I saw this fascinating tweet the other day:

This is so neat because it places what seem like totally different urban design philosophies on a continuum, which shows you how they’re really, in some ways, all the same thing faced with different evolutionary pressures.

I’ve used this line before: suburbs are cities in the sense that whale flippers are legs. You can look at the way we build places now, and you can identify the bits of “design DNA” that were altered to get us here.

I’ve done with strip malls. A strip mall is not an invention, per se. It was not created; it evolved. A strip mall is essentially an urban block that has progressively lost 1) its upper stories, 2) its curb- or street-parking only, 3) its placement up against the street (i.e. no setback), and 4) its mix of allowable uses. That’s it.

Shave every floor but one off an urban commercial block (thus shaving off residential), plop it down in the middle of a parking lot, and you have a strip mall. Relatively little “design DNA” had to change in order for our built environment to be so tremendously altered.

You can see, with those street patterns, how the basic connectivity of the streets is lost in stages, over time, until you don’t have connectivity at all. This is how you get the absurdity of two houses whose lots border each other being five minutes away by car (I’ve seen this kind of thing before.)

One reason we did this is privacy/quiet/safety. You’ll see “Quiet cul-de-sac lot!” on real estate listings. It’s interesting, because what they’re implying you have privacy from is cars. Yet when we build this way, we are effectively mandating that everybody own a car. We’re worsening the problem by trying to alleviate it.

Now one interesting thing is the very old, pre-grid image on the left actually kind of resembles the most recent style on the right. I suppose because more (most or all?) travel took place on foot or by horse, and having a neat, orderly street system just didn’t matter all that much. Or because that style evolved naturally when no plan was imposed.

Interesting stuff. Especially thinking about the things we create in an evolutionary way.

Related Reading:

Shopping Center Missing Links

What If Suburbia Still Looked Like This?

Nooks and Crannies

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