American readers will be delighted with this: someone is trying to build a new America. – no Americans, that is. And, to be more specific, it is the European Union (EU), Putin’s New Russia and capitalist China that are trying to do so. They all call this trend the ‘New American Urbanism’.
New American urbanism is what city planners, architects, civil engineers, real estate developers, appraisers, and bankers across the United States simply refer to as “urbanism.” It is the path so familiar to all of us in which cities, towns and communities have been conceived, planned and built. It has nothing new, since urbanism in the United States and to a lesser extent in Canada is a phenomenon that dates back to the 1970s. It is simply the very practical way that North American cities are structured: a mix of commercial, residential, and light industrial districts effectively connected by a system of boulevards, highways, streets, and alleys. Residential neighborhoods are made up of mixed-use housing clustered with schools, sports centers, wide sidewalks, and essentially everything within walking distance of the home.
Business is conducted in downtown or downtown areas, with the characteristic skyline typical of high-rise and low-rise concrete buildings. One wouldn’t think that all of this would cause such an uproar. But it has. There are three specific reasons for the rest of the world to suddenly rediscover the United States and put it (again) under the microscope: time, money, and economy of scale. The EU, Russia and China face the common dilemma of having to relocate millions and millions of people on relatively short notice and share the common denominator of minimizing social cost and maximizing affordability.
With the collapse of European borders and the rapid disappearance of unique national identities, the urban trend across Europe today is to create hubs where new jobs are relocated and developed. Cities and towns must follow the people who, in turn, follow economic prosperity wherever they find it. As such, it is imperative that a live, social thread is quickly and quickly created wherever it is needed. Call it the logistics of capitalism, but the EU cannot achieve its coveted goal of creating a free market zone of roughly 600 million people, twice that of North America, if this area cannot be properly connected, provide services of effectively and economically integrate.
Similarly, more than a decade has passed that Russia is in the process of bringing down the old Stalinist organization of a modern and self-sufficient European Russia on the one hand surrounded by a group of backward Asian republics and Putin, the former head of the KGB, now to become, for reasons of internal politics, the main architect of the new Russian social integration. Consequently, the republic is now in the process of developing remote areas such as northern Siberia and the eastern Urals, and will soon face the enormous problem of having to accommodate, house, connect and integrate millions and millions of migrants and domestic workers. .
China suffers from an ailment called “ one-sided development ”: its coastal areas, home to 35 percent of China’s 1.3 billion people, are expanding at a rate of 10 percent annually and have been. doing so over the last decade, while the remainder sixty-five percent of the population living in the interior live in communities where running water is considered the ultimate luxury. The Chinese leadership is well aware of the economic gap that exists between the rich, modern and westernized inhabitants of the cities on the one hand and the poor, uneducated and hopeless inhabitants of the countryside, as well as the tension, envy and enormous social unrest. that generates this situation. – if not resolved quickly – it will inevitably lead to.
Hence America. Using standardized models of development, urban planners around the world have thought (possibly at the same time) that Americans need four years to build, connect, develop, service and integrate from scratch a standardized community of 30,000 people. . This would include the construction of roads, viaducts, railways, shopping centers, habitable housing, parks, sidewalks, streets, lighting, school and sports facilities, public service facilities such as electricity, telephone lines, cables, sewers, water network, also a small airport. like planting trees everywhere. In addition, the typical time to build a home in the United States, from digging a hole in the ground to handing over the keys to the owner, is five and a half months. Using the same standardized models but applied to different construction and development methods, it would take Western Europeans seven years to achieve the same goal, with an average home construction time of about one year. It would take the Russians almost ten years to do the same, with a typical house building time of one year and the data is not available to the Chinese, but it is a common belief that it would take them longer than the Russians to build this city. model in the field.
Furthermore, what foreigners especially appreciate about North American cities, towns, and neighborhoods is the economy of scale: the more you build, the less expensive it becomes. And, naturally, the fact that environmental concerns are paramount, particularly in Canada. So much so, in fact, that Europeans have come together in no less than Stockholm to draft, well … The Stockholm Charter, in fact, where the European Town Planning Council has officially adopted as a mission the goal of maintaining and preserving the well-being and integration of present and future generations through the construction of cities, towns and villages quickly and with mixed uses with architectural lines, construction techniques, planning and management following the model of American cities.
It seems like someone is holding back a lot of criticism these days …
Luigi frascati
