a timetable.
I’d disagree throats are necessarily the main problem with Victoria. The problem is that they run it like a terminal more than a through-running station. And you can add passing loops and terminal platforms in much cheaper locations (n/b this what Japanese regional rail and intercity lines do see Kintetsu or Meitetsu). Timetable padding and rolling stock cleaning/services are space intensive activites, so do them where space is cheap (exhibit X+infinity on why British rail is definitely not running “a business).
And even Piccadilly is inefficiently used, with far too much padding because both regional and inter-city services are too interlined and there aren’t nearly enough passing loops. But just building a Picc-Vic through-running tunnel will solve this problems much more cost efficiently than the current plans.
I once did the figures for passing loops on Chiltern and Midland lines compared to Kintetsu’s intercity Osaka-Nagoya line (similar population and distances). Kintetsu has passing loops roughly every 6-7km, on UK lines its more 15-25. But British transportation people and activists would rather build a giant tunnel through the Pennines than learn from foreigners.
Manchester didn’t have a strong city-centre office commuting market back in the 90s (even now it’s a lot weaker than it should be). To be honest Metrolink does the job – it’s fast in the suburbs, and Manchester city centre is small enough that traversing it at street level is still swift with a good degree of segregation. A city centre tunnel would increase access/egress time between vehicle and street level that would wipe out any gains from running 20mph quicker, and incur building maintenance costs Metrolink can ill afford.
The only thing that triggers a tunnel requirement is passenger volume. That really means when you need to run trams longer than 60 metres which is the legal limit for road running trams. Metrolink isn’t quite there yet – even the Altrincham and Bury lines aren’t sufficiently busy to run all trams as double sets. You’d need a doubling of city centre employment rate, doubling of public transport mode share, and unashamedly develop Trafford, Stretford, Sale and Altrincham into higher density neighbourhoods (a lot of them have advanced plans to be fair) to create the sort of volume that would support a metro tunnel. Even with light-rail technology, 90m walk-through trains like the new DLR rolling stock will certainly feel like a proper metro. I actually think this would be achievable if Greater Manchester put its minds to it.
But then this would be concentrating development and investment on an already affluent corridor, and funnelling everyone into the city centre would just ‘create another London’ which northern politicians don’t like. They are much more interested in levelling up projects like undefined tram trains connecting Heywood with Rochdale.
“another London”. Jesus Christ that opinion drove me mad when I was in Sheffield. No wonder GM barely grew faster than-NIMBYier-than-God Surrey in the last census. In 1900 Osaka was called the Manchester of the Orient, to say that now is to insult Osaka.
Thanks for the link. GM like most parts of the British transportation system is cagey on numbers (using millions per annum is always a tell for a bad system). And I stand corrected on the Trafford line.
The Heywood line comes from all the Atomic valley dreaming. Because decades of throwing industrial policy at Lancashire have worked wonders for the British aerospace and nuclear industries….
@Borners, I have a different question then.
Would you rather spend £25bn on HS2 or:
* £2.5bn each on improving the city centre transport in Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds and Newcastle.
* £1.5bn a year for 10 years on electrification, passing places, line speedups and new stations with that money split 50:50 between projects to boost railway revenue and projects to support leveling up
Too many false dichotomies. The north needs better London connectivity to gain the ability to develop national facing and international facing service sectors, which in turn creates the local commuting patterns that drive the need for better urban transits.
As things stand Merseyrail and Tyne & Wear Metro are severely underused. Both Liverpool and Newcastle need to densify their inner city areas and call a moratorium on suburban Barratt Homes developments. Especially Tyne and Wear need to close the office elements of Cobalt and Quorum business parks and move the employment to Newcastle city centre.
Manchester’s problem is they are not willing to simplify and rationalise their heavy rail network. The city and the wider region insist on having a plethora of low-frequency direct trains from everywhere to everywhere, including every Tom Dick and Harry wanting direct trains to the airport for their annual bucket and spade holidays, while places like Burnage can’t get a usable commuter service.
@Weifeng. HS2 phase 1 which is under construction and almost certainly can’t be cancelled fixes the capacity issues with the rail network in the south. It also speeds up trains from the North West and West Midlands to London by about 30 minutes which isn’t bad.
However if you were to cancel HS2 phase 2 you would need to (and it would be fair to) spend most of the money saved in the midlands and the north.
Personally I think due to state capacity issues and due to the refusal of anyone in the public sector to ever admit they were wrong about anything means delivering HS2 for a reasonable budget at this point is probably impossible.
Cancelling Phase 2 means there’s no classic network capacity relief for Stockport, Macclesfield and Stoke commuters into Manchester, Stoke and Stafford commuters into Birmingham, or for Doncaster and Wakefield commuters into Leeds. It means Leicester punters to London can only get on trains already stuffed full with Nottingham, Derby and Sheffield passengers.
@Weifeng. If you care about running more stopping services from Stoke to Manchester for example if you added passing tracks at Adlington and a north one at Macclesfield or Congleton that would be enough to run a stopping train from Stoke to Manchester every 30 minutes along with a London express every 20/40 minutes and a cross country every half hour.
And that would be a heck of a lot cheaper than HS2 – even if you also have to repeat that in half a dozen places.
It’s not just about stopping services. It’s about Stoke having express trains into Manchester that are not already full with passengers from London or Birmingham. HS2 isn’t just about speed, it’s about capacity. The net uplift of 3tph into Manchester (as in, the 3tph HS2 trains are in additional to existing service level) is justified. With that level of traffic intensity passing loops won’t do it, you need continuous 4-tracking. It you need to 4-track anyway, would you:
– expand the existing railway formation through constrained urban areas, with lots of station reconstructions, compulsory purchases of private properties, impose lengthy closures, and all the while limiting line speed to 180km/h and train lengths to 265m, or,
– build a new alignment in open countryside with minimal compulsory purchases and disruption to the existing railway, and have the ability to run your trains at 300+km/h and at 400m length?
@Weifeng, rebuilding both Stoke and Macclesfield stations is pretty useful if you want to run more stopping trains from Manchester to Stoke and you want to maintain the current 2tph express to Birmingham and 2tph to London, at which point extending the platforms to 400m or just setting it up so partial door opening works seems like a pretty small price to pay.
Overall it helps you with reliability too – if the express trains into Stoke are late enough they will be delayed by up to another 20 minutes at present as they will be stuck behind the stopping train the whole way from Stoke to Manchester Piccadilly.
At Wilmslow you might need to move some signals but the track setup is clearly acceptable for 400m trains as it stands with partial door opening. Crewe also clearly supports 400m trains already as the sleeper is 400m long and currently stops there. Probably you wouldn’t generally bother to stop long HS2 trains at Stafford.
With Stockport – well I think the idea that the people of south Manchester will allow the ugly viaduct currently proposed or the inconveneince of cut and cover to reduce journey times by a further 5 minutes is probably a fairy tale. So either you spend billions and billions boring a tunnel under south Manchester for HS2 or you increase the platforms at Stockport to 400m and use the classic lines for the run in to the city centre. And frankly with partial door opening Stockport is probably usable as it stands given there are 5 tracks to the south.
@ Matthew Hutton
You are vastly underestimating the cost and complexity of upgrading saturated main lines. Have a look at the HS2 Phase 2b Strategic Alternatives report:
Click to access strategic-alternatives-to-hs2-phase-2b-atkins-report.pdf
Read that against the 2017 version of Phase 2b economic case:
Click to access high-speed-two-phase-two-economic-case-document.pdf
The alternatives deliver far fewer additional seat km than HS2 2b and hence far lower benefits and revenues.
The Strategic Alternatives require 360 ‘equivalent Sunday’ closures and around 100 full weekend or extended weekend closures. Cast your mind to the 2008 West Coast Main Line upgrade and how there were essentially no weekend services for years, and costs were quadruple original estimates.
Selective Door Opening at somewhere like Stockport would be a huge dwell time red flag. The other problem at Stockport is the Edgeley Junctions which are near impossible to grade separate. You shouldn’t be running high-profile intercity in flat junction mixed traffic environments full stop.
@Weifeng, I kinda feel we are massively off topic – but I do think that these government reports are often just a justification for whatever proposal the government wanted to do to start with.
For example with the original HS2 report they considered a deep underground station at Paddington but didn’t consider a surface station.
Well the Heathrow express and the Didcot semi-fast services could definitely be Crossrail trains, so between them that would free up surely at least 3 if not 4 platforms, plus there’s a huge gap next to platform 10 with cycle storage where you could get 2 platforms, and you could surely get 4 if not 6 tracks between platform 1 and the road to the south of the station. So you could easily create at least 9 platforms in Paddington for HS2 – if not a dozen without having to demolish any other buildings at all.
Now probably Euston is still the best choice as it is close to the Eurostar and Kings Cross – but still Paddington at least should have been considered seriously. Post crossrail Paddington really isn’t badly located anymore.
The recent East-West rail report is similar. It says east west rail sharing track for a mile north of Bedford station with the midland mainline is impossible, even though there are 4 tracks there and no Thameslink services. Obviously ideally you’d separate it – but it hardly feels like the world ends if you don’t.
I do wonder if the reports you have linked are similarly flawed to be honest.
The Strategic Alternative report author is an HS2 sceptic.
@Matthew Hutton
Sandbagging!
Exactly Richard. And Manchester is clearly started to drink its own Kool-aid with the Trafford Park line because they don’t want to build flats in more convenient locations.
Forgive me but I haven’t seen any data showing which manchester tram services/stops are the most popular?
Best place to start is probably the Greater Manchester Transport Committee papers:
https://democracy.greatermanchester-ca.gov.uk/ieListDocuments.aspx?CId=193&MId=4996&Ver=4
Go into the Agenda reports pack and there are Metrolink ridership figures by line from page 60 onwards.
Altrincham is the busiest line, followed by Bury, Oldham, Didsbury, Eccles. Trafford Park is doing almost as well as Ashton and Airport.
Even the busiest line Altrincham was only managing 11m trips per annum pre Covid. In London that sort of figure is produced by a single station like Wood Green.
Very interesting. Thanks!
It is clear the airport line and ashton lines are severely underperforming.
Arguably the rochdale line is also weak as it has twice as many stops (19) as the others.
And actually the Trafford Park one is arguably nearly as strong as the Eccles line given it has significantly fewer stops and doesn’t cross the city centre.
The Trafford Park line makes sense. It’s a large employer and it’s right that workers now have a high quality public transport option. It’s similar to Frankfurt tram lines 11 and 12 which also serve an industrial corridor.
Oldham and Rochdale are your Brexity ‘don’t want to be Manchester’ places.
So the flaw/risk with levelling up spending is that you build a brand new line within Manchester and you get less revenue than a single station like Haddenham and Thame Parkway or Princes Risborough in the South East. And obviously the costs are enormously higher as well.
