Cities

dropped your flag

Philadelphia, because it's where I'm from, where I live and where I work, my home is every sense.

Huaraz in Peru because I stayed there for a while and it's fucking beautiful and the people are wonderful.

I like Baltimore and Atlanta a lot, they're culturally very similar to Philadelphia.

San Francisco is beautiful aesthetically but an absolute bourgeois shithole, unbearable to interact with anyone or anything there. Damn shame really, wish I could have seen it in the 40s.

pic related is Huaraz and the mountains right by the city

Of course urbanization is horrible for the peasants in Peru and Ancash province is really poor, but living there for a while went a ways in radicalizing me for sure.

You watch too much animu

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Chicago, because I come from the area and it has a strong labor history. The architecture is almost unrivaled as well. Pics related.

REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

Drive on the road before you criticize it. Also, if you think that's bad, there's a water treatment plant literally on the Lake.

AMERICA
I remember on KC, Americans would post outside threads with only pictures from their cars.

Stop living in cities.

Chicago has great public transportation. I'm just saying the road provides great views. Also there's a beach and a park in the pics. It's not like we never leave our houses or cars. Although, our public transportation and infrastructure as a whole is lacking tbh.

greens must go

well I loved florence when I visited, the whole city is beautiful

I live in Burgerstan tho so all our cities are ugly as shit.

G R I D S
R
I
D
S

and?

Other than my home city, probably either Paris, Kobane, or Athens.

good taste
London and Geneva are my favorite cities of those I have visited.

yeah when it's not polluted. and retard people that can't not drive.

gimme my Arcologie Utopia

I dont really have a favourite city. My city is shit because its 100% post-ww2 due to the fucking nazis.

Amsterdam is a fucking shithole due to the tourists, but the old dutch inner cities layouts is pretty as fuck and very nice.

What makes a city beautifull is a consistency of architectural constraints and styles. All houses should be roughly the same height, ideally not more than 3-4 stories (anything else is inhuman and imposing). They should have limits of architecture within which there is variety. This means no cappie or commie blocks, but true variety between houses in the same street. Cities should be car-unfriendly, this can be achieved by smart planning in advance or blocking streets for cars, with electronic bolders to allow local residents and emergency personnel to pass. Pic related. Cities should be traversed with public transportation, bikes and walking, and cities should be designed so it is possible to do so. This means no suburban sprawl, but distributed countryside towns. A town should ideally not be larger than 10-20km across, which is a comfortable 0.5-1 hour bike ride either way.

Glass pillars can fuck off. Cars can fuck off. Capitalist architecture can fuck off, concrete can fuck off. Cities are supposed to be for people, not cars and banks.

Also berlin is a fuckugly city because it was bombed. Venice is very pretty but it stinks like death and is way too crowded with tourists.

I choose more based on territory not what was built there.
I like beaches so California or Miami are fine for me. Surf is something I love.

stop being spooked to shit.

No meme intended, la havana truly is the most beautiful city i've ever seen.

No

I live in Helsinki, neat

what makes you like it so much?

The old town buildings, which are very few basically look like S.t Petetrsburg's old buildings. So if you want to imagine Helsinki it's like a mix of Stockholm and S.t Petersburg

quite comfy

lmao, I go to school in the large building behind the statue

Deurbanisation and a return to agrarianism please. The old cities should be abandoned or razed with few historical exceptions. New communes integrated with the countryside connected by a network of excellent public transport. Also remove roads.

Edinburgh, best city in the world.

Why does something need to be small, to be human?

Unironically Berlin.

Thats boring af

I've lived in Prague for a bit and that city is amazing. Perfect population size (1.1 million I believe), great architecture, walkable, lots of parks and hills, and easy public transport. My ideal city will have all of these. I'm in Innsbruck right now and it's Prague but smaller with more mountains. Big cities like Paris or NYC give me anxiety I like smaller cities and towns, feels more personal. Someone mentioned Barcelona and would have to agree

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to be realist socialist cities are going to look awful

wrong

Living in a high rise is not a pleasant experience. Very little community exists between neighbors. Living in a 30 story building, I knew the names of two other residents. Living in a single family house, I was on good terms with everyone else on my street.

Say hi to Fjordman.

This not due to the nature of the building, it's about the nature of place. In the past, place and community were almost one and the same, today community is used to indicate a likeness that is placeless (the gaming community, the transgender community). My grandmother lives in a high rise building designated for the elderly, it's a place where everyone knows everyone because the people who live in it are settled there, they aren't transient, their likeness is their place. I live in a residential street build in the 19th century, the sort of humanly cobbled street that is supposed to bring people together, but apart from one neighbor I hang out with, I barely know my other neighbors because our differences have a separation in them transcends our physical nearness.

