Your Friendly Neighborhood

So recently, as I’m sure plenty of you have heard and humored me about, I’ve developed a serious interest in city planning and decided that I should do a piece on that blossoming passion. I wasn’t sure what to do, I’ve lived in cities all over the world, have friends in towns all over our country, and have visited countless metropolis throughout the globe. But asking “which is best, Ted? Please tell us, we need to know. It’s KILLING us!” is too simple. I want to ask you all, my loyal readers, which city you think is best and why. I’m not talking about the place with the best head shops (SF), or the place with the best transportation (NYC), or the stupidest people (Boston), or the best looking people (LA), I want to know which city you think is planned out the best. It can be anywhere, Kuala Lumpur, London, Vaduz, or Ulan Bataar, but I want to know what you all think from a very technical standpoint.

In the mean time I’ll give you my candidates, sticking mostly to the U.S. and places I’ve spent a good amount of time in and you can just sit there and think about all the amazing, nuanced comments I have. So here goes:

New York City. My home sweet second home. I was discussing this with a friend of mine I met in college and realized that she thinks I’m from California while most of my friends from high school think I’m from New York. I love that. Truth be told I spent less than 2 years in New York after living in that ubiquitous place, right-outside-the-city, CT (for those who don’t get the joke, most people you meet who say they’re from New York aren’t actually from  New York per say. It’s usually a mix of Westchesterians, Greenwichites, and Scarsdalians who want to be from Manhattan so badly that they prey on the unassuming by claiming to be from New York. I was among them, sigh) The years I spent on the upper east side while finally living there and not living a lie taught me a lot about good city planning and is where I can trace my flowering interest in the city from.

Simply put, New York’s planning scheme has been nearly perfect from the beginning of urbanization. Two distinct business zones (midtown and Wall Street), balanced commercial and residential zoning, adequate green space (Central Park was one of the most challenging urban endeavors in the country’s history), and relatively mixed income levels combining in neighborhoods (save for the upper east side and more recently Greenwich Village). This is all well and good for flyovers and 3D modeling, but the truth is that New York’s planning department has been heading down hill since the 70’s and 80’s saw development of government housing projects in all 5 boroughs. Schools have attempted to improve by segmenting themselves into smaller, more focused institutions but are facing the same problems their behemoth predecessors endured. And the biggest building project New York has seen in decades, Brooklyn’s Atlantic Yards Project, is an ostensible humanist project at best. New York is a lot like a ballplayer who is getting a little too old to play his position; he’s trying to do things the way he’s done it but doesn’t realize the game is being played by different rules now. What it needs is a new way to play, or some steroids, both work.

And now for something completely different. Los Angeles. Now, given I’ve never actually lived in L.A., but then again neither has anyone else. But I’ve spent a good amount of my rambling life around it. LA is in a lot of ways the Bizzaro New York; while people from New York hate people who say they’re from New York and are actually from the surrounding areas, people in LA know that you don’t actually live there but somewhere around there. Los Angeles actually refers to a 100+ mile stretch of land north of San Diego and reaching up to Santa Barbara, and anyone who lives in that expanse is for better or worse from LA.

Los Angeles is terribly planned. Plain and simple. The downtown is a ghost town between the hours of 6 PM and 8 AM save for some swanky bars frequented by powerful yuppies. The residential areas, wait Los Angeles has residential areas? Let’s say you want to go from Pasadena to Santa Monica for dinner one night, both of which are within the L.A. county line. Unless you catch the I-10 on those wondrous nights when only a few hundred cars are on it, expect to leave at 6 for 8 PM dinner reservations. Did I mention the two places are less than 15 miles apart? That’s what LA is, a labyrinth of highways and completely separated commercial and residential zones. I mentioned it being the bizzaro New York though, right? Well for all it’s faults, LA still has some of the most breathtaking real estate in the world, some of the most generous homeless programs in the US, and some of the nicest (and best looking) people you’ll ever meet. Los Angeles has in unexpected pleasures and intangibles what New York has in technical masterpiece (though New York has plenty of those other ingredients too), which makes it a terrible city but a really great place.

And here’s what most of you have been waiting for, my 3rd favorite city in the U.S., San Francisco. Given a place is what you make of it, and I’ve made a lot of the city by the bay in my extensive time over the last 5 years. A great place to live, a great place to party, a terrible place to love sports teams (with the exception of the Go-Go Warriors). LA and SF are such diametrically opposed places that I’m surprised by the fact that more has not been made about their mirror images. SF has the technical planning down pat, LA has the real estate that people from all over the world are looking for. If you dropped one on top on another there’s no doubt that San Angeles would rival New York as America’s tourist destination.

Sorry I’m going on about San Francisco’s comparative qualities and not talking about the city itself. Well first of all, the Giants suck, let’s just get that out of the way. Second of all, SF proper has done an amazing job with the space it’s been given. Originally of course, cities were built on hills for defense purposes, you can see it in many of the classic metropolis’ of the world. I see such distinct similarities between Istanbul and San Francisco that I’m wondering if the SF’s planner wasn’t a Turk. The difficulties of building a modern city on a hill are obvious, water drainage, building integrity, transportation difficulties, the list goes on and on. San Francisco has handled each with a stunning amount of grace and precision. A well manicured grid system has kept road traffic light, a bus system that is both sustainable and well-directed, and a populous that is knowledgeable and vigilant have made San Francisco the Paris of America. If you’re into that.
Last and certainly least is Boston. Now I’ve only lived in the city for slightly under a year but already the planning has driven me insane enough to actually apply to Department of Transportation and the MBTA in the hopes of making things a little better. From afar, Boston is an obvious mix of old and new. Certain areas are rounded and roundabout much like farm roads while others are strict grids based on the Mormon model (yes most gridded cities are based on a model from those yokels in Utah, dear Lord the irony). This makes for roads that split off and turn without warning leaving most out of towners lost and angry, adding to the dismal driving that Boston harbors (NB: people think New York drivers are some of the worst, this is a common misconception. They are just extremely aggressive but equally knowledgeable. Boston drivers are the previous without the latter).

It might sound like Boston draws most of my ire in terms of city planning, and well you’re right. There are some great areas, don’t get me wrong, but Boston suffers from an overabundance of bars and a lack of truly cosmopolitan ambience which any city worth its salt knows is important. And it’s road system and public transportation is one of the worst I’ve ever seen. Cambridge is cool though.

So there’s my list. Feel free to yell at me, tell me I’m wrong, call me names, the usual. I’m sorry I didn’t get to the international cities but I would have been getting above 2000 words doing that so I figured most of you would be bored enough with the 1500 I already have. I want to hear from you all! That’s why I write!

Bonus: Irvine, CA might be the best planned city in the world. There is no blade of grass that was not placed there with the overall plan in mind. I tell you man, those White and Chinese planning teams can really do conformity well. Take a look at its stats and you’ll realize that if there was ever technical perfection in “urban” planning, Irvine would be it.