Jesus. Those traffic numbers probably means that the weaker metrolink lines are generating fewer passengers per stop than the Windermere branch.
And certainly vastly less revenue.
Bear in mind a line with a single set every 12 minutes has a lower capacity than the buses on Wilmslow Road.
The East Manchester Line is an incredible piece of asset. The working class east side of Manchester and Ashton councils have never been interested in metropolitan regeneration – in fact Ashton recently refused a proposal off Edge Lane for being too tall and not in keeping with the suburban character of the area. The Eastlands Regeneration Framework is the weakest of the frameworks in GM. The 2002 Commonwealth Games must have one of the shittiest regeneration legacies. Look at what Birmingham has achieved with Perry Bar, and Birmingham is hardly a bastion of urbanism. Then you’ve got the derelict Eccleshall Street which last time I checked was still awaiting being decontaminated.
That line is capable of running at least 20tph of double sets, and that kind of frequency could unlock a hell of a lot of development.
London has done a ton of such conversion – so much new residential stuff around St Pancras and Kings Cross used to be goods yards; I think some of the Stratford conversions have been residential, likewise, and not just offices. Or is it something that other British cities have not done?
London has always been a little bit different from the rest of England, and the rest of England has always had a degree of resisting the London way of doing things. Being the centuries old trading hub London is exposed to continental European culture more than other parts of England. Posh city living has always been a thing in London which was never really the case in the industrial cities of the north, where urbanity was only ever associated with poverty squalor. Even during the height of post-war suburbanisation London never lost its urban identity, and inner London recovered fast since the 90s when urban living became cool again. On the other hand northern industrial cities embraced suburban living with considerable gusto. Things are only beginning to change and at least Manchester has what’s resembling a semi-decent spatial framework now, but even up to the mid-2010s new developments were still mainly suburban housing estates in outer areas. Even now high density inner city developments are associated with ‘those yuppies from London’ and are viewed with suspicion from the ‘traditional working class residents who always aspired to having a house and a car’.
Seems like how many American cities want to define themselves as Not Manhattan in one way or another.
In England, towns in the South East like Reading and Woking are urbanising their ex-industrial and ex-railway land more comprehensively than cities in the North.
The community board of Midtown Manhattan defines itself in opposition to skyscrapers; even there, the NIMBYs hate development.
They do have a point at times. There comes a point where the commercial needs to spawn another center. Midtown from Wall Street. La Defense. Canary Wharf. Chicago instead of the Northeast. 75 years ago the epicenter of electronics was in New Jersey. Automobiles in Detroit.
I made an exception for London for that reason. And since the Blair government there has a general “brownfield first” element in British planning cultures. Which has really started to change things in Manchester and Leeds in particular. In part because the Conservative governments have been pushing develop to Labour safe seats.
Problems is a lot of these sites are not easy to redevelop, but local authorities pile on obligations on top those costs via the 1947’s Act capacity to micromanage developments (i.e. random architectural editing, affordable housing requirements* etc etc).
The excuses are frankly pathetic considering the redevelopment much poorer Eastern European cities have managed in the last few decades. But Outer Britain is very pathetic.
*Affordable housing is the most poisonous NIMBY bullshit of the lot.
Has anyone ever used the Airport Link to Manchester Airport? Its shit. That’s why it has low ridership. My mother and sister live in Bolton and its almost impossible to get a train from Bolton to the airport without changing at Piccadilly. Okay you say. But the piece of shit train from Bolton to Picc last time I used it was one of the converted bus bodies with doors at each end. So getting luggage onto a two car train packed with commuters is a fucking joke. I ended up going to the stop after Bolton because I could not get off the dam train in time before the doors closed……. that’s why people don’t use that service because its shit.
The Airport line of the tram was never about Manchester-Airport flows (which the railway more than covers – if anything the Airport sees more trains than necessary due to the people demanding direct services from all sorts of far-flung places that don’t warrant it), but about the suburbs in-between to the employment hubs at the Airport and City Centre – a problem with ridership would be a problem with those suburbs.
However, it doesn’t help that the loop isn’t finished, which would save the need to go the long way around via Wythenshawe Town Centre between Roundthorn and the Airport – even with rush-hour traffic (which doesn’t tend to apply to the airport working hours, hence the early-morning service on the tram) it’s going to be quicker to drive to the airport from Chorlton or Baguley because the tram takes a very indirect route for cross-Wythenshawe journeys.
There’s been a lot of improvements to the rail service between Bolton and the Airport. The line is now electrified (though there’s still diesels running between Bolton and Manchester due to Blackburn, Barrow and Southport not being electrified – but new modern ones, not Pacers, which were removed from the rail network entirely). I don’t think, even back then, you would have had to change at Piccadilly – as even then there were regular Bolton-Piccadilly trains that continued to the Airport, rather than Hazel Grove. However, they’ve now made it that all but a few peak trains between Bolton and Piccadilly continue to the Airport, so your journey would be a lot better (the terribleness of post-COVID Northern notwithstanding) these days.
Those random Manchester Airport services are among the many many dum things about Northern railway services. Complexity addiction leading to constant timetable cascades. They don’t make financial or equity sense let alone operational sense but they make political sense since Cheshire posh, frequent-flyers and the Welsh are considered higher forms of being than ordinary Northern commuters. “Privatised rail” my foot, I’ve lived on actual privatised railways with airport connections (Keisei’s Hokusou line). It was better than most London commuter lines despite some horrific infra problems.
An even better example than Florence, Québec City, which has one of the largest pedestrian-prioritised zones in North America, while having one of the largest automotive motive shares (80%) out of any city of it’s size.
fits with the Quebec region’s inexplicably conservative politics
In Providence, I was talking about the neighborhoods on what is now the R bus route,
A very very quick surf around on Google Streetview, the neighborhoods developed when the trolley car arrived. It had to be walkable because people didn’t own cars.
everyone in Italy does their shopping at suburban shopping centers offering far lower prices.
Supermarkets have a much wider selection. More categories and more choices within a category.
The refrigerator genie escaped the bottle soon after the automobile genie. You can go to a supermarket, do a week’s worth of shopping, including things like toilet paper and laundry detergent, haul it home in the car and have it taken care of in an hour or two.
It is true that some in the Anglosphere have an overly romantic view that only picture perfect medieval streetscapes support non car-dependent travel habits, if this is the point you are getting at.
All you need is three ingredients – streets, active frontages, density. Look at places like Berlin and Cologne, ugly cities by European standards but they just work. Outer Barcelona too (in terms of lack of post card prettiness).
Yes there are supermarkets but they are in urban settings, then plenty of traditional bakeries, greengrocers and butchers too, all of which serve locals, many of whom would come from upstairs or just around the corner. At least compared to your average British cities and towns, I find there’s a much lower prevalence of big-box retail (shed in car parks) in continental Europe.
It is also true that much of Europe don’t really do the kind of active and visible traffic calming measures that Anglosphere urbanists tend to advocate. Even then, there’s only so much traffic that Europe-sized roads can handle and the dominance of dense residential housing means for a lot of people the natural tendency is to walk to the shops.
It comes down to attitude to food. A good chunk of continental Europeans will shop little and often and buy individual items from the best shops on the high street (the French would famously buy bread, croissants and cake from three separate bakeries). Doing a big weekly shop and throwing any shit from the freezer into your trolley is just unsophisticated.
1. Cologne is not at all ugly :(.
2. Most Parisians, like most other people, do their shopping at supermarkets; the bakeries are fast food sandwiches, like the New York delis except with worse selection, whereas for normal groceries people go to Carrefour and Casino/Monoprix. I haven’t surveyed French professors or anything of that sort, but for what it’s worth, a Swiss professor who almost hired me for a postdoc at Basel mentioned to me during interview that he sometimes would go across the border to Germany for its cheaper groceries.
3. Carrefour and Casino/Monoprix, like the German supermarket chains (and I think also the British ones?), operate in city centers at pedestrian scale, and not just at hypermarket scale. There needs to be a mass of pedestrians and public transport riders for them to do so, but they evidently do do that; I don’t even remember seeing any parking at the Casino and Monoprix at Nation, whereas here, Aldi and Lidl do have parking garages even at their urban-scale stores. American supermarkets are kind of weird in that they don’t do that, except for Target – Walmart and Costco don’t adapt to the urban market, and overall those inner neighborhoods sometimes end up as supermarket deserts, like the East Side of Providence.
Sure, but the vast majority don’t use cars for shopping and an awful lot do it on the way home from work, either by walking or by transit. Those supermarchés are of same size as any other country with occasional bigger ones, such as the Champion in the Italie complex (shopping mall at base of those 3 hi-rise apartments in 13th) and which has direct access from the Metro. There will be similar larger ones in Montparnasse and some of the other big transit nodes. These bigger ones actually have underground parking so they are halfway towards a hypermarché. Hypermarchés are not allowed in Paris (ie. inner Paris) which is part of the reason why Paris retains its profusion of smaller shops and street markets (that still thrive). There is one hypermarché that sneaks into Paris, the humungous Carrefour in the SE corner of the bois de Boulogne (! possibly because this corner was devastated by building the Peripherique? possibly has its own entrance from the Peripherique?).
So if you live in Paris you have a huge selection from regular street (open) markets, permanent (covered) markets, small grocers on every block, supermarchés, hypermarchés.
Re your comment on the Swiss, that applies to anywhere close to the Swiss border. It is well known that a lot of the people who work at CERN (half of which is in France) actually choose to live in France. For the same reason: Switzerland is expensive for everything.
Yeah, that’s my point about car-free retail – it is very strong in transit cities, but doesn’t look anything like what tourists associate with those same cities; therefore, focusing on farmers’ markets and bakeries leads urban leaders to pass the wrong policies for modal shift or economic development.
P.S. do I look to you like the kind of person who ever set foot in or near the Bois de Boulogne :D? I lived right near the Bois de Vincennes. Fuck the 16th.
Hah, me-too. I never knew of that giant Carrefour and don’t know how old it is (but feasibly was built at the same time as the Peripherique which could explain why it has such a privileged position?); only found it when G-mapping supermarkets in Paris. In fact I have never been to a hypermarché but some day will make a special visit to that one because it is accessible on foot (G map even provides the route from the Porte d’Auteil metro). In fact the Carrefour is not marked on my Michelin (paper) map but Parking is, so looks like the whole thing is under the park?
I doubt its majority customers are either from the 16th or plebian-Paris, but Franciliens frantically using the Peripherique.