Yeah I really like the architecture and it does feel like a cross between stockholm and st petersburg. The street cars are cool. I liked linnanmaki because I'm into that sort of thing. Having a the Harbour there adds to the whole atmosphere. There seemed like there was a lot of public areas to enjoy yourself and the city just seemed very pleasant. I have also been to stockholm and it had a lot of those things minus the st. petersburg architecture and really liked it but idk I found Helsinki more lovable.

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suburbs should be razed

You're not incorrect.

Americlap who hasn't left the country since I was young

In terms of location, when I visited Salt Lake City it was pretty with the mountains and lake.

In terms of culture, Baltimore is pretty cool. Haven't went to Chicago or Detroit but I admire their ties to leftism.

I'm from New York City and I have a love/hate relationship for this place. On one hand whatever isn't gentrified bourgie crap I'm really fond of and it's my home and all that crap. On the other hand porky and his trust fund kids constantly expand outwards and take more and more of our city and they've already taken a big was chunk out of it.

Man Berlin is huge and offers a huge variety of stuff for many different interests. And the reasons for tourism to come here are not really the same reasons why people like to live here. Often they are even in conflict.

Berlin has a very diverse set of architecture stuff like Karl-Marx-Allee to the small houses in very green areas at the border to Brandenburg, the two city centers of former east and west Berlin ect. so depending on where you live your daily experience differs a lot. There are some areas which are very central in the west which i last visited years ago. Personally I really like Berlin for its many Parks, trees and green areas, stuff like Tempelhofer Feld is pretty unique. There are also many lakes at the outskirts easily reachable by bike and the amazing public transport(its amazing but its so integrated into most peoples lives that every problem creates massive complaints), and depending on where you go you can be almost alone at some lakes (which makes it possible to have small parties there without much problem). While not being a great city to bike in in comparison to many nordic cities its still very fun and makes it possible to get around fast. Berlin is also sorrounded by the state of Brandenburg, which in some areas is the least densely populated in all of Germany and to the north has the amazing Mecklenburger Seenplatte, most immigrants never seem to realize this and suffer because they dont know that huge nature areas are only an hour away by train.

If you live here culturally there is also much choice. There are many different cinemas, from huge mainstream ones, outdoor cinemas, to smaller program cinemas, to super small artsy ones showing shitty student movies and everything in between. There is a big movie scene apparently too. Its big enough and diverse enough to have a good choice of bands that come from all over to Berlin. Many art galleries too but they seem hipster af mostly and I am not into that.

Food is also pretty good, with some famous staples like Döner easily avaible, even thing previously hard to get like good Mexican food seems to become more common with the ongoing gentrification.

For tourists there is much to see if you like museums and history you can spend weeks in them and there is much to see from all eras. Especially architecture can be interesting. There is to much different stuff(and not just in Berlin, half an hour away is Park Sanssouci a great beautiful park full of palaces n shit)and to much shit happend in this city that I could do an overview here, ask if you are interested in something specific.

And there is of course the nightlife, many cheapish bars, shitloads of clubs(and many are good, not just the internationally famous ones like Berghein, Sysiphus ect.), if you are into techno this is heaven. I am not really, I am more into psytrance but even in the winter I have atleast 3 events every weekend to chose from. Shops are open all night, selling cheap beer and food, and getting drunk in parks ect. is no problem. Weed is a misdemeanor and if you get caught with less than 10g you most likely wont get prosecuted. Smoking in public is no issue as long as dont do it right in front of the police.

Politically its fairly leftist, depending to what you compare it too. Radicals are mostly anarchists. City gov is a left coalition which is pretty ok for socdems. There are many leftist venues, and bars which are mostly pretty cheap and keep punk alive here.

There are also many downsides and there are more than enough people who think that Berlin is a horrible place for various reasons.

But you really have to be a bit more specific about your interests to receive more useful suggestions.

Same gut here. I'd like to add on that there are other disgusting bits to this city besides the gentrification. The part I live in is a separate island to the south that pretty suburb ish for most of it except the very North but is considered to all be apart of the city. What's gross about this place is that it's filled with very conservative upper middle and upper class ultra Americanized Italians and irishmen that have at least 2 cops in their family. Blue lives matter flags are fucking everywhere and it's gross.

Also I'm going to Galway, Ireland and potentially visiting Dublin and if anyone can tell me what those places are like and possibly good places to eat at?

Wow thanks, Genosse
Well there are a lot of things I would like to see. I´m into the different architectural sites and I think the parks and palaces are something I would really like. What would you say are some of the nice places regarding those would be? And there any solid museums that are must sees? And I think you´re right checking out Brandenburg and Mecklenburg would be a good idea.

