Quote:
Originally Posted by Spocket
The reason cities in other countries don't tend to have a central business district is because it makes no sense in most of the rest of the world.
Bear in mind that most cities on earth are far more densely populated than what you'll find in North America (north of Mexico, anyway) That means travel times are much harder to keep short. So why put everything in one place in the middle when you can spread it out? Who wants to spend hours traveling to work? Nobody on earth does and only in the US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand is that model the standard. If anything, they'll build nodes but a central core is more or less out of the question.
If you go to a place like China, you might get somewhere like Pudong in Shanghai or Beijing's CBD but those are just the jewels in the crown rather than the only centers of commerce. Not that it really makes any difference since the entire city is high rises anyway. About the only way you're going to be able to distinguish any building is if it's really tall or set in an expansive layout.
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It’s a bit more nuanced than this, really. Cities in the US also, for the most part, really came into being during industrialization. They developed quickly, and with railroads, which encouraged centralization as lines were built to outward from the center to bedroom suburbs. And these cities were often surrounded by absolutely fuck all - there was a small city, and then there was wilderness.
In Europe, the cities were much larger before industrialization. There were limits on how tall you could practically build, before elevators, and so cities spread outwards. They were de-centralized because most people got around on foot. In London and Paris, among other examples, the (several) main train stations are in a ring on the fringes of what would be considered the central area - which was already too fully developed to be running new surface rail lines into by the time of the steam engine. And as these cities grew, they also absorbed existing towns and villages, many of which were hundreds of years old, and then formed hubs within the metropolis.
A handful of the oldest cities in America (like the New York metro area) are actually more multi-polar, as well (Manhattan is much more than a CBD). The newest American cities (mostly in the West) are also less centralized, because they developed in a post-railroad world. But it’s really trains that made the New World cities of the 19th century so incredibly centralized.