Admit it, you secretly would like to live on Avenue Foch, but know that the closest you’ll ever get is as a feral in a one-man tent/bedroll on those strip parks–for a few hours before the flics remove you:-) Me-too:-(
I think the causative factor is “walkability” which happens to correlate (but not always) with transit, and of course also with high-density. Despite what I said about some of those bigger supermarchés having their own Metro entrances, most access them via walking not the Metro. This is why Anglosphere planners can’t integrate these notions into planning: the concept of not doing massive weekly shops, car obligatoire, is beyond imagination.
That Carrefour at Auteuil might have something to do with Roland Garros and Parc des Princes (Home stadium of PSG), but I’m not sure.
You can have both. It doesn’t matter where I buy my industrially produced stuff. It’s all the same. I can go into the supermarket every week or ten days to restock the pantry and freezer and go to the baker and the deli every few days. The picturesque farmer’s market isn’t going to have dish detergent or paper towels.
adirondacker:
? Didn’t I say: if you live in Paris you have a huge selection from regular street (open) markets, permanent (covered) markets, small grocers on every block, supermarchés, hypermarchés.
In other words, Parisians and French in general appear to have a wider choice of shopping options than anyone else because Americans don’t have hypermarchés, nor much in the way of street markets or covered markets.
Paris has 60 street markets, ie. temporary markets that rotate around the city on specified streets on specified days; plus about 20 covered markets (permanent, about one in each arrondissement).
They’re not called farmer’s markets (more likely to be that in the provinces). What would satisfy adirondacker might be certain streets (not to be confused with the temporary street markets). Famous ones like rue Mouffetarde (5th), rue Rambuteau (border 3/4th), rue Clerc (7th), rue Daguerre (14th) and others. These are semi-pedestrianised with the whole selection of shops, many with stalls on the street from fruit & veg, meat, seafood, to cheese, flowers, to cooked products plus general supplies where you can buy your detergent or paper towels. A stroll down those streets will get you anything you need.
It’s doubtless true that most people don’t do all their shopping at such markets, but most Parisians will use them some of the time. A shopping trip there is a festive event where you might also have a meal or a cafe etc, and you can pick up recipes and cooking tips from the vendors or other shoppers. Some might buy ingredients and buy the cheese and desert too, for a special Sunday meal. The street markets are not a thing for tourists as you will find all of them, including in outer-arrondissements (and in the banlieus) always thronging with people.
I don’t need to be satisfied about anything. I know where the bakers, butchers and fishmongers are up here in the foothills of the Adirondacks. I don’t need to go to a farmer’s market. I just go to the farm. The same as I did back in New Jersey. though those are extraordinarily large gardens compared to what most people consider farms.
North America is fairly lousy with hypermarche.
https://www.walmart.com/
I shop in three different ones depending on what other travels I’m on. The supermarket section sucks but if all I want is a cans of cat food and and a box of pasta it will do. They are the same where ever I buy them.
There are other ones. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypermarket#United_States
adirondacker: “I just go to the farm.”
You seemed to have missed the meemo that talks about urbanism, walkability and car-free retail. By comparison you seem to be doing a lot more–like a quantum or two–than a Parisian’s (or even a NooYorker’s) carbon miles, probably in some giant pick-up, you know for all that fresh prodooce. How many different farms do you have to visit to do a proper shop? How long does it take? I might be wrong and you are using your cargo-bike.
You know, it was probably the Middle Ages when centralised markets made it efficient for distributing fresh products to non-country folk.
From that Wiki article you cited:
I suppose I am showing my age but the ’90s seems late in the day when the French (of all people) created and named them in the 60s.
Also, as of 2011 at least, there were no WalMarts in NYC five boroughs. But there are three within, what, an hour’s drive of adirondacker? Parisians are truly envious.
The farm I had in mind was a short bus ride away from my neighborhood that was and is as densely populated as Brooklyn.
A few of the discount department stores Sam Walton went to go look at, back in the 1960s, had a supermarket attached. The two we frequented did. New York City doesn’t have any Walmarts because the movers and shakers think Walmart is for the great unwashed in flyover country and won’t allow them.
In big cities the supermarkets are definitely smaller in Britain. Tesco has a whole brand for it. Tesco Metro.
“Most Parisians, like most other people, do their shopping at supermarkets; the bakeries are fast food sandwiches, like the New York delis except with worse selection, whereas for normal groceries people go to Carrefour and Casino/Monoprix.”
I don’t doubt this is true (when I was a Parisian I would do most of my grocery shopping at supermarkets) but I have to imagine that the street markets/marchés couverts + smaller stores like boulangeries or butchers represent a non-negligible proportion of people’s food shopping. In any case they always seem to have a pretty large amount of people whenever they’re open and I imagine there’s a non-tourist economic rationale for their existence since they’re absolutely everywhere in the city.
https://www.insee.fr/fr/statistiques/1283665#consulter
It seems that the average Parisian spends 63.1% of their grocery budget at supermarkets, so it’s a clear majority but the rest isn’t negligible.
Baguettes have to be consumed on the same day they’re bought so people who like them end up going often to the boulangerie. And while they’re there, they often buy something extra, maybe croissants for breakfast or a pie for desert.
Yeah. There is nothing comparable to the Parisian boulangerie on this side of the Atlantic…at least outside of minority ethnic communities.
German bakeries by contrast seemed to operate on more of a franchise model–quality often comparable or better than in France but more amenable to super-marketisation. The bäckerei I shopped at in Tuebingen was located in the supermarket foyer (much like Starbucks in American grocery stores).
> American supermarkets are kind of weird in that they don’t [operate in city centers at pedestrian scale, and not just at hypermarket scale], except for Target – Walmart and Costco don’t adapt to the urban market, and overall those inner neighborhoods sometimes end up as supermarket deserts, like the East Side of Providence.
“except for Target” is doing an awful lot of work in that sentence–there’s 14 Target locations in Manhattan alone, including at 34th St and at 42nd St. Some other national brands do figure it out–Whole Foods, Trader Joe’s. American grocery chains just tend to be fairly regional; you don’t see Food Lion in Ohio, or Safeway east of the Rockies, or Wegman’s outside the US-South-and-Upstate-NY axis… If anything, it’s more that the multi-state players don’t compete in a niche that’s already well-served by more local brands–the Fine Fares, Associateds, Gristedeses, Fairways, Morton Williamses, etc.
Anyway, this all just reinforces your ultimate point: you don’t have a walkable city if you don’t have walkable supermarkets–NYC would not be walkable without places to Just Do Your Shopping–but walkability is like drowning: it doesn’t look at all like what we imagine it to look like.
The biggest supermarket chains operate under different names in different areas. You wouldn’t know Albertsons in Texas and Cub food in Minnesota are exactly the same company if you don’t happen to know the ownership. While it isn’t a secret, it isn’t something that anyone talks about or that matters.
And to all intents and purposes ALDI and Trader Joes are effectively owned by the same holding company…..
Aldi, in the U.S., is Aldi Sud and Trader Joe’s is Aldi Nord. Two different companies.
It helps that nearly every place that American and Canadian tourists are going to go to in Europe are going to be very pedestrian friendly because of having a lot of tourists, being big cities with very good transit by American standards, or being university cities and students without cars need a way to get around. The same is true for the Asian developed democracies people take vacation too. Most of these places are going to have amazing transit by North American standards. Compare Wichita or Omaha with Lyon or some other small French city when it comes to transit. Every French city of the same size will beat Wichita and Omaha hands down when it comes to transit. They might even beat some of the better transit cities in North America like Boston or Philadelphia.
Sure, but then the top city in the world in the number of foreign visitors is Bangkok, on pre-corona numbers, narrowly ahead of London and Paris – and Bangkok is not at all pedestrian-friendly or transit-oriented.
And yeah, Lyon has a higher modal split than any American metro area except New York. But it’s not because of whatever American tourists get to see (for one, Lyon doesn’t even have that much tourism – it’s not Nice). It’s because of the combo of the Metro and Part-Dieu, planned in tandem in the 1970s.
As I said in the very first* post this is not due to tourists but the opposite: it is the way the cities were built for residents that makes them good for tourists. Not the other way around. This is important so that ‘urban planners’ in the Anglosphere–who are often political flunkies–don’t get the entirely wrong idea of designing a city “for tourists” which is definitely not what happened in Paris, Amsterdam, Barcelona, Brussels, or Venice (where the tourists actually do outnumber the residents).
(* it was the first post last night but now has been demoted, something messing with the clock? It has now reverted to putting my posts into moderation, so something has changed …)
@Alon: number of tourists. I’ve come to distrust published data on tourist numbers. On some counts NYC gets more than Paris which would hardly be a surprise. But I seriously doubt Bangkok does, and I can’t see it getting more than HK pre-corona, or even Singapore (especially if counting the huge number of transit air pax that spend hours in the giant transit shopping mall). I suppose I should shutup about Bangkok since it is decades since I have been there, but it seems not to have changed all that much (other than getting even bigger), despite a Metro it is still a traffic-ridden, dusty, crowded place that is somewhat hellish if you don’t like extreme hot & sweaty and extremely bad air. That’s not to say it doesn’t have some interest like most (Buddhist) places of worship for a city; when I first visited it had the biggest outdoor market in the world (the Weekend market) but it has since been moved out of the centre of the city … hah, just like Les Halles was moved to Rungis which now claims to be the world’s biggest food market!
“On some counts NYC gets more than Paris which would hardly be a surprise. But I seriously doubt Bangkok does, and I can’t see it getting more than HK pre-corona”
I can absolutely see Bangkok being the most visited city in the world.
It has a massive catchment area – Vietnam, Indonesia, the Philippines, China, and India are all a short-haul flight away – not to mention an international reputation. It’s also convenient and inexpensive to get to, with Bangkok being a regional low-cost carrier hub, and well served by European holiday and flag airlines.
Granted, Hong Kong also has/had those factors going for it, but Bangkok has the additional advantages of affordability (food, accommodation, and attractions are all considerably pricier in Hong Kong) and a more liberal visa policy (e.g., Chinese tourists get a visa on arrival into Thailand, while they need to apply for a Hong Kong Entry Permit; Vietnamese tourists can enter Thailand visa free, but need one for Hong Kong), making it the more popular choice for quick getaways among the region’s lower middle class.
The flight out to Bangkok from Europe isn’t super cheap but once you are there the cost of living is ridiculously low. I spent a heck of a lot less in Thailand/Vietnam/Cambodia when travelling as a student than anywhere else.
You would probably spend more in a day in Paris than a week in SE Asia.
No one has convinced me that Bangkok is #1 in visitor numbers, either in Asia nor the world.
