Quote:
Originally Posted by Architype
Everybody knows that this kind of lifestyle arrangement is unsustainable. It's totally auto dependent, results in poor physical and mental health, socially and environmentally unfriendly, not to speak of being poorly built with cheap materials and is an ugly pastiche and mockery of real life and real architecture. Let's leave Leave it to Beaver in the 50s.
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Ouch...….
I'm trying to decide if you're being sarcastic or not, but something tells me that you are.
Amsterdam is great, but not everyone wants to live in a small apartment on the sixth floor of a six storey walk-up. Living on a canal may be romantic, but urban congestion can get a bit tedious at times, and not everyone wants to bicycle to work all the time or be forced to take the tram during a pandemic. Children may want a backyard to play in, and it can be difficult hosting a barbeque in a downtown tenement. Sometimes a car is convenient if you have to get groceries.
In other words, a downtown lifestyle can be good if you are a young professional, or if you are single and do not plan to ever have children, or if you are an empty nester who wants to downsize, but that still leaves a lot of people who want to have a driveway, a garage, a bit of grass, and a house large enough to accommodate 2-3 kids and occasionally their friends for a sleepover. I don't think suburbia is going anywhere.
Can there be improvements in suburban architectural design - of course. Can suburban neighbourhoods be made more walkable - absolutely! Should public transit in the suburbs be improved in quality - unquestionably. Should we avoid suburban monoculture and instead promote the idea of "village nodes" around which varied housing options could be established - wouldn't that be neat.
Improvements can be made, but there are a lot of urban elitist snobs on this forum who think that anyone who does not want to live in a tiny downtown condo is nothing more than a Neanderthal and a "breeder" who should be called out and castigated within an inch of his/her life...………..