Our self imposed scarcity of nice places

Every advocate for making urban design more [pick one: walkable, bikeable, beautiful, lovable, inviting, human-scale] has at some point or another faced the charge of elitism. Virtually every feature of public space that makes it more pleasant to linger in, stroll through, or simply view, has at some point been associated by someone with gentrification, or simply culturally coded as upscale.

This belief is rooted in the following true observation: The best American examples of top-notch urbanism are mostly places inhabited by well-to-do Americans, and their real-estate prices and rents are usually prohibitive for most others. This includes the majority of places that are currently walkable, bikeable, have attractive human-scale architecture, have attractive greenery, aren't pockmarked with parking lots, and are full of small storefronts suited for local businesses.

However, we go badly astray if the lesson we take from that observation is that the design features of such places are themselves exclusionary and elitist. Or, even worse, that basic quality-of-life things like pedestrian safety or generous public space are inherently elite concerns.

We need to learn how to separate form from (current) function. In fact, our shortage of nice places is almost totally self-imposed. And it's precisely because 98% of the North American built environment is so blah that the 2% of places that are really well-designed environments quickly get bid up by the rich and become inaccessible to the rest of us. The solution to this isn't to stop creating such places, but to create vastly more of them.

from Hacker News https://ift.tt/3wa0tUW