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Yet most Americans are not young, highly educated Manhattan residents. Young reporters, virtually all of whom live in dense, expensive places like New York or Washington, believe the world is the one they know first-hand, the one in which they and their friends reside. This is not what you read regularly in the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal. Between 20, a net 1.9 million left New York, 1.3 million left Los Angeles, 340,000 left San Francisco, and 230,000 left both San Jose and Boston. At the same time, a net 3.5 million people left our largest metropolitan areas-those over 10 million-while the majority of growth took place in cities under 2.5 million. In the last decade, nearly 90 percent of all metropolitan growth in this country took place in suburban locations, up from the previous decade. The evidence is even more telling in the U.S.
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In Europe, immigration has slightly boosted populations in urban cores, but the flow of domestic migration still heads towards the periphery. This, notes NYU professor Shlomo Angel in his landmark book A Planet of Cities, is true both in developing and developed countries. The growing disconnect between people and planners is illustrated by the oft-ignored fact that around the world the great majority of growth continues to occur on the suburban and exurban frontier, including the fringes of 23 out of 28 of the world’s megacities. The midtown project has prompted Yale architect Robert Stern, a devoted urbanist and no opponent of density, to warn that too much high-rise development creates a dehumanized aesthetic that chases away creative businesses and tourists, while preserving older districts attracts them.
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Novelist Will Self noted the “Wizard of Oz–hollowness” of these structures that seek to inspire but also “belittle us” with the mass, scale, and stand against this great city’s historic grain.Įven in Manhattan, the red-hot center of American ultra-density, eight of the island’s 10 community boards oppose Mayor Bloomberg’s attempts to densify midtown. Densification may be revealed religion to British planners, but this faith is not well accepted by citizens who live nearby. In London, too, attempts to build what the Independent describes as “the tall, the ostentatious, the showy and ‘iconic’” have been widely criticized for undermining the human-scaled nature of London. Similarly in Los Angeles, neighborhood councils have rallied against attempts to build denser buildings, which generate more congestion and erode local character. Singapore, often held up as a role model for densification, has seen growing concern about the destruction of historic structures, ever-more crowded subways, escalating house prices, and lack of open space. Protests over urban development priorities similar to Istanbul’s occurred earlier this year in São Paulo, where the government is accused of putting mega-projects ahead of basic services such as public transport, education, and health care, particularly in the run-up to the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympics. And as the people’s desires continue to run counter to what those in power dictate, the urban future is likely to become increasingly contentious. The grandiose vision of high-rise, high-density cities manifestly does not respond to the actual needs and desires of most people, who continue to migrate to the usually less congested, and often less expensive, periphery. In the United States and elsewhere, people, when asked, generally say they prefer less dense, less congested places to live. There’s just one problem with this brave new condensed world: most urban residents aren’t crazy about it.