Quote:
Originally Posted by Steely Dan
it seems like most of the time when i see suburban residential side streets from europe, the whole arrangement just looks and feels so very different.
i guess what i'm asking is the north american streetcar suburb typology exclusively a north america thing?
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Basically yes. There a lot of areas in Northern Europe that will feature detached, single-family housing in close quarters around walkable main drags, but there are a lot of small elements that add up to skew the feel.
Looking at
Hellerup, Copenhagen from the air, you can see that it's
not so structurally different from Shorewood. The streets are wavier and the building types are different, but it's overall a similar plan. They are even both beachfront areas north of the main city.
Zooming in, though, you see the lot shapes and sizes are quite different...
Hellerup has wider, shorter, squarer lots and the main street is characterized by European-style courtyard blocks, whereas
Shorewood, as you noted, is based on long and narrow lots.
At street level, the main commercial drags really show their differences...
Strandvejen in Hellerup is just so obviously European, nothing in North America looks like that.
On the residential streets,
Shorewood has that North American, "open" feel with its yards, driveways and the rest. Over here, single-family often means walls or hedges.
You can see this in Hellerup, where walking down the street doesn't give you much of a look at the houses. It's either
hedges,
walls, or some combination thereof.
Some
streets are more open, but the houses still just have a totally different way of relating to the street and each other than in North America.
This just how Northern Europe rolls, and you can see it in
Hamburg,
Stockholm,
Poland, whatever.
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Anyway, that's usually my gut reaction to seeing those sorts of privacy attempts being made. The only exception would be truly massive Lake Forest type estates where the gate was clearly just there to flaunt wealth and keep gawkers away.
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