Popularity has no correlation with how cheap a place is, besides which:
is, in my experience, quite untrue. Even if you stay in a 1 star hotel (or are allowed to stay in such a hotel in some of those places). Accommodation is always the highest cost and depressingly this has normalised around the world without expecting high hotel standards. Even when I stayed in Bangkok as a backpacker a lifetime ago it wouldn’t have met that exaggeration. In the developing world often an equivalent (2-3star) hotel is more expensive than in the rich world. And if you are going to compare a dosshouse or bunk-bed hostel to Paris then you must compare the same thing (and yes, they exist; you can even camp with a tent in Paris at the Camping du Bois du Boulogne, not glamping).
@michaelj
I’m from East/Southeast Asia, so you’ll have to take my word for it.
Besides that, how cheap a place is may not be significant if one is already set on the destination, but it absolutely matters to (the considerable number of) travellers who cross-shop and bargain hunt for places/flights/hotels.
@John D.
I don’t have to, and I don’t. I have cursorily addressed this in another comment a few minutes ago.
It’s not a question of the integrity of your word. People can have all kinds of misapprehensions/delusions about where they live and how it compares to elsewhere. (In fact, one of my rules of travel is: don’t ever ask a local; either often they don’t really know, or they are too embarrassed to say they don’t know so make up something. This rule is kinda true everywhere but even more so in less-developed world in my experience–probably because they are reluctant to “offend” the foreigner.)
Yeah, but that is a quite small minority of tourists or travellers today. Sad but true. Almost by definition it is not a big part of the market –because the market and those promoting it aren’t much interested in that sector. And actually, even that sector aren’t like the early backpackers, because … you can’t. I’m reading Erika Fatland’s “Sovietistan” in preparation for an overland trip, Australia to Europe (since the trans-Sib is ruled out! I have done it west-to-east and wanted to do the reverse trip, damn Putin, now I have to do it the hard way) and she warns that Kazakhstan is first-world expensive for travellers (except air travel which is absurdly cheap in the Stans; but I’m going to use the trains!).
……………..
Very quick look:
I chose Holiday Inn because they are everywhere and very roughly similar, and are not hi-end. In fact this one is near Gare de l’Est; you could pay $252 at the one near Opera-Palais Garnier. I don’t know if there are any in the suburbs which presumably would be a bit cheaper still.
For the record, I never stay in Holiday Inns or their ilk but this simply gives a fair survey of like-for-like. I think the proportionality would apply across the board, with perhaps the exception of low-grade guesthouses (if they still exist; even youth hostels are like regular hotels these days). Also Paris is the AirBnB capital of the world so I am sure one could find one at a fraction of this hotel price (though they too are more like hotel prices these days).
Anyway this ain’t anywhere near 700% more expensive, it’s 40% more. That’s without trying for a cheaper option in Paris; there are 116,000 hotel rooms of which 3,760 are 1-star (just sayin’) and that’s without venturing into the suburbs.
Cheapest room in Bangkok Holiday Inn: $114
Cheapest room in Paris Holiday Inn: $160
If you look on Booking.com for private rooms in a hotel with en-suite and a rating of 8 and above for a week from the 30th september you can get something in Paris for £885 vs £251 in Bangkok. This is sorted by price but close to the centre.
And hostels etc are a lot lot cheaper in Bangkok.
That is exactly the kind batshit crazy comparison I was warning about.
And you did it.
Then you presented it as if it proved your case!
I rest my case …
“Yeah, but that is a quite small minority of tourists or travellers today. Sad but true. Almost by definition it is not a big part of the market –because the market and those promoting it aren’t much interested in that sector.”
That’s a very interesting take on the travel market when virtually every airline and booking engine will advertise multiple cities in order of price, and every single person I’m familiar with adopts the destination-agnostic approach between some and most of the time.
“People can have all kinds of misapprehensions/delusions about where they live and how it compares to elsewhere.”
Good thing I’m not making a comparison to elsewhere, but an observation of how people where I live choose their holidays. And in any case…
“I’ve come to distrust published data on tourist numbers.”
If you won’t take statistics, explanations, and anecdotes, then it’s down to one gut feeling against another.
@John D.
Actually, I did say I don’t trust any of the stats on this that I read. Thus, I also said I wasn’t entirely sure I accepted the common, and long-standing (like maybe 5 decades) claims that Paris is the most visited city in the world. I have always had a suspicion that NYC may be ahead. (And of course before long maybe Beijing … maybe not any more.) So it is you making the confident claim of Bangkok being number one and on the basis of shonky data and claims. I showed that the top result from Google showed Paris with only 15 million; did you seriously believe that? Then at the same time as saying Bangkok was #1 it gave HK as 30+m (FWIW which also sounds right) so WTF? It was exactly as I said: crap.
FWIW here is the pre-corona airport info (incomplete because London has multiple airports etc):
Incidentally this data is more likely to be correct because airport data is accurately recorded and widely accessible (so yes, I accept this Wiki data on this single narrow statistic):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_busiest_airports_by_international_passenger_traffic
2019
1. Dubai 86,328,896
2. London 76,043,973
3. Amsterdam 71,679,691
4. Hong Kong 71,287,552
5. Seoul 70,578,050
6. Paris 69,823,084
7. Singapore 67,601,000
8. Frankfurt 63,067,739
9. Bangkok 52,933,565
10. Taipei 48,360,290
HK (and Seoul) gets 20m more air arrivals than Bangkok, and Singapore 15m more. Admittedly HK and Singapore are very big transit hubs so one would have to look at that. Bangkok is also a transit hub but not as big as these others.
London and Paris have multiple airports which seriously boost their numbers; London-Gatwick has 40+m and Paris-Orly has 29m–so the Paris air arrivals climbs to almost 100m!
On this list it is HK and Paris (and to lesser extent London, Amsterdam) that get very significant visitors via overland, mostly rail. Just one of Paris’ 5 mainline rail stations, Gare du Nord gets 10m+ from a single line (Eurostar) and a total of about 300m from all (of which I don’t know how many are long-distant rail). HK gets huge numbers of rail visitors from mainland China (and it is a part of the biggest urban conglomeration on the planet, the 100m+ of the Pearl River Delta, with 3 additional big international airports that also feed the HK travel market).
Paris (not including the suburbs) has 116,000 hotel rooms while Bangkok has 86,687. As I said earlier Paris is AirBnB capital of the world (>50,000 IIRC). I’d say that visitor accommodation would be a fair proxy for visitor numbers, and in total I’d reckon Ile de France has >2x Bangkok.
So, as I have said repeatedly, I still don’t know the real data but more than before I am more confident that Bangkok is not number one.
I really have no idea what points michaelj is making, here or in the other sub-strand. All that matters is that Bangkok IS a tourist city, and Barcelona IS a dense city – which were the points made by the original posters. Superlatives or not matters not a jot.
@Wifeng Jiang
Because I was disputing both your points? Err, no. It was those two posters who made definitive claims, and weird claims about Barcelona based on 1x1km squares (of shonky looking stats).
But you’re right, I would have been better advised not to respond to almost pointless claims (I still don’t know what the Barcelona claims are supposed to show; on this blog I regularly use Barcelona as an example of high urban density.). I’m always getting sucked in …
@michaelj, a lot of the big chains, such as Starbucks or KFC, are much posher in Asia than Europe/the US. I suspect that also applies to Holiday Inn, so you aren’t really comparing like-with-like.
@michaelj
I did look into air passenger origin-and-destination numbers (i.e., excluding transfer traffic) for 2019. For Bangkok’s two-airport system (BKK and DMK), it was 53.8 million; for Hong Kong (HKG), it was 50.6 million.
Though the numbers favour Bangkok, it’s hard to draw conclusions when local (indigenous) and foreign (visitor) traffic aren’t distinguishable, so I decided against using them in my initial reply.
Yeah, the international numbers are obscured by transfer volumes. For the same reason, Atlanta is not America’s top domestic tourism city.
I have been told by an informed source that the East German partial attempt at restoring the Nikolaivertel was so successful in attracting customers in the 80’s that the police put a limit on how many persons were allowed in the mixed-use area. When I visited it in 2005, my contacts and I were among very few people there for lunch. In the Wikipedia article it states that the population of that area was declining even before the war. Perhaps there are other examples of popular walk-neighborhoods that have experienced changes in popularity?
https://berlin-nikolaiviertel.com/?lang=en
I obviously wouldn’t know what it was like in the 1980s. Nowadays it just looks like a section of Mitte; I think of it as somewhat of a traffic sewer but it could just be that my route there goes via Stralauer Straße, so instead I perceive my neighborhood center as Kottbusser Tor or maybe Alexanderplatz.
Why does Madrid Metro have low ridership per kilometer, despite low construction costs and high density?
I don’t know the reasons, but the lower your construction costs the lower ridership you need to be worth building. I would hope that Madrid used their low construction costs to build not just the most important busy metro lines, but also less busy that they knew wouldn’t get a lot of riders – this additional coverage makes the whole strong for everyone. Even if you never use the less used metro line, that it is there if you need it gives you more confidence to depend on the metro for everything.
I’m reasonably sure that Madrid didn’t do that though. It is what your city should do if it figures out how to build cheap.
Can I propose a paradox about density? Something of the style: “The perceived sustainability of an environment is inversely related to the actual sustainability”.
For example, Barcelona is the densest urban area in Europe [1], it has good metro, buses are slow but popular, one of the two commuter rail companies has a good reputation for reliability, and walking has a modal share of over 50% [2]. The city is not full of hipsters, and there isn’t such a different attitude towards food. It’s just more convenient to do the shopping in one of the 4 to 6 supermarkets next to home than taking a car.
But at the same time, the same density of people makes Barcelona have a density of 6000 cars per km2 [3], the amount of green space per inhabitant is very low (and concentrated in hilly areas away from where people is), and the EU has fined Spain for consistently exceeding air pollution levels in Barcelona and Madrid [4].
So people who need less cars per person are more surrounded by cars when being a pedestrian. People who require less asphalt per person, have less green space around them.
I almost agree 100% on “All you need is three ingredients – streets, active frontages, density”. That enables walkability and transit. But after that you also need people to vote for politicians who actually push for it. And on one side, you have people who still push for car-prioritization. And on the other side, you have NIMBY’s who would oppose necessary transit or TOD because of the inertia of resisting the past crimes made in the name of car infrastructure and “brutalist urbanization” (surely there’s a technical name for that?).
PD: The whole thread about grocery shopping looks preposterous from Spain. If you take a car to go grocery shopping or bring small kids to school, you don’t live in a city, period. I’ve walked for my groceries when I’ve lived outside of Spain too.
[1]: https://twitter.com/undertheraedar/status/1622625736992468992?lang=en 16 of the top 20 most dense km2 in Europe are in Barcelona
[2]: https://omc.cat/en/w/surveys-emef Working day mobility survey
[3]: https://interactius.ara.cat/en/rethinking-barcelona
[4]: https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/top-eu-court-rules-against-spain-air-pollution-madrid-barcelona-2022-12-22/ “Top EU Court rules against Spain for air pollution in Madrid and Barcelona”
Hmmm.
