It's an old thread at skyscrapercity.com but is very interesting thread to read what Europeans think when asked about certain U.S. cities, or just U.S. cities in general.

 

http://www.skyscrapercity.com/showthread.php?t=206504

Great thread. I'll try to get my wife to pitch in her 2 zlotys.

That is a fantastic thread.  I love the generalizations and opinions and leave it to a few dumb Americans that must flood the thread with photos and insults.  Just let the Europeans speak!

^ i agree. the op asked for euro impressions, there shouldn't be any americans posting -- its annoying. otherwise an interesting thread indeed.

I think the fact that some Americans couldn't handle the fact that Europeans called their spade cities a spade was interesting in and of itself. I loved the comment by one of the European posters that soulless American buildings "don't hug you" like European buildings do. An outstanding use of words.

Even Canadians can safely look down their nose at us, and I agree after having visited cities like Toronto, Quebec, & even Guelph, which owns our downtown even with only over 100,000 residents.

Good discussion! I can't disagree with a lot of those points. Our country is just not very urban. When you think about it, only a handful of cities have a intraurban rail system that truly allows you to go car-free. It's slightly frustrating, especially in a state like Ohio, to try to explain why living in urban neighborhoods is a good thing.

 

At the same time, the differences are because of history. Unfortunately, the car made life easier and harder.

A lot of the things they were saying are true and the truth can be painful to hear. But I love a good skyline, always will.

 

Am I the only one that saw a few weird things though?? What's up with people saying Chicago is dangerous because we got Al Capone running the streets? I just thought that was weird. That's like me saying those Nazis in Germany just eat sausage and drink beer all day (which is totally false).

 

I'm sure I'm going to have a few people roughing me up for this comment but take it easy on me.

^ I wish I could take a train to Canada. Coming back on 1-75 S through Michigan was like driving on a 3rd world version of a highway and you have to drive through a rundown neighborhood to even get onto that highway. Driving through that piece of crap was very stressful and I would easily choose another mode of transportation if it was available. Like I said before, the most desirable american cities are also the most urban and if local leaders don't understand this we will always lag behind. And just for good measure, here's a mini-photo thread I did awhile back on Zaragoza, Spain, a city you wouldn't hear much about as it's your average large Spanish city, but then when is being a typical European city a bad or even "average" thing? I wouldn't mind our cities to be on par like any other European city. http://www.urbanohio.com/forum2/index.php?topic=9402.0

I think the fact that some Americans couldn't handle the fact that Europeans called their spade cities a spade was interesting in and of itself.

 

The Europeans are no better.  I posted on one of those boards about the urban decline and de-industrialization of northern England as exhibited at that Shrinking Cities show I went to up in Detroit and the European posters essentially reacted in a very defensive and sarcastic "you're wrong!" mode.

 

The Europeans can be pretty touchy too, when others observe negatives about their citys.

 

Northern England is probably a special case, though, as the German cities I was familiar with where not as run-down looking as what was shown in that Shrinking Cities exhibit. I was thinking that they might have declined since i last was in Germany 25 years ago, but Monte's pix of his recent trip show that urban Germany is still pretty healthy and in good shape.

 

I always thought it funny that the car-obsessed Gemans with their extensive freeway network (which is just as agressive as the US interstate system in terms of suburban bypass freeway construction), still maintain useable regional mass transit systems made up of bus and trains...and these are really regional systems that link up across city and county limits.

 

 

 

 

^ I wish I could take a train to Canada. Coming back on 1-75 S through Michigan was like driving on a 3rd world version of a highway and you have to drive through a rundown neighborhood to even get onto that highway.

 

Could the freeway-though-ghetto phenomenom be the kernal of much of America's ill-will toward urban living? If so, it also doubles as the nastiest bit of irony I've ever tasted.

