Should there be any doubt that LA belongs among the big 6 urban US cities?

[Crawford]

A lot of Europe isn't that old, even if the underlying street grid and pedestrian patterns are mostly intact. Is the average home in Metropolitan London or Paris much older than Metropolitan NYC? Likely not. German cities were almost universally destroyed 80 years ago. Same with Warsaw, Rotterdam and many others.

Med Europe is generally older, and since it was poorer, and had issues like Franco, developed less urban renewal and wacky postwar schemes. But I'm not sure the big cities are overall that old. Madrid has quadrupled in population since 1950. Rome is prolly the greatest historical city on earth, yet it was quite small for 1,000 years, and didn't really boom again until the 20th century.

IMO people ascribe trans-Atlantic development/lifestyle differences to age, and I think it's more a postwar divergence. 1950-era Detroit and Hamburg would have been pretty similar. By 1980 or so they embodied radically different built forms and lifestyles.