Quote:
Originally Posted by badrunner
You fetishize it but you have never been to Japan (or Cupertino for that matter). You just have opinions. Tokyo is one of my favorite cities in the world, and I often compare it favorably to my own city, but the housing stock there is a weak point. Everyone knows this. It's mostly generic postmodern boxes, not traditional architecture. Many houses are built to be disposable - to last one human lifetime. It's not something that California homeowners are looking to for inspiration. Sorry to inform you of this. In fact, any halfway decent suburb in California has much higher quality housing stock than 90% of Tokyo. And now you know.
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I don't intend to be arrogant, but I'm hardly ever surprised by any place I visit, whatever the country. I'm so interested about geography, history and urbanism that my research lasts way more than the actual travel.
I've never been to Japan, but I have close Japanese-Brazilian friends that have lived there and be sure I'm very very familiar to Japanese cities layout and urban form. And California, well, aside being the centre of world media, Hollywood, I'm on an urbanism forum dedicated exclusively to the US cities for the past 13 years. So without false modesty I know one or two things about Californian cities as well.
You might don't like dense SFH residential areas (even using very derrogatory terms to refer to them, "third world", "slum", but
I do. I do like those simple, monotonous Japanese way to build their compact houses. I prefer them to any thing I saw on Cupertino. And that's appearance I'm talking. To actually live there, hands down: Japanese urban form is much superior to me.
Quote:
Originally Posted by mhays
Its advantage is its urban form, not the construction quality or aesthetics.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by eschaton
Honestly, aesthetics are overrated when it comes to urbanism. When you go to the really old sections of a lot of Mediterranean cities, most of the buildings are pretty plain outside of the area around the town square. This makes sense, because the buildings are jammed so close together there is literally no way to see the facades from the streets. The view that people engage with is the "streets" - the pedestrian walkways that you travel down.
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Indeed. Athens, for instance, always deemed ugly but it has an amazing urban form. Make pedestrian life, public transit being viable.
Suburban Atlanta tree cover is beautiful (not Cupertino though), but it's horrible for the environment and urban lifestyle.