City Planning
One of the interesting things that I have found from not only Jurgen's blog but from other people's comments is, when seeing an American Suburb, to question the city planning. City Planning? What city planning?
Yes, it does happen, and the down town areas of many towns and cities are a testament to that, but once you leave that centralized area different rules take place.
Let me illustrate by explaining the history of the area where I grew up and my parents still live.
About a century ago the area was owned by US Steel and served as the farm where the feed was grown that fed the mules that worked in the mines. When automation took over the land was sold off in large lots, primarilly to farmers - my great grandfather among them. Farms it stayed for a long time.
When his children grew up and got married he divided up his land, after having already sold some when times were hard (and he gave some away for a church to be built), and gave it to them to build houses. When I was a child my family own about 6 acres on which were 3 houses all occupied by family members, 2 barns, 2 green houses, and a large garage/shop. It was also home to a small herd of cows, about 2 dozen chickens, 4 pigs, a large vegetable garden and innumerable dogs and cats. Most of the land to the north of us (towards Bessemer) was already divided into smaller suburban lots while most of the land to the south was still farm land.
Now my parents live on the last of that property on a little more than one acre and are the exception in the area. Everything else has been divided up and sold off. The land to the south that was farms was bought in large chunks. It has all been developed into acres of identical houses on streets that didnt exist 10 years ago. People living on land whose last human occupant were migratory Creek.
Then take where I live now as another example. I am in a large suburb of Birmingham, AL known as Hoover. Hoover has no downtown. The land is hilly and cut by numerous small creeks the flow, eventually, down to the Cahaba River. It has a large stretch of a commercial district along US 31 and it has neighboor hoods that grew up off of that. Some of these were planned neighboorhoods, some not. If you know how to look, and where, you can still see evidences of the orignal boundries between large pieces of property that were divided up and sold off. With a little architectural knowledge you can even date these areas. Eventually, disconnected neighboorhoods merged, larger pieces of land with one owner became dozens of smaller lots with many owners, and finally communities that had their own seperate names became one mass municipality known as Hoover. There is no grid, there aren't really even any straight roads. For a long time it was part of unincorporated Jefferson County. As a municiple entitity its not very old at all.
I knowthe story is the same in other places. The communities grew up organically. There were no city planners because there was no city government to do any planning. Large chunks of land were claimed or bought cheap when land was cheap and was sold off in pieces when it got more valuable. Eventually these small pieces organized into something, sometimes in connection with a town that actually had a small grid, and became a city or town of their own. Or several smaller towns grew together and became a city, just as organically.
In a lot of America city planning is not poor, its nonexistant.
