Badly planned cities

[dvdneal]

I'm sure this conversation is out there somewhere, but after spending a week in Topeka it didn't take long for me to get hit with how bad the planning is for the city.

Overall the streets hit me as the bad planning aspect, but the lack of urban renewal and over concentration of strip retail add to the list.

Maybe as an outsider I was jsut more sensative to it, but the road conditions were horrible, some roads in neighborhoods had no curbs, a lot of the main roads cut from four lane arterial to two lane collector almost randomly.
My personal favorite was driving up a small hill in the right lane at 40 mph and cresting the hill to see a curb in my lane. It was in the middle of the street, not a decel lane, or intersection, just something to force you into a garage.

It looks like the city was built, post war housing boom happended, then for a long time there was nothing but minor county housing projects.
Then suddenly the "new" part of town springs up with an overload of retail. There just seems to be no easy way to get around town.

When you visit a town what hits you first to say the town is well planned or needs a little help?

[OfficialPlanner]

One of my favorite all time quotes on Cyburbia is from the myths thread:

That the characteristics they like about cities/neighborhoods/places are the result of "good planning" and characteristics they don't like about places are the result of "bad planning."

[paiste13]

one thing i've noticed is in small town most developments are one cul-de-sac so there is no planned-interconnectivity. It's just a main road with a bunch of cul-de-sacs coming off of it.

[Linda_D]

I'm sure this conversation is out there somewhere, but after spending a week in Topeka it didn't take long for me to get hit with how bad the planning is for the city.

Overall the streets hit me as the bad planning aspect, but the lack of urban renewal and over concentration of strip retail add to the list.

Maybe as an outsider I was jsut more sensative to it, but the road conditions were horrible, some roads in neighborhoods had no curbs, a lot of the main roads cut from four lane arterial to two lane collector almost randomly.
My personal favorite was driving up a small hill in the right lane at 40 mph and cresting the hill to see a curb in my lane. It was in the middle of the street, not a decel lane, or intersection, just something to force you into a garage.

It looks like the city was built, post war housing boom happended, then for a long time there was nothing but minor county housing projects.
Then suddenly the "new" part of town springs up with an overload of retail. There just seems to be no easy way to get around town.

When you visit a town what hits you first to say the town is well planned or needs a little help?

Why do you assume that there is actually much overall "planning" involved in the built environment of cities or towns? Aside from Washington, DC, how many major American cities were actually laid out in some grand design from inception? How many have followed that plan to the present? What suburbs are really "planned", even today, except on a development-by-development basis?

It seems to me that haphazardness is the only "plan" in American cities and towns simply because people have been putting up what they wanted on land that they owned from the beginning of settlement -- and that continued to be pretty much the norm for most of the 19th century. In the 20th century, developers and politicians figured out that segregated uses appealed to people fleeing the crowded conditions of city centers, so developers started separating residential subdivisions or office parks or shopping centers from each other while politicians employed zoning to confirm the existing uses and to ensure that residential subdivisions stayed residential and that manufacturing and shopping were concentrated in certain areas, especially when they already existed.

I think if you find what you think is a "well planned" city, it's probably that that city got lucky in that development was controlled by somebody with some kind of decent vision. If you find what you think is a "badly planned" city, it's likely that city was simply unlucky in what individuals or government chose to develop.