Interesting.  In a quick scan, it seems they really despise skyscrapers (ironic considering the eponymous website) and Chicago really is nothing special to some of them (as it is to Americans like me); though a number thought Chicago's "talls" are cool.  They really seem put off by our cities' bland-ness and our ode to the auto and lousy mass transit -- no surprise there... Also, it's not surprising they really liked Boston, which is a very Euro looking city.  For that reason, I'm disappointed Philly wasn't included; very Euro also (but dirty and nasty... on 2nd thought, maybe it's best they didn't, on 2nd consideration)... Yeah, the jingoistic/thin-skinned American posters were most annoying, esp considering an American poster, Edge25, asked the Euro's oppinion of US cities.  What did they expect, the Euros kiss their asses?  ... get a life people!  Disgusting.

pro'ly my fave post:

 

Washington

 

Good Points: Centre for US democrecy and goverment. Looks quite clean and well structured.

 

Bad Points: Rising crime/murder rate. You might run into G W Bush.

^ I wish I could take a train to Canada. Coming back on 1-75 S through Michigan was like driving on a 3rd world version of a highway and you have to drive through a rundown neighborhood to even get onto that highway.

 

OMG, I know exactly what you are talking about.  That border is an embarrassment and disgrace to our great country.  In fact the southern part of Michigan on I-75 wasn't much better.  The grass didn't look mowed until you cross into Ohio. 

 

On another note, Niagara Falls, NY isn't much better.

The Canadian version of the interstate, the "401" (AKA Mcdonald-Cartier Freeway), seemed under-designed by US standards in the southern Ontario stretch from Windsor to, say, the London area.  Starting at London it turned into a pretty impressive bit of road engineering, equal to the best US high volume expressways.

 

I noticed a lack of services at the exits, too, where you'd find in the US a cluster of gas stations and fast food places). It seems the 401 follows the German autobahn example of clustering the services in rest-areas or service areas (you see this on some US tollroads, too).

 

 

^ I wish I could take a train to Canada. Coming back on 1-75 S through Michigan was like driving on a 3rd world version of a highway and you have to drive through a rundown neighborhood to even get onto that highway.

 

OMG, I know exactly what you are talking about.  That border is an embarrassment and disgrace to our great country.  In fact the southern part of Michigan on I-75 wasn't much better.  The grass didn't look mowed until you cross into Ohio. 

 

On another note, Niagara Falls, NY isn't much better.

 

Just think of how that is the impression of America lots of Canadians share that cross this particular border. If that was my only experience, I'd be tempted to just turn around.

>That border is an embarrassment and disgrace to our great country.

 

No kidding.  Not saying that part of Canada is the best thing that country has to offer either.  And the Niagra Falls area is what our great National Parks would have become too -- imagine the Grand Canyon lined with vacation homes, hotels, ferris wheels, observation towers, and so on. 

 

C-Dawg, if you still have a chance try to take a class from Tom Patin at OU:

http://www.finearts.ohio.edu/art/pages/faculty-staff/art-history/patin.htm

 

He's got a lot of interesting ideas about what's peculiar about America's relationship with nature...to be sure, the pristine wildernesses of Europe were logged and turned into farmland thousands of years ago so the potential for national parks preserving wilderness wasn't there.  The US federal and state governments (park services, EPA, etc.) to some extent work to preserve wilderness areas more than they do specific old structures or neighborhoods.  The idea of private property is also fundamentally different in the US than it is in the rest of the world...although the idea of private property was invented in England it's here where land speculation, subdivision, consolidation, and so on happened in a spectacular fashion.  The township system, homesteading, etc., are pretty much exclusive to the US and I think the echos of that period still affect how people think about individual structures, neighborhoods, and so on here.  Here there is always more farmland to develop and so there is less of a sense that "this is all we've got" like people from a small country like Belgium or Denmark would think and so less attention paid to "ordinary" areas, buildings, or neighborhoods. 

^ I wish I could take a train to Canada. Coming back on 1-75 S through Michigan was like driving on a 3rd world version of a highway and you have to drive through a rundown neighborhood to even get onto that highway.

 

OMG, I know exactly what you are talking about.  That border is an embarrassment and disgrace to our great country.  In fact the southern part of Michigan on I-75 wasn't much better.  The grass didn't look mowed until you cross into Ohio. 

 

On another note, Niagara Falls, NY isn't much better.

