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A Traditional City Primer (and how modern cities are utterly broken, and even New Urbanism doesn't fix the core issue)
(www.andrewalexanderprice.com)
this post was submitted on 13 Dec 2024
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Solarpunk Urbanism
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A community to discuss solarpunk and other new and alternative urbanisms that seek to break away from our currently ecologically destructive urbanisms.
- Henri Lefebvre, The Right to the City — In brief, the right to the city is the right to the production of a city. The labor of a worker is the source of most of the value of a commodity that is expropriated by the owner. The worker, therefore, has a right to benefit from that value denied to them. In the same way, the urban citizen produces and reproduces the city through their own daily actions. However, the the city is expropriated from the urbanite by the rich and the state. The right to the city is therefore the right to appropriate the city by and for those who make and remake it.
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I’m a fan of this design principle and agree with the author on most points, but I am curious how cities like this deal with big box purchases - appliances, furniture, etc.
For retail stores, how do they get stock in? Same with supermarkets, do we build service lanes designed more for delivery trucks and waste collection?
For customers, how do you get that new washing machine or dining table home? These aren’t everyday purchases individually, but it a city they collectively are.
In the medieval city center I grew up in, there are market streets that are 6-10m wide, which are accessible for utility and delivery vehicles in the early morning. All the cars come and go before 9 AM, after which the area is pedestrianized. The market street can then be used for restaurant seating, public gatherings, market stalls, or just a spacious boulevard.
Residential streets are narrower, but still wide enough for one-way car traffic plus pedestrians (cyclists needed to dismount or go around). Utility and delivery vehicles can use these streets, blocking them for other vehicles while they're unloading, but since pedestrians and cyclists can pass it doesn't disrupt people from going about their day.
Ultimately the delivery vehicles do go to dedicated car roads, a two-lane 50 km/h ring roughly 1 kilometer in diameter around the medieval city, but that means you can walk to 3000 people's houses, as well as markets and restaurants and schools for tens of thousands of people, without crossing a car street.