Stockholm. Mostly because I live there
Convenience and aesthetic.
It depends. I think culture will play a bigger part in its looks than the Soviets let it.

is Stockholm being gentrified hardcore?

My rent hasn't gone up yet so it's not affecting me.

The poor areas are being gentrified to fuck though. So fuck that.

Lots of history and old buildings are comfy imo. Budapest is a beautiful city that comes in mind.

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You learned nothing. Congratulations.

Stockholm is probably the best city I've ever been in for a prolonged period of time. It's clean, human scale, efficient transport systems, parks and water everywhere… you can literally walk across the whole city proper in a few hours, like I did once. Perhaps its only flaws are that its a bit too homogeneous (needs more modern architecture) and its cultural offer is not as abundant, diverse or lively as other great places like Paris. Well and the dark shitty winters.

Read Jan Gehl, Life between Buildings. Or Cities for People. Also Christopher Alexander, The Timeless Way of Building and A Pattern Language. Would give pdfs but I have these on dead trees.

It almost entirely has to do with understanding human perception and human psychology and biology. The dimensions and qualities of streets, rooms, buildings are related to our bodily capacity to move, to navigate, to comprehend, to see patterns, and to relate to others. We have reached an accumulation of understanding where we can have a truly scientific architecture (and not the naive functionalism of modernism 1.0 or the trials and errors of pre-modernity) if only we could get rid of capitalism.

Most of the cities that grew or reformed in the 19th century and up to ww2 had pretty much everything solved. Modern enough to integrate industry and electricity, trains and public transport, parks, sanitation and other amenities and solutions for large populations, yet still pedestrian and human scaled; before cars and heavy industrialization came to build thoughtless, shit cities. Indeed those 19th, early 20th C. cities are some of the best cities today, and had little trouble with integrating cars and now getting rid of them again.

Read a fucking book. The grid structure is without doubt the best practical urban organization yet conceived and proven in actual usage since thousands of years.

Your post was really great but concrete did nothing wrong comrade. It's an exceptional material with wonderful and unique properties when used intelligently. But it has been abused much like glass has…

Blogpost continued…

Only up to a point. The issue of community has been discussed to death in architecture theory. It is easy to isolate people and thus forcibly destroy or severely hamper community formations but it is much more harder if not impossible to force community formation through architecture. You can build a fucking oasis but you can't make the horse drink. Community is the result of shared activities and goals which happen on public spaces, not housing building geometry. The internet goes to prove this point. As an architect you can only provide a stage that enables a diversity of activities and allow easy access to it but have zero control of what will ultimately happen there. Ancient cities have seen myriads of political regimes come and go, millions of people with different family units, business communities, religions… architecture is not deterministic of society, though it has an influence.

You do touch upon an important aspect which is transience. Capitalist forces that make most people rent a place means they feel little need to get involved with their neighbors, neighborhood, building maintenance and local politics. You're only there temporarily and own (control) nothing, and so is everyone else you meet. But if you own or live long enough in one place you become more interested in its fate and have the time to meet other people in public spaces and engage in group activities. (One could even relate it to rep democracy where long term planning is made near impossible by the constant rotation of politicians with short-term interests).

Burger style car cities have destroyed public space by turning the street to the motor vehicle and therefore severely hamper communal activities. Then of course they replaced it with malls where public life is reduced to conspicuous consumption.

Beyond a naive but accurate understanding that tall buildings are isolating, there are several factors. The isolation has to do with our perceptions, past 5 stories its near impossible to hear or recognize people on the street, therefore separating you from the public life (or vice versa, looking up).

The dimensions also work well with a decent street width to provide a pleasant outdoor environment with trees, natural light and sky, not oppressive and dark like with skyscrapers.

Another is to do with the fact that 4-5 stories is pretty much the limit where people will tolerate climbing stairs. Of course you can use elevators but they take up space and are energy and maintenance hungry (building super talls is capitalist insanity, elevators gobble up enormous amounts of floor area the higher you go, not to mention the structural costs… they make up for the inefficiency by charging exorbitant amounts).

Another, and more compelling aspect, is that about 5 stories (definitely no more than 8) provides an ideal amount of space for an optimal urban density… less is inefficient, more creates congestion (as long as city mobility networks are essentially two-dimensional).

Bullshit it's not. There is no yard to take care of. There are barbeque parties on the roof. There are sports parties in the common areas. There are gyms and indoor pools. There is centeral air and heating. Salesmen and bill collectors cannot get into the building. You never have to do any maintainance. You don't even need a car, because there are busses and trains within walking distance. You never lose power during storms. There are no groups of kids running around breaking shit. You don't even need a designated driver to take you home after a party. Your commute to work is a literal walk.