 

^^^ to be fair, the grass surrounding 75 in monroe county, mi (immediately north of ohio) is a marshy type, not sod.  it seems appropriate to me since 75 closely parallels lake erie's western shore, hence the marsh.  but i will say that michigan is pothole crazy.  how could it not be, with even more limited transportation options than ohio, besides the car.

^the thing is, Canadians are smart to enough to not judge a city from the highway. They know that most of our shitty/poor areas are placed by highways (no one wants to live there). Highways kill neighborhoods, so it's no surprise that Motown looks rundown. It's not just a Detroit thing either...

Highways also support neighborhoods with exits that make the neighborhood more accesible. When exits are taken out for safety reasons, many communities oppose it because it prevents people from getting off on that exit, where they would be spending money in their community.

That's why the I-75 upgrade between Sharon Rd. and Lockland is held up.

The big "joke" from my european friend's when I was in college was the age of my city. "Wow.. you're city is 200 years old?"

 

This came back to a head when Katrina hit, as a guy I kept in contact with said that basically nobody would build a city below sea level in Europe anymore, but America is too young to know better.

 

Anyway, in Europe they would build their cities to protect themselves from attacks. That's why you'll see so many wedged between mountain peaks, or surrounded by water on 2 or 3 sides. Like they took anti-sprawl tactics before sprawl was even a sparkle in big auto's eye's.

This came back to a head when Katrina hit, as a guy I kept in contact with said that basically nobody would build a city below sea level in Europe anymore, but America is too young to know better.

 

And yet The Netherlands continues expanding below sea-level.

^ Details, details!

LOL, perhaps your friend has never been to the Netherlands.

>"Wow.. you're city is 200 years old?"

 

Well the thing is that the majority of the "old" parts of the European cities are maybe one square mile (with a few stretching to about 1.5 miles by 1.5 miles) and most of what appears to be old in Europe is less than 200 years old and in fact a lot of it was rebuilt in the 1950's after the war depending on which city you're in. 

 

Here's Barcelona, a 1,000 or so year-old city, but the actual Medieval part is literally only about the size of a suburban shopping mall and its surrounding parking lot.  The gridded development is all from around 1880 onward. 

 

Oh, and what's this?  And awfully familiar new golfing community just outside Pamplona:

 

 

 

LOL, perhaps your friend has never been to the Netherlands.

 

probably true, he's from the czech republic, and while he talks a good deal about the US, he's like anybody else in terms of his point of reference.

 

I was speaking more towards the whole, "how Europeans view US cities."

 

anyway.. for what it's worth...

Interesting thread there.

[insert usual Suburban Scorn talk here].

 

It'd be nice if US cities would return to actually being cities and real places.

Then again, I'm just some communazi.  Who's gonna listen to me?

 

/bumped

This came back to a head when Katrina hit, as a guy I kept in contact with said that basically nobody would build a city below sea level in Europe anymore, but America is too young to know better.

 

Too bad it was the French who built it... :-D

Much of the housing stock lost in New Orleans was hand built and past down several generations. It's sad, the thought of it being replaced with whats available today.

and most of what appears to be old in Europe is less than 200 years old

 

That's certainly the case with Germany, which experienced its major industrialization era around the same time as the USA.  Yet German citys are built  out denser, in the working class areas.  Bourgouis neihgborhoods are sometimes similar to US suburbs...single family villas set in yards.

 

and in fact a lot of it was rebuilt in the 1950's after the war depending on which city you're in.

 

In the late 1940s and 1950s Gemany and the US both had the same modernist urbanist model to work from, but the Germans rejected it during their reconstruction, pretty much following the old city streets and blocks (you can see the results in Montecarlos' pix of Cologne and Munich). 

 

(the "old" part of Cologne, dating from the 1950s & later)

 

The Americans, however, embraced the modernist model during their urban reconstruction period (AKA "urban renewal"), and rebuilt with lowrise townhouses and apartment towers, set amid in a lot of open space and parking.

 

(Lake Meadows, Chicago)

 

 

>Much of the housing stock lost in New Orleans was hand built and past down several generations. It's sad, the thought of it being replaced with whats available today.