1. What do the cars run on in Spain? In France there’s a lot of diesel pollution, which gets better as cars transition away from diesel but the process is too slow and beset by rock-throwing.
2. If I’m understanding link #2 right, the province has 27% transit, 50% car modal split for work trips? That’s… not the best. But I guess this is still 2022, so with some corona adverse modal shift that’s already going away. And also, the province includes rural areas way outside the legal AMB or the RMB, so RMB modal split should be healthier?
Almost half of the cars are diesel [1], but I used to think that’s because the promotion of diesel cars by EU for so many years, so I guess the situation is similar in the rest of Europe?
On link #2, even if the page in English or Spanish, the PDF’s are in Catalan. So to guide you, taking the first “Main results summary” PDF:
https://omc.cat/documents/662112/1182871/EMEF+2022_Fullet%C3%B3.pdf/cfa7a5e9-9d7a-8311-ced4-f9f30e12cccd?t=1688727190327
As you have noticed in page 9, for going to work the modal share of car (plus motorbike) is 50%, for personal stuff it’s 27%. I think this rather points to the fact that people actually live in areas where all the daily needed stuff is reachable on foot, but for job hunting you don’t want to limit yourself to what’s close to home, you want to use the power of being in a city (or close to it).
I haven’t found any page there breaking up the work mobility by areas, but in page 7 you have one breaking up the total mobility by areas. Barcelona is the official city proper, which is actually a more or less random collection of central districts of the urban area (plus a bunch of deserted mountain space). “1a Corona” is the urban continuum, with wide reach of metro. AMB is the following metropolitan ring, here comprising also cities that are separated among them by geographical accidents, but which are dense themselves (except for a few sprawling posh neighborhoods). RMB is half the province, you could commute from there to Barcelona by train. The whole SIMMB already includes small towns (and a few bigger ones!) where technically you may live without a car, as far as you don’t want to do anything interesting in your life, and where you can commute to Barcelona by train, if you don’t mind wasting 4 hours of your life commuting to-and-fro everyday (compared with 2 hours by car).
Correction, I found the statistic of modal share and type of trip for proper Barcelona city, in here:
https://bcnroc.ajuntament.barcelona.cat/jspui/bitstream/11703/128157/1/Pla%20de%20Mobilitat%20Urbana_bcn_2024.pdf (page 70)
Inside the city, in work-related trips the car/motorbike still accounts for 34% of modal share, which to me it feels like a lot for an area extensively covered by public transport.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/774178/registrations-from-cars-in-spain-by-kind-from-fuel/ Car registration in Spain by kind of car
I think this is like many situations of equilibrium, for example in chemical reactions or in economics. Greater human density causes more traffic which decreases car usage per capita, but not enough that traffic returns to its original levels.
That is a ridiculous circus trick article. It only compares a 1 km2 block in each city, and even there I don’t believe it: 48k/km2 is nothing I have seen on reliable calculations using conventional methods. Barcelona gets it ‘high density’ label because the Eixample is 36,000/km2 but it is only 7.48 km2 and should not be compared to, say, Paris’ 25,000/km2 over its 87km2, or even Kowloon’s 49,000/km2 on its 47km2 area. Instead the Eixample might be best compared to Paris’ 11th arrondissement of 41,000/km2 on its 3.7km2. Or if you really wanted an inappropriate calculation try NYC’s Stuyvesant Town-Peter Cooper Village: 25,000 residents, on 32 hectare (0.32km2) for ≈78,000/km2, the KWC or Dharavi slum of the developed world!
So please don’t join the recidivists on this blog who like to cite ridiculous and fictitious urban densities.
You didn’t read the article and your data about Barcelona is wrong.
The article divided the whole of Europe in squares of 1km2, it didn’t look for the specific most dense square in each city. 16 of the 20 most populated squares in the whole of Europe corresponded to Barcelona’s 1a Corona. It’s not gerrymandering.
Also, the data of that article is consistent with the census data, and I’m not sure what better data you can have.
Take the most populated square, for example. That’s not Eixample, that’s mostly the neighbourhoods of Collblanc (55k/km2) [1] and Torrassa (67k/km2), with a pinch of Sants-Badal (58k/km2) [2] and an area of train tracks that lowers the statistic a bit.
The second most populated is in Paris.
And the third most populated is again in Barcelona outside of Eixample, divided between Santa Coloma and Badalona, with parts of Santa Rosa (63k/km2) [3], Sant Joan de Llefià (57k/km2) [4], La Pau (49k/km2), La Salut (40k/km2), Sant Antoni de Llefià (42,3k/km2), etc…
The fourth and fifth are Eixample, but the rest are all around Sants, Les Corts, Santa Coloma, Badalona, L’Hospitalet, Guinardó, Gràcia, Clot, etc…
Actually the central parts of Eixample and the central premodern neighborhood are less dense residentially because they have a lot space used for business and tourism.
[1] https://www.l-h.cat/utils/obreFitxer.aspx?sKKwM7kw9gH2dqazCdqazCojMRrqazCscZmjv99EDFlf4FwUiFtEXCoPZs4LJJ6B7a1tVMCYj : Page 4, demography of L’Hospitalet by neighborhood
[2] https://ajuntament.barcelona.cat/estadistica/catala/Anuaris/Anuaris/anuari17/cap01/C0101050.htm demography of Barcelona by neighborhood
[3] https://www.gramenet.cat/fileadmin/Files/Ajuntament/anuari_estadistic/Any_2021.pdf Page 22, demography of Santa Coloma de Gramenet by neighborhood
[4] http://badalona.cat/portalWeb/getfile;jsessionid=RLh2NnNSgDW7fDl74m6FG7rTpHz3SLbWQprswJLCG7NXGlz2YLs6!-852789647?dID=15936&rendition=web population density of Badalona by neighborhood
Sorry, I’m not at all interested in any of that. I don’t think data on a 1x1km scale is suitable from an urbanist, or really any point of view. And I don’t know how they derived those figures (and am not interested to find out) because they don’t represent true densities; possibly removed streets or other non-residential surface. It’s meaningless.
It’s like that example of Stuy-Cooper housing with its super-high density. The density is true but meaningless in an urbanist view because it doesn’t include all the things that make a city, or even suburb, function. No retail, utilities (fire, police etc), schools, universities, medical/hospitals, clinics, libraries, government offices etc etc. No transport. But I can use it to convince myself that those densities on Euro-cities can’t be true, because Stuy-Cooper is mostly 16 floors (thus about 3x most Euroblocks) and without streets etc yet only a bit more dense than what is being claimed for those Euro zones? Nope.
“Sorry, I’m not at all interested in any of that.” Well, that shows what kind of person you are.
As for why Stuytown has 3x floor space but just a bit more density, there’s an easy answer: The smallest flat in Stuytown is 700 sq ft large. Meanwhile the smallest flat in an Euroblock is something like 200 sq ft, probably smaller.
Not to mention that while Stuytown buildings are tall, they’re also very widely spaced apart. It’s like, what, 30ish buildings over an area of 18 square city blocks? One could easily have far more built-up space.
But he’s exaggerating on a lot of the other stuff too–let’s see, “retail, utilities, schools, universities, medical/hospitals/clinics, libraries, government offices, transport”–well, looking just at Stuytown, i.e. the corner-cut square bounded by 14th st on the south, 1st ave on the west, 20th st on the north, and Ave C/the FDR highway on the east:
Retail: there is a Target across 14th st from Stuytown
Utilities: FDNY Engine Co. #5 is on 14th St just west of 1st Ave; there is a police station about 700m away from the oval
Schools: there are 3 schools in the blocks across 1st ave & 3 more within 3 blocks south of Stuytown.
Universities: surely we don’t expect a university in every 1-km-square block; but Stuytown is 1.5 km from the central part of NYU’s campus
Medical/hospitals/clinics: well, Stuytown is just across 1st Ave from Beth Israel Hospital, but even better, the grounds of Stuytown itself have Mount Sinai Doctors (clinic) and two (!) different dentists
Libraries: Do we count the study center located within Stuytown? Let’s suppose not, then your nearest library is half a kilometer away from the center of the oval
Government offices: Okay, it’s true, city hall is not located within Stuytown
Transport: L train is available on 14th St
To which the obvious response is “but that’s not IN THE FOOTPRINT, so it doesn’t count,” which ignores that other similar towers-in-the-park developments throughout New York have things like firehouses and schools integrated into their footprints. In the hypothetical where we tile NYC with Stuytowns, maybe not every one of them needs the dance studio, bike shop, and pet store? And again, the ground area could easily be much more built up than it is.
But you know. Paris is perfect, everywhere that isn’t Paris is flawed for not being Paris, and anything improving upon Paris in any way is by definition impossible and also a figment of our collective imaginations.
@Tiercelet
You don’t get it. Your delineating of what is close to Stay-Cooper, but not within proves my point. The high density of those few blocks (and they aren’t really blocks as the original streets were erased) is meaningless other than showing the useless point that if you build pure residential and go up, you can achieve high … residential density. Not a point of contention.
But my question is simple: can you build a city like that? No, you cannot. Thus, for an urbanist, who aren’t concerned with individual buildings or even clusters of them, it is quite meaningless. It doesn’t hold a single lesson other than not to do it. And guess what? No one does it like that anymore, well except China who really should have learnt.
Incidentally, you have also shown what many planners now realise: the original streets should have been retained and a Euroblock approach could have achieved almost the same density but vastly better urbanism, ie. livability. As it happens, it is of a scale that is not all bad. But that is for the reasons you show: there’s enough real city with all it provides nearby. And yeah, it’s not a model for anything I want to live in, even if there are worse typologies.
@Tiercelet
It is fair enough that you can criticise/critique such views. However, sneering doesn’t qualify. In fact, you have made a few cursory stabs, such as:
Could it? Well, only in a theoretical engineering sense. Even Manhattan building regs wouldn’t allow it for the obvious reason that it would be a horror show. In fact, you may not realise it but you have inched back towards the Euroblock model! Except one can’t build that as hi-rise, for the same reasons. And that shows exactly why there are real limits to livable/sustainable densities. Stuy-Cooper can only be that density because it has displaced all those other essential city functions to elsewhere–and they have to be somewhere.
You also imply that one Manhattan model is to have such hi-density islands around the city, and of course surrounded by the city, ie. “tile NYC with Stuytowns”. True. But is it a desirable typology, or even a viable one? As I’ve written extensively before, surveying the different examples–from Paris, Barcelona, Manhattan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Tokyo–reveals that the upper desirable (and possibly long-term sustainable) density is about 20-25k/km2. (As discussed elsewhere, I have it a bit lower than Paris’ average because we all want a bit more living space; I was perfectly happy in my 18sqm studio for years in Paris but don’t pretend it was properly sustainable–such spaces are for transient use. And even chambres-de-bonnes are not allowed under modern French building regs.)