Living in a highrise is the shit.

There is a shoreline bike path and parks/beaches in-between Lakeshore drive and the lake.

Hardly positive. But fixable.
Depends more on people than buildings.
Usually those things in capitalist society don't exist but in expensive bourg buildings and absent in the majority of cheap housing. Though technically you're right that those things are *possible*.
Fucking bullshit, *someone* has to do maintenance, goddamn porky. High rises are not magical. On the contrary, the larger the building the more critical maintenance of it becomes, and often more expensive even if the cost is distributed.
That is about urban structure and public transport and completely separate from high rises as a typology; I live in a hellhole where there are high rises and you need a car and zero busses, trains, and fucking no sidewalks.
More bullshit. Some power grids are complete shit and very few buildings have generators, besides this doesn't have anything to do with building geometry as well. Any building might be made storm resistant regardless of size, even off grid (although its extremely hard for large vertical ones to be energetically self-contained).
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Again with things that are about not high rises.

Living in a high rise is not (necessarily) complete shit, but most of your arguments are. RAFB and try again.

also where is the papa marx statue?

Brazilia is pretty neat.

My Favorite is Nuuk, Greenland

Unfortunately there really is not an existing example that I could point to in regards to what I would consider an ideal city.

I do hope these pictures are able to communicate what design elements my ideal city would feature however.

Not to turn this into sharing vacation slides, but I spent three months in Prato, a few miles from Florence, and it's a pretty stunning place with strong red history, though I managed to stay within the old city walls with everything centrally located, so I'm biased, perhaps. The usual gush American-in-italy cliches apply, i.e. everything is so close by, the food is so good, the pace of life is more manageable, etc, but to me it's the best balance I've seen between modern urbanism and natural localism without either becoming suffocating on one end or backwoods on the other. It's for people like me who want what a city can provide while still giving you elbow room. It sports the Centro Pecci, probably one of the coolest modern art galleries I've seen, plenty of bookstores, affordable tenement housing, and a street still currently named after Karl Marx, the neighboring Pistoia having a street named after Gramsci.

Staten Island? Im from Northeast Philly, same thing, suburban feel and all holier than thou white cops and firemen who blame everything on black people even tho pretty much everyone has multiple siblings and friends who shoot heroin and live in the ghetto and only arent destitute themselves because theyre fucking class traitors

What do you call this art and where do you get it? I just love it.

How embarrassing

Brutalism was a mistake

ghastly

what the fuck

All of those houses are made of paper mache, popsicle sticks and debt.

I bet most units are empty

I'm from Melbourne. Yes, it's full of liberals, but I love how anti-conservative it is.
And in terms of the city itself, the younger generations have reclaimed the colonial buildings - which are beautiful from an architecture perspective, but have an authoritarian feel to them. By turning these buildings into social places like cafes and restaurants, and the all the funky street art… It's a beautiful place.
In terms of the liberals, you will find a few "trots", market socialists, anti-fa types, etc - but no one quite like Holla Forums. I love the city all the same.

cities are already car unfriendly.
things that make cities car unfriendly:
-retarded city planning
-zero parking spots and/or insane parking spot fees
-other cars (this is the worst one).

And since everyone is posting city porn

You will have to be specific in regards to what art you are referring to.

Brutalism is love, Brutalism is life.

Melbourne is the id-pol capital of the southern hemisphere.
It would only be a positive if the entire area were carpet bombed with nukes.

That third picture depicting a bunker facility, and the fifth depicting the office, which I wager is probably brutalist.

That was just something that I pulled off google images.

As with almost all of my Brutalist pictures, taken from the odd Brutalist architecture thread on 4/his/.

Correct.
Isn't Brutalist just beautiful on both the inside and out?

on its own, but i dont like it when it clashes with some old neoclassical surrounding.

WIth some care. That 4th picture is uncomfortably imposing.

I agree.
Thankfully there is a very easy solution to that, destroy everything that is not Brutalist.

Protip: the rest of the country is full of reactionaries that make up shit like this

Implying that I fucking haven't.
I happened to be in that fucking horrid city during some SAlt organized conference.
It was a miserable experience.

The would would be much better off with the inner-city proper (plus unis) and its hipster, sjw population reduced to radioactive ash.

lmao
They're the fucking definition of the liberal stereotype that gives Melbourne a bad name

That was literally occurring while I was down there.
SAlt are bad enough as it is, some-sort of national gathering of them was a nightmare.

Have you been to the fucking inner city or to a uni campus?
Those places are fucking hives of id-pol.
It was disgusting.

You know.
Maybe if alot of people share a common set of criticisms, maybe there is something to them?

No, friend.
The people of Melbourne give Melbourne a bad name.