Vacant lot in Springfield vs typical development in Tokyo's Nerima wardpic.twitter.com/lQpvHdBL95
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Vacant lot in Springfield vs typical development in Tokyo's Nerima wardpic.twitter.com/lQpvHdBL95
Hilarious part to me is that the house in the upper left corner of the Springfield pic is about the same size as the ones in the Tokyo pic. Could fit 25 such houses on that vacant lot easily, but have an American design it and you'd only fit about 6
I mean damn just look at the difference in road widths--granted Boston Road is a major arterial, but there's still the parking lot access road etc...
Funny how (to me) Tokyo looks way worse from above, but way better from street-level. Obvious which one you should prioritize, but I could see how city planners would get fooled, looking down at a map.
To be fair, the only way Springfield would ever look good from street level again will require some sort of thermonuclear weapon. For a better comparison, look at somewhere more comparable to Japan's average prosperity level like Somerville, Arlington, Brookline, or Cambridge.
sure, I was just struck by how many houses could fit on that vacant lot when I was out inspecting bus stops in the area--that's what prompted the tweet
All snarking aside, what's fascinating to me is the utterly insane volume of wasted/underutilized space in the hundreds of large cities here that have been left behind by the new urbanism boom, particularly in light of the skyrocketing real estate costs in the ones that haven't.
the wasted space (and its contribution to overall impoverishment) in our stagnant cities is definitely on my mind a lot--but it's not surprising that high real estate costs in other cities haven't changed things for them...
...mainly because they're just too far away to benefit from places which are still thriving--they only *work* when they have functional economies of their own
it's like that tedious cliche about "why do Americans need to build dense when we have S P A C E" as if all the acreage in, say, Wyoming makes an ounce of a difference to people trying to live and work in, say, Boston
Or for that matter, all the acreage in WESTERN MASS vis-a-vis the people trying to live and work in Boston
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