Stuy-Cooper gets so much attention because it has surprised many planners and urbanists in surviving and being successful over a long time. It is fairly exceptional in that regard. But it is not intrinsic to the typology but to the special environment it happens to be in, in fantastic location in an amazing city and filled with middle-class professionals who value those two things (and work nearby). Survive it may have, unlike endless very similar examples both in NYC and elsewhere (including Paris or at least Ile de France), but I would say it is not robust despite that survival. The typology is prone to problems. It was a close run thing when that hedge fund bought it up and tried to transform it but were thwarted (it should be noted, by their own extreme economics). All the other examples are not, and in any given city cannot be, in such a privileged position which is why most of them have troubles, or in London and Ile de France they are being demolished and rebuilt more along Euroblock lines (maybe not London so much, another story, probably a horror story). A bit like the Barbican in the City of London. Paris “happens” to show a typology, an arrangement, that works spectacularly and has shown terrific sustainability (I mean socially, urbanistically as well as structurally) and for a lot of people of mixed status (2.2 million, 40% more than Manhattan, probably 3x-4x of the equivalent area of central London). I promote it because I “happen” to have lived it for years and familiar with it (though not fully aware of its specialness in these senses until I moved away; Joni was right!). Equally I am a bit confounded by so many planners etc who are constantly looking to “reinvent” or rehash (in the case of the hi-rise model) something “new” when such an excellent, proven model exists. It just works. And here’s the thing: all the crap being built in Anglosphere cities (and elsewhere) will never actually achieve anything like the same high density (never mind the urbanity)! So it’s not just a matter of my or anyone’s “taste” but simple quantitative results, without even considering the qualitative.
Final point on scale. I’d like to hear what anyone thinks looking at a scale of 1x1km achieves. What meaning is extractable–even assuming those densities are true (I don’t believe them but that’s not the main point and doesn’t change anything; btw, the differences amongst those top 20 aren’t meaningful either). I mean why not 0.1×0.1km? (closer to Kowloon Walled City). I mean maybe the Burj Khalifa has the highest density in the world if you express it using its footprint, or a supertall in NYC or the Shard in London (nah, all of these have lots of empty apartments). I can’t learn a single thing from any of this. Perhaps the size of a district is appropriate which would include Eixample and Paris-11 and NYC-UES (all about the same and arguably the highest density in the world at this scale)? Those are 7.8km2, 3.7km2 and 5.2km2 respectively. But we’ve discussed the limitations of both those (and the attempts to remedy the former’s deficiencies). Thus, the unit to be considered needs to be a minimal “functional” entity. That appears to be minimum of about 25km2 up to about 100km2 (close to Paris; Manhattan is ≈55km2). That’s to achieve an urbane, sustainable, livable environment and anything approaching a 20 minute city. There may be cases where 5 to 10km2 makes some sense for particular arguments/lessons but 1x1km nope, never.
It’s less than a square kilometer. If you want to compare square kilometer clumps it would include parts of the neighborhood out side the gates.
@adirondacker
Right. You’re right. Which I pointed out. The thing is, as I said multiple times, I don’t believe a 0.3×0.3 or 1x1km zone is appropriate for these (or any?) purposes. I am in the middle of crafting another reply to Tiercelet to try to address this issue of scale which is key.
BTW, that stuff on shopping … on re-reading it this morning I see it is a bit more Lenny Bruce than the light jesting I was aiming for. I won’t be turning to standup anytime soon (and yes, we all know what happened to Bruce.)
Seems like I have to clarify a few things here:
First of all, my intention was not to win any contest at “my city is denser/better/worse/whatever”, it was to make the observation that, if you use density to lower the footprint per person, you’re putting that footprint under the nose of everybody. Someone with a myopic view says “Cities are not sustainable, because in them I see a lot of cars and few green spaces. I passed by a posh sprawling neighborhood and it looks greener, because I saw less cars moving around each street and I saw lawns/parks/nearby forests/golf courses.”
And my conclusion is that making the city more friendly requires, not only density, but also political will (and popular support for that will) against car-supporters and myopic NIMBY’s.
Second, I understand you don’t care about Barcelona (and it’s ok, it’s not the center of the world), I’m not sure why you insist so much on an argument that you refuse to understand and check?
Of course one 1kmx1km square by itself doesn’t mean anything, I completely agree with you! My point is that I was using Barcelona as an example of the paradox of before, because Barcelona has a lot of very dense space (more than you seem to be aware), and the article of the squares shows it better than the “city proper density statistic” because the city limits are drawn in a weird way. Maybe this map will be clearer:
The “most dense” urban area I’m referring to is the area between Cornellà and Badalona, which includes 2,5 million people, and it’s more or less the length of Manhattan but wider.
About the not believing the data… The amounts of people come from official census, it looks reliable. And the areas fit the maps drawn for each neighborhood, if you don’t want to waste time checking it, I’ll just tell you that they look correct too. I won’t go into the detail of which services/transit/etc is everywhere because I’d bore everybody pointlessly.
@Jordi
Nothing here changes my view.
But I have nothing against Barcelona or Spain in general. In fact, like most visitors I loved Barcelona though my preferred area to live would be Gracia an old town just north of the Eixample. Because it predates Cerda and the Eixample etc, it is lower and has a nearly perfect arrangement of small shady squares and plazas; indeed I’d say at that local level it is better than most of Paris. Otherwise I would choose the Gotic zone, despite the tourist hordes, for much the same reason. Not that the Eixample is bad, but it has well known defects which the Superblock scheme might considerably overcome–I hope so.
I don’t intend to criticise Barcelona but just use it as an example versus Paris. They’re not even the same thing, in that Paris is an entire city of about 100km2 while the Eixample is only 7.8km2. Still, it shows that more variety should have been built in by Cerda, like real squares and plazas rather than his hope that those chamfered corners of the blocks would somehow create them (of course he was not to know his plan would soon be overrun by choking traffic).
To jump to my response to Tiercelet, that is the reasoning behind why I don’t think the density of 36,000/km2 (Eixample) is good: seemingly it is only achieved by sacrificing other things important for good urbanism. Anyone who thinks this could be improved by simply going hi-rise, or at least higher, is wrong. Paris shows that, and only equals (slightly exceeds) that density in the 11th and it is exceptional in the arrondissements by ‘sacrificing’ parks, squares, hospitals (none), government buildings (almost none), cultural (no big ones) etc. The reason people (who laud the 11th) don’t really notice is because of the scale (only 3.7km2) and that all those things are all around it in the rest of Paris. But just like you couldn’t build a city only of Stuy-Cooper towns, you couldn’t build one of only the 11th arrondissement. And you couldn’t build one of only the Eixample either. Likewise you couldn’t build Paris like Gracia–if you did it would be Amsterdam but at least 4 times the size which of course wouldn’t work the way either Amsterdam does or Paris does today.
Scale matters! In all 3 dimensions.
Which brings me back to the 1x1km squares. I haven’t changed, for the same reasons. First, it is not informative in any way that is useful to me. Those maps kinda prove it. As it happens (and for whatever reasons) there are dozens in Spain but only one in France! Italy has, I presume, Rome and Naples showing. Heck, it is almost the anti-map of good urbanism. Second, I still don’t accept the data. The 49,000/km2 works out to 20m2 per person, and that is what Alon gives (more or less) for the living space (ie. inside apartments) for the average Parisian but one third of land is street without counting all the other non-residential stuff of which there is a lot in Paris. How can that possibly be the average for all the urban area? (Maybe it is the very scale that is distorting the outcome, such as counting all the residents of all buildings any part of which is touched by that magic 1x1km box even if most of it lies outside the box? A kind of pixel effect that needs to be corrected by the complicated algorithms to make our display screens avoid artefacts? Dunno, don’t care, not interested. )
Anyway, I have described in part (above) why I make my arguments on urbanism and what is good or bad density/typology and I couldn’t make any use of that 1x1km ‘data’. And I seriously hope it doesn’t become adopted by anyone else (planners, journalists etc) because it will just muddy the arguments even further. Believe it or not, these arguments are not prejudicial on whether a place is Barcelona, NYC or Paris. I’m trying to draw generalisable rules of urbanism. It may well be an extraordinary set of flukes that made Paris what it is … and near-perfect:-) Of course not perfect because that is impossible; I couldn’t have Gracia and Paris (in fact just like Barcelona can’t have Gracia and modern Barcelona; I hope that makes sense, re-read my 2nd para). I couldn’t have adirondackers walkable farm (if he says so, eyeroll) because ditto it wouldn’t/couldn’t be Paris (though you can in fact take a short RER ride to farms).
@michaelj
First off:
> It is fair enough that you can criticise/critique such views. However, sneering doesn’t qualify.
Yes, in retrospect I went too far with that, and I apologize. I just hope that you can appreciate the sincere frustration that comes from seeing you circle back to the same examples, while outright dismissing conflicting information–whether by refusing to engage with the claim that large parts of Barcelona are, today, denser than your proposed upper limit, or the stats about Bangkok as a tourist destination, etc. But it was not measured or fair of me.
—
Let me be clear: I’m not cheering for towers-in-the-park as a built form (I don’t much care for it either). I just think your argument about it is weak. In pointing out that almost all the services you mention are in fact either within the footprint or right across the street, I was trying to say that without changing anything at all today, you can add another 0.06 sq km to the 0.3 sq km of the residential part to include those services within the footprint. Then the objection is considerably weakened, while still having upwards of 60k/km^2 residents. So it doesn’t seem appropriate to reject the Spanish example out of hand.
And I do maintain that it would be perfectly possible to build more in the footprint–I mean, the trivially obvious answer is that you could just raise everything (including the topsoil) up one storey, build ramps to the park, and use the entire bottom level for all those services; nobody would do this because it’s too expensive, but more realistically you could add another storey to the buildings with street frontage and have more retail/services within the footprint without exceeding heights that are common in other developments (StuyTown’s are ~13 storeys (though PCV are taller), you get 20 or more in places like Morningside Heights Co-op, let alone NYCHA.) Not to mention extending some of those first-floor footprints back further into the parkland, to really take advantage of the land area recovered from the usual donation to automobile storage. Residential-towers-over-wide-retail works just fine at Zeckendorf Towers a couple blocks over.
This wasn’t done when Stuytown was built because people didn’t plan for it; and it’s not done today because the redevelopment would be too expensive to coordinate; but neither of those mean that StuyTown has surpassed some theoretical maximum for human livability.
