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I see them as hell on earth, but apparently the people living there are happy with them. Going by train from my old suburbanized village to Amsterdam I always passed the Vinex "Weidevenne" near Purmerend. I remember a couple of middle-aged English women talking about the 'nice houses' so 'near to the water'. It's beyond me how anyone can like these things, but maybe I'm just too judgemental.
You can see plenty of the atrocities through a google image search.
Really great diary. I still dream of my self-sufficient house by the riverbank one day, when I retire in 40 years or so. But it's the city for me now. It's great to read about these things -- decentral energy production in the city, community, organisation, design... it's a way of thinking I don't grok yet at all.
The problem with this Vinex housing is that it was thought up by bureaucrats for the middle classes, for whom avantguardist or just progressive thinking is not thought to be relevant. A kind of soft bigotry. It's just house, tree, car, and how do we give them their own without turning the whole country into an American style suburb. More thinking was applied to the management of masses and transportation than to how these people would live.
I see them as hell on earth, but apparently the people living there are happy with them.
Ripping on the suburbs is a form of elitism (of which I am also guilty). When looking back to the origin of the suburbs I absolutely cannot blame people for their enthusiasm. Could you honestly tell someone living in cramped, noisy, crime ridden cities like NYC in the early 20th century that they can't have that affordable house in the suburbs due to its poor aesthetics, unsustainable nature, and lack of neighborhood community? If you are for a more egalitarian society, doesn't that have to extend to material concerns as well?
There is no shortage of counterpoints to be made, of course, that can and do fill many books. Once the automation, energy, and materials were available for a mass market, though, they were absolutely going to be used for that purpose. Whether or not it could have been done in a different manner more suitable to human happiness is the only question I am interested in now.
you are the media you consume.
We had some speeches in the French Assembly in 1840 that tells of African villages at the doors of Paris (no African people there, mostly from center of France), that it was a shame... That we should build transient cities (Cité de Transit) to teach those people about how to live in the City... On century after we did build them !
Maybe that's why I speak of the "drift" of the City :-) "What can I do, What can I write, Against the fall of Night". A.E. Housman
A further difference with many American suburbs is that the houses in Europe tend to be built to last, in America there is often a lot of cheap, throwaway material being used on otherwise quite sizeable houses, which is a strange attitude (I think) to housing. An extreme focus on the exterior, while neglecting the character. This fits in with the fake plastic capitalism of America -- treating houses as perishable commodities with built-in obsolescence.
(this is probably a rather prejudiced sweeping generalisation based upon watching too many librul hollywood movies, but I think part of it sticks)
Your point about elitism is spot-on. Still, as margouillat says, it's undesirable to have people living in suburbia. So you have to think about the institutions and the cultural image that lead to people to live in them.
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