 

Actually most of the destroyed areas in New Orleans look like Dublin-Granville Rd. in Columbus -- 1970's era shopping centers and apartment complexes.  Just like in Europe, only a small part of New Orleans is from the 1700's and early 1800's.  Look on Google Maps -- the French quarter is about one mile by one half mile or a half square mile in a 350 square mile city or .06% of the city. 

 

>the late 1940s and 1950s Gemany and the US both had the same modernist urbanist model to work from, but the Germans rejected it during their reconstruction, pretty much following the old city streets and blocks (you can see the results in Montecarlos' pix of Cologne and Munich). 

 

WEST Germany did to a greater extent than East Germany. 

 

Here's central Munich, this was all destroyed in the war.  You can see that the street paths seem to have been straightened slightly. 

 

Some drab auto-centric apartments outside of Munich:

 

And did I hear someone mention communism?  Moscow:

 

Moscow:

 

Moscow:

 

Moscow:

 

Moscow:

I wonder if sub-prime mortgages are becoming as prevalent in Europe and other parts of the first world as they are here.

Those satellite pictures of Moscow are nasty. I'm looking forward to seeing Cologne and Frankfurt.

WEST Germany did to a greater extent than East Germany.

 

 

Yeah, I was thinking of the FRG.  The DDR rebuilt in the commyblock style...good example was central Berlin.

 

Here's central Munich, this was all destroyed in the war.  You can see that the street paths seem to have been straightened slightly

. 

 

Yes indeed, this happened to one degree or another in all the postwar reconstructions.  I have real good before and after example from Hannover that I might post in a few days. 

 

Those grid street areas on the left hand side of the Munich pix, above and below the train station, where platted in the 19th century, contemporary with US citys.

 

Good show of the suburban Munich eurosprawl.  I am putting togther some pix of German suburbia and will post it soon...they do single family a lot, too, as well as the usual eurostyle high or mid rise slab stuff.

 

Moscow..lol...do I see a big box retail complex?  Da!

 

I knew two girls from a small town between Hamburg and Bremen staying with a friend of mine.  When I told them that I was studying planning the first thing they said was "I hope you don't study the American cities."  And these girls were pharmacy majors.

I knew two girls from a small town between Hamburg and Bremen staying with a friend of mine.  When I told them that I was studying planning the first thing they said was "I hope you don't study the American cities."  And these girls were pharmacy majors.

 

Well it is always good to learn what NOT to do.  But when learning about great planning cities; there are only a couple that turn up in the states...usually we are discussing European cities.

Well I am leaving for Amsterdam, Brussels and Paris next week so I will be bringing back plenty of photos.  This time it is a pure personal trip so I won't have to deal with a work schedule.  I will have a week of Europe all to my self...  oh I can't wait.  I feel like I will eventually move there.  I love my country but Europe is stunning.

 

You can find my world photo gallery here which includes Frankfurt, Cologne, Munich & Paris: http://www.pbase.com/cincyimages/cities

 

Heidelberg is still one of my favorite cities I have visited in Europe:

 

Reading those comments from skysckrapercity.com made me thinking I was living in some parallel universe where all of Europe was inhabited by guys from UrbanOhio.  I don't have any specific quarrels with any any of the comments (except for European1978 who said that "DC is quite flat" and DonQui who said claimed that DC was one of the cities built "before the car".  These guys have clearly never lived in Washington DC and have only been there as tourists.) but the gestalt of the comments were bizarre to me.  It all struck me as pretty superficial.  Boston has "great history".  New York is "dirty".  San Francisco is "liberal".  Chicago is unmentioned.  American cities are going seem "the same" if all you pay attention to is the fact that everyone speaks English and there is usually a grid pattern somewhere.  But clearly the grandeur of New York was almost pre-ordained with its magnificient physical location, while every inch of Chicago seems built with effect, to make a swampy plain into the greatest city on earth.  When I think about Boston I think of a city that has managed, for good or bad to hold on to most of its original conceit while accomodating masses of people that, by their very weight, change that conceit.  Whereas Philadelphia has not.  And in each of these cities there is a classic or representative style of townhome that I immediately think of as being of the town.  But you can have fun in any of these towns.  All that usually takes is some cocktails and a couple of chatty girls.  And let's face it, when you stay out late in any of those European cities you have to take a cab or walk home anyway.