I think this gets at the real point: the barrier is that organizing this kind of built project requires more central direction than is available under existing western systems of governance, with fragmented private land ownership and a NIMBY flashmob confronting anyone who tries to organize redevelopment of any size. China is alone in doing this not because everyone else knows better, but because China’s alone in having the wherewithal to undertake construction on this scale. Japan sometimes comes close; and where it succeeds, it’s because the rail conglomerates are such large landholders, empowered to undertake projects at large scale. Given the authority to do it, things would look different in the west–I assure you, if Hausmann had been working twenty years later and had access to elevators and steel framing, he also would’ve been building to 15 storeys.
If we aren’t doing it today, it’s more because it’s too hard for it to happen spontaneously. But constraining oneself to that isn’t practicality, it’s defeatism–literally any kind of transit-oriented or dense development in America today is “too hard,” so we’ve got to assume that some of the restrictions can be relaxed, or we’re just doing SimCity fanfic.
This issue is unrelated to towers-in-the-park vs euroblock–to build a euroblock today, from scratch, you’d *still* need to buy up a lot of land at once to get a large enough footprint. And the economics just aren’t there for the same path of organic growth that originally created European euroblocks (or even lower-coverage New York-style blocks of connected brownstones)–if your lots remain narrow, it’s too expensive to install the elevators you need after 3-4 storeys, and you usually can’t get wide-enough lots in established city areas, let alone get permitted to build anything on them if you could. (In the hypothetical where you could–which applies to construction of new euroblocks too–I think you’d achieve more with my actual preferred building pattern, Japanese-style high rises with external corridors to allow floor-through apartments on wide buildings. But that’s down to aesthetics really.)
Ultimately–and I’m saying this as an observation on urbanists generally, not you personally–as near as I can tell, most of the objections to towers-in-the-park are actually based on disliking the aesthetic, with other reasons generated secondarily. And again, it’s fine not to like it–I don’t much care for it myself–but we should be clear what’s argument from true hard constraints and what’s argument from aesthetics. That includes acknowledging where some of the arguments against it have existing contradictory evidence.
PS
In the spirit of being fair and engaging with arguments–you mention that you’ve written extensively about 20-25k/km^2 being the upper limit; do you have a couple preferred examples that you think lay out this case particularly well? I don’t know that I’ll be very successful trying to find & sift through your comments on e.g. this blog.
@Tiercelet
I reckon I covered this is my previous post (reply to Jodi). I don’t consider it “conflicting” information, rather just useless information. I don’t know how many more times I can say it, but looking at 1x1km squares, even if solid data, has nothing to contribute to what interests me or should interest anyone interested in urbanism. Other than, say looking at Stuy-Cooper’s 0.32km2 and showing it is deeply inappropriate as a model for a city anyone would want to live in (or even could be livable).
I still don’t believe it. A quick Google (“cities with most tourists”) produces two bits of bollocks: “The review puts Bangkok as the most visited city in the world, with approximately 22 million international visitors.” and “Paris, France with 15.834 million tourists per year.” Where do they get this shit? Just last week I read a (more credible, but too lazy to track down ref) that Paris has now exceeded its pre-corona numbers with 44m visitors to Ile de France. Like I said, most of the cited figures on tourist numbers are poor quality, written by lazy journos and city-PR departments. I’d bet real money that Hong Kong gets more visitors than Bangkok–but don’t have the time & energy to try to work out what stats to believe. Actually that same webpage gives “Hong Kong, China with 27.880 million tourists per year.” You only have to look at HKI airport numbers to know which is likely to be correct. Also it seems some of these sites are only using “international” visitors which probably means arrival by air which works for Bangkok, HK & Singapore (though I first arrived in Bangkok by train) but not for Paris (which gets 10m via Eurostar for just a single rail line!). FFS, it’s bollocks, and I can’t really care if people are so credulous.
Yet again, this is seriously missing the entire point. Of course one can always increase density by increasing height. No one is arguing that trivial point! But look at what you are suggesting: burying “all those services”!!! (definitely worthy of three exclamation points). You must be a Corbusier fan. Do you really think Parisian (or Barcelona) type urbanism would be generated? Or even New York? And, more importantly, that is not the way current planners of those hi-rise zones propose. But funny enough you’ve described Haussmannian (as in Paris and Barcelona etc) urbanism with the entire ground floor of the whole 100km2 given over to commerce etc (retail plus medical, restos, boulangeries etc etc). When they build those fancy new hi-rise in Manhattan they don’t want any of those small traders but instead leave the space empty until they snare a big corporates (Macdonalds! Banks–not so much these days) which explains why so many are empty and parts of previously vibrant Manhattan are being turned into deserts. Londonistan too.
But actually, another way to try to have both (hi-rise and services) is seen in Hong Kong like nowhere else: the city without ground (see Cities Without Ground, by Adam Frampton et al;). I suppose HK shows it can be made to work but OTOH I don’t think this is true for most of the world, especially the western world. Sadly, not sure how much longer it will work for HK either.
I think you are getting your wires seriously crossed. I don’t think China, or Japan, are any kind of models for how to build “best” cities. Although I had my interest piqued by the masterplan for Shanghai which was of a mega-mega city which was really a confederation of cities linked by fast transit (a solar system); unfortunately I doubt it will come to pass and they have bungled their Metro which is too slow and too crowded. Another mega-mega city, Chengdu, is experimenting with the Bögl urban maglev system to speed up connection to its distant outer parts, so we’ll see … I don’t understand why China didn’t foresee these obvious problems with their mega-cities. Big western cities already have the problem so Chinese cities will have it even worse–and they do!
There’s a maxim that goes something like: only a fool learns from his own mistakes while a wise man learns from other’s mistakes and, alas, China had that exceptional opportunity but hasn’t really done it. I mean they tried to make an even bigger version of LA with freeways smothering everything (actually much worse than LA which hasn’t built a true new freeway for decades; inner Shanghai is much more entangled by its (elevated) freeways). Likewise they have gone for hi-rise. With their sheer numbers it is ‘easy’ to think that it is inevitable but I’m not so sure. First thing is, and this is one of your errors: hi-rise≠hi-density. Most of all that hi-rise stuff doesn’t produce higher density than Paris! It’s a fact that many otherwise sensible people (including readers of PO) can’t accept. One isn’t saying it can’t produce higher density, but for the most part it doesn’t (you know, because most of Manhattan is not, and can never be, 100% Stuy-Cooper.) HK and Singapore might be forced into it, though again it’s not true for Singapore despite all the misleading stuff written in newspapers etc.
Maybe. But remember that the original conception for Paris (in the 17th century) was relating maximum desirable height to street width to enable minimal air & light. Haussmann was an aesthete so it is not certain that he would have abandoned those precepts. Indeed when Pompidou tried to impose his vision of Paris (which was driven much by economic terms, which turns out to be false) he was rebuffed (though aided by his early death, whew, Paris may have only narrowly escaped).
Then it was also tried in a set of experiments in the redevo of the eastern half of the 13th (70s-80s), with those 31-storey residential towers, about 30 of them IIRC, and BeauGrenelle (Front-de-Seine). Clearly those experiments were stopped. Today, in the rest of the 13th developed after those times, ie. Paris-Rive-Gauche, it is Haussmannian typology but with lower ceilings they squeezed in about ten floors (same building height). Note too, that none of these led to higher residential densities (though the ‘new’ Haussmannian feasibly could) and I don’t consider they make good urbanism. (Front de Seine has had recent big makeovers–by itself an indictment–and I haven’t been there since to tell if it improves it much.)
There you go making all kinds of wrong assumptions. If a given area can actually produce higher density than most existing hi-rise then that simply cannot be correct. In fact it is more economic because Haussmannian buildings are cheaper and faster to build. I will agree that it is not easy, politically or at grass-roots because the public simply don’t trust either the politicians and especially the developers. And some of that is this crazy thing over the absolute imperative for hi-rise to achieve desirable hi-densities. NO. Most people involved in these dumb arguments have visited Paris (or Barcelona etc) and loved its urbanism. Yet, somehow can’t embrace the idea that something similar could in fact be done in their home cities. It has been reinforced by ignorant politicians, developers and the likes of Ed Glaeser, Matthew Yglesias and Ryan Avent (who aren’t wrong in the primary message which is about density but totally wrong in their ridiculous assumption that it can only be achieved by hi-rise, which hardly anyone wants).
Alas, too much of a drudge searching PO for old comments. But it is pretty straightforward, given the top premise of “good urbanism”: Hong Kong may have the highest average density but no one is going to propose it as a model for the west, so forget densities of 40-50k/km2. Eixample sets an upper bound of 36,000/km2 because it has acknowledged problems and also is not truly a city; Manhattan (≈28,000/km2) and Paris (≈25,000/km) are close but Manhattan has too much hi-rise and the likes of Stuy-Cooper not to mention other awful project-housing. Paris has quite a lot of very small studios (like my 18m2) and even smaller (8-10m2) chambres-de-bonnes*, thus if one wants a Haussmannian city without those it is more like ≈20,000/km2. But it could be manipulated (carefully) to be higher density by squeezing in one or two extra floors (not necessarily only by the awful stratagem of modern low ceilings but by top floors being more deeply set-back; in fact I notice some new apartment blocks this appears to be happening (it can be done well by incorporating a wide terrace for penthouses; I see that there are strict rules about coverage of these terraces to avoid them subverting the function). Hence, without creating a detailed mathematical model my ideal density might still approach Paris’ of ≈20-25,000/km2. Note this only applies to a whole city (or inner city if you like, given the suburban and exurban mess most western cities have), and so by definition, and like Paris but not so much even Eixample or Manhattan, it includes generous parks, squares, plazas, schools, sports, hospitals (some very expansive like Salpetriere), universities, monuments, some wide boulevards etc etc. (Again, that stuff is why you cannot use Stuy-Cooper as a model.)
Here is an idea of what can be achieved at different densities (table below, which I suppose won’t display cleanly). This is not for an entire city obviously but is my concept of how we could retrofit our Anglosphere suburban sprawl into a better form of urbanism; essentially a ‘string of pearls’ as TOD on mass transit nodes (the string). The 2.4km radius is meant to approximate the notion of “20 minute city”, ie. walkable from the centre to the edge. So the 2.4km circle has area of 18km2 and holds from 181,000 residents at 10,000/km2 up to 452,000 residents at 25,000/km2.
……………….. Population inside r (thousands)
…………………….(at diff. density/km2)
Radius..Area….10k…15k……20k…..25k
2.4……18.1…..181….271…..362…..452
1.6……..8.0……80….121……161…..201
1.2……..4.5……45……68…….90…..113
0.8……..2.0……20……30…….40…….50
0.4……..0.5……..5……..8…….10…….13
I did find this link (and I recall there is a lot of other comments on that page)
You can have both. Like StuyvesantTown/Peter Cooper Village does. Towers in a park on one side of the street and walk-ups on the other side of the street. Most cities have different kinds of neighborhoods and it’s okay to have more than one. Many many different kinds. And it’s all hypothetical in most cities because there aren’t many wide swaths of easily develop-able land just laying around.
I personally love the Haussmannian euroblock model and am pretty attached to it, but I don’t necessarily think it’s wrong to try and seek higher Floor Area Ratio forms in areas where demand is highest, and I think adding an extra floor via surélévation wherever possible is probably a good idea (this already does happen on Haussmannian buildings here and there in Paris). If I’ve understood you correctly, your argument is that the euroblock Haussmannian ~7 story (R + 5 + mansarde) built form is the pinnacle of urbanism and basically can’t be improved upon. At a neighborhood level with no parks this peaks at a FAR of around ~4.5. Do you see any cases where in some places, having a greater FAR might be useful? Somewhat unrelated note (since the FAR is probably below Haussmannian levels), but what do you think of ZAC Clichy Batignolles ? Do you have any knowledge on why they chose the current built form instead of a euroblock one?
@minhn1994
The version of Haussmannian form was actually not so much due to him; a lot predated him and the height limit was increased in the decades after him, during the Belle Époque when there was increasing pressure on finding more space in a wealthy growing city. It is just shorthand to label it Haussmannian.
This set of building regulations controlling these critical elements of the city were developed over 3 centuries (begun in the 17th) and so is not some random, accidental thing, nor is it intrinsically reactionary or anti-modern like some so-called modernists like to claim. By the early 20th they had taken it as far as it could be taken. Unlike the Anglosphere where one decade they will define requirements in terms of light & air and FAR or whatever, then the next redefine it to satisfy developers who essentially call all the shots in all Anglosphere political systems. In Paris it really is done according to basic principles, of urbanism one could say, not political expediency. We saw attempts to go the Anglosphere route (to serve political and so-called economic ends instead of urbanism) at various times and particularly under Pompidou. As anyone can see clearly in today’s Paris (not to mention the banlieus where the rules are more relaxed) it wasn’t their finest hour. Luckily not disastrous except the HLM in the suburbs. Only because it was very limited –to the 13th (eastern side was post-industrial brownfield) and Front-de-Seine; of course also Tour Montparnasse, the Jussieu campus and the hideous, Stalinist Annexe Marie IV which is both hideous, bulky and well above height limits (it really needs demolition as it has zero worth).
The third phase really in attempting to incorporate ‘modern’ construction began in the past few decades. Not construction methods but economic; remember Paris was and is a pioneer, eg. August Perret’s building at 25 rue Benjamin Franklin (in Alon’s detested 16th; incidentally named after Ben because he lived near there when ambassador) was the first reinforced-concrete apartments in the world. The new phase was squeezing more floors out of the same building envelope by reducing ceiling height.
This is most obvious along the eastern extremity of the same 13th and part of Paris Rive Gauche (around Biblio Mitterrand). They’re still Haussmannian but look pretty much like any other buildings you find around the world. In fact I don’t agree at all with the reduced ceiling heights; this is something that is very impactful in a high-density city, and is robbing Peter to pay Paul. It was done, not so much to satisfy developers but the city politicians and demographers who have been worrying about intramuros-Paris population reduction and changing demographics. The kind of thing you are worrying about. I disagree with the strategy on principle but don’t think it matters too much in Paris, mostly because it is minor in scale and it is a lot, lot better than those 50s thru 70s atrocities. And I certainly don’t agree with those, including Alon (putting his Ed Glaeser hat on) who would demolish half of the 9th to allow true hi-rise, you know, to allow more working class to live in central Paris (is the Marxist line I think:-).
I am not in favour of this obsession with height anywhere mostly residential–because there is zero advantage re residential density, or not enough to justify destroying the urbanism. The case of CBDs mixed with residential, then I agree there is no point in different rules. The real problem is trying to contain both the developers and the politicians who seem in love with such topologies (phallus syndrome probably combined with profits). This is not just my finicky quirkiness, but I believe the tower issue lies at the heart of a lot of NIMBYism. Everywhere in the Anglosphere people have learnt they cannot trust a thing developers or their politician proxies promise on future development. They always want more and want to discard any assurances and barriers to doing exactly what they want, of course usually arguing that it is to the benefit of the residents and future city. Their big trick is to get a project approved under existing rules then as soon as it is approved, submit a modification which trashes them. Sometimes there will be successive rounds of this shit until the development is utterly transformed, all approved under ‘special exemptions’. That then normalises it for the next development in the same zone. OTOH everyone likes Paris and its Haussmannian arrangement (which is similar in Barcelona and other Euro-cores).
Regarding the Martin Luther King jr development over those rail marshalling yards in Batignolles, I haven’t seen them other than online. Again I don’t agree with it but it is relatively minor in the context of Paris. I think the building height limitation was relaxed to 50m but I’d still bet the residential density is a lot lower than normal Haussmannian Paris, partly because of bigger apartments (I presume) and lower efficiency use of the land. I don’t know any insider details on the ZAC but I’d bet it was political, possibly Hidalgo, partly to have a quartier of such starchitecture follies in Paris, and possibly to cater for the international rich set who want to buy such stuff. Possibly a competitive response to London’s direction under Boris. Paris has long been a leader in city and residential architecture but, excepting those 50s-70s experiments, they adhered to overall Haussmannian precepts. This is another serious diversion. I hope it is another strictly limited experiment which will be fine. Supposedly the height relaxation was allowed because it didn’t impact on the sightlines from any of the iconic structures. I hope they don’t extend it over the whole remaining zone, not least because they really should be building more affordable and thus usual density Haussmannian buildings. And I hope they don’t do the same to the La Chapelle ZAC which is probably the last big brownfield site in the city.
Oh, and please note that hi-rise residential is never cheaper than the older low-rise stuff they displace. Look at all the new stuff in Manhattan, especially the supertalls which are absurdly priced and like Londonistan, are mostly purchased by non-residents who aren’t there most of the time. It’s even true of the less high stuff like in Chelsea as pointed out by Michael Sorkin. So what exact housing problem are they solving? No, they are making it worse, displacing affordable housing and pushing up property prices across the whole market. Again, why developers and politicians like them.
Hope that answers your questions and puts it in proper context.
It would be interesting to see how Istanbul stacks up in htis argument. I mean its older than any of the other European cities mentioned, has multiple “cores” where the tourists visit, Sultanahmet, Taksim, Istiklal and its offshoots, NIsantasi, Bagdat Caddessi, Kadikoy (Moda) etc very little in the way of legacy rail transit systems but a shit ton of new metro built in the last 10 years with 5 more lines under construction. Shopping habits amongst the locals may be different than the other locations mentioned as car ownership was very low until fairly recently.. Street markets are everywhere and there is a variety of different sized supermarkets to choose from alongside the bakers, butchers etc. Migros has everything from local small stores to mega markets as does Carrefour, than add in SOK, BIM, A101 amongst others who all have multiple small stores in neighborhoods. Delivery service has been available since I was working there 20 years ago, you call the local bakkal for some beer, eggs, bread, tomatoes and 20 minutes later the delivery kid arrived with your stuff and these day MIgros for example has an excellent delivery service. I was in Istanbul a couple of weeks ago visiting family and was staying on the Asian side near Suadiye Marmaray station for a week. I used the transit system a lot to get across to the European Side and just on the Asian side, some tourist stuff and some family/friend/work related trips. Every train was busy. Of course you can link this all together with the ferries, Tunel, Kabatas funicular and the tramway system up through Sultanahmet with a single Istanbulkart, which I used to get to see Aya Sofia,but it was interesting that most on the tram were local and not tourist despite the tram running through a tourist core..But then I guess that what is a tourist core, Kapali Carsi just up the road from Ayia Sofia is also used by locals for shopping and the streets around it are all local oriented dry goods street markets……..
So Im just wondering whether the ideas expressed in the post can be extrapolated to Istanbul or is it just too damn big and different to fit in to the theory?
Istanbul is poor by Western standards. It developed a huge area of very dense development in an era when most people couldn’t afford cars. The transit system is mediocre (though fast improving) but historically people were stuck taking it anyway.
Until 15 years ago Istanbul had 2 rail lines one from Sirkeci and one from Hydarpasa serving a very limited area. No one really used it, that’s where the Dolmus and bus network came in. So there was no system to speak of and people I would assume used whatever was local to them.
Istanbul barely had a metro system until very recently, so I wouldn’t be surprised if it evolved differently; it’s interesting to see how it’s evolving now, with the combination of a rapidly growing urban rail system (albeit one with only one cross-Bosporus line) and very high housing construction rates.
Obviously the recent challenge with the Central Government starving the City of Investment leading to a delay in the half finished lines has not helped but they are moving again now. When you look at the areas served there is though an area that is underserved by the Metro. That’s out to the East, in Immamoglu’s old district of Beyliduzu, which has seen significant housing growth in the last 20 years, which i witnessed first hand as my father in law lives there. The M7 is supposed to be extended out to Esenyurt but given the housing density in this area that’s not really going to cut it. Sure the MetroBus express lanes start out here but until the MetroBus crosses the Bosphorus then the full potential of that system will not be realized. And housing is moving east of this area already with significant development ongoing. At some point the Metro will need to be reimagined in this area as currently you have a huge underserved area. Granted the topography does not help but still I think this will be challenge that it will be interesting to see how Metro Istanbul and IBB solves. Alongside the new housing you also have the ongoing redevelopment of existing housing stock in these areas that has since accelerated since the recent earthquakes….
The other major challenge is to link the Asian and European sides of the Metro, currently to cross the Bosphorus you have to use Marmaray, or a ferry. There is a project “Great Istanbul Tunnel” which is supposed to link the metro systems but it may be a bit far north to really help.
On a separate note I do wonder how the overall system design fits into some of the models that you have advocated. I have to believe that in general it has been a success, 16m people have to have a way to move about the city that does not result in complete gridlock but are people using it because its better than the alternative or becaseu it really serves the needs of the city?
Yes, but the city is getting money from the EIB instead – it borrows money at lower interest rates than the Turkish state, that’s how much international investors hate Erdoğan.
True, but it also shows that every time they build a line, its packed and the banks get their money back…… I recall years ago that ISKI the Istanbul water company had a higher credit rating than the rest of the country, because everyone needs water and everyone needs to get rid of wastewater from their homes and ISKI was incredibly efficient at metering and charging for it while keeping construction costs low.
Article is confusing ,the whole conversation is backward , we are looking at things what has happened rather than planning for the future.
Future
Transit ,bus and car system as well as pedestrian should be designed as one component , rather than pedestrian only or like Berlin or this or that.
Focus point should be to remove poverty and make city as an economic development engine for all,
Amar Sawhney
Guscurban.org