Polycentricity is great for cars and bad for everything else. A walkable, transit-oriented city is one with large job concentration in and near the center, and the European cities you think are counterexamples are rather strongly-centered (Paris, Munich, Stockholm, Berlin...). - ThreadSky

alonlevy.bsky.social • 91 days ago

Polycentricity is great for cars and bad for everything else. A walkable, transit-oriented city is one with large job concentration in and near the center, and the European cities you think are counterexamples are rather strongly-centered (Paris, Munich, Stockholm, Berlin...).

Reposted from YIMBYLAND

Give me your hottest urbanist hot takes

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walrusseal1.bsky.social•90 days ago

What about in the case of Tokyo? Perhaps just out of necessity it’s spread so large and wide but it’s definitely got multiple cores

alonlevy.bsky.social•90 days ago

Tokyo has a very strong primary CBD and strong satellite CBDs within a short distance, about 6-7 km by straight line to Shinagawa, Shibuya, Shinjuku, and Ikebukuro, vs. 15 km Essen-Bochum and 31 km Essen-Dortmund.

lukebro92.bsky.social•90 days ago

So Nuremberg (550k) which has a negative commuting saldo towards Erlangen (110k) and Herzogenaurach (25k) is in a bad position to become a good transit city?

alonlevy.bsky.social•90 days ago

Hmmm, how many jobs are there in Nuremberg overall? Asking because Boston is also very centralized, like New York, but Cambridge has a higher ratio of jobs to residents than Boston (because Kendall Square is really part of the center).

lukebro92.bsky.social•90 days ago

Good question, but I can only give a vibes based answer, not hard data. Nuremberg (and to some extent also neighboring Fürth) has been hit hard by deindustrialization and only partially recovered with new "knowledge economy" jobs

matt439miller.bsky.social•91 days ago

Disagree. Polycentricity is a general emergency phenomenon of transportation and urban economics. We see more of it with cars because cars/car mandates make the costs of higher density prohibitive until much higher land values.

ericcarlschwartz.com•91 days ago

At what scale would you define the center of Berlin to call it strongly centered? Because I tend to think of it as quite polycentric

alonlevy.bsky.social•91 days ago

Everything inside the Ring. Or even the east-west axis between City-West and Warschauer Straße with a blob around Friedrichstraße extending south toward Potsdamer Platz.

ericcarlschwartz.com•91 days ago

Aaah ok makes sense. I was thinking at a smaller scale.

spencerheckwolf.bsky.social•91 days ago

Yeah, office and commercial development drive public transit mode shares more than housing and retail development.

jarekfa.bsky.social•91 days ago

How is this a hot take? Everyone in urbanism looks at LA as a failed paradigm with a low ceiling on transit potential due to its polycentricity.

alonlevy.bsky.social•91 days ago

Everyone thinks European urbanism is polycentric because no skyscrapers. It isn't; the polycentric regions are the more auto-oriented ones.

lukebro92.bsky.social•90 days ago

Managua pre 1972 earthquake: monocentric and subject of this song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kyC1l7LR180

Managua post 1972 earthquake and corrupt "rebuilding" and civil war and "urban renewal" and... "What if 1980s LA but worse?"

tallentire.bsky.social•91 days ago

Polycentricity Just means more than one centre. There's still centres.
A free for all of businesded scattered everywhere i would say I'd quite a different thing and yes. Thats car centric sprawl.

vivalapanda.moe•91 days ago

Based and Bertaud-pilled

weatherdai.bsky.social•90 days ago

all hail external economies of scale

denis.trailin.ca•91 days ago

And yet the planners in Vancouver keep trying to make it happen

mosesnyc.bsky.social•91 days ago

Ruhr Valley?

alonlevy.bsky.social•91 days ago

Much lower per capita public transport usage than the major monocentric German metro areas.

ellenteapot.ca•91 days ago

The bay areas of San Francisco and Tampa: “shit”

alonlevy.bsky.social•91 days ago

San Francisco is one of the most centralized cities in the US, at MSA level.

woolie.meowmeow.city•91 days ago

The Bay Area is not so much poly-centered as much as it is two separate linear cities, each 50 miles long and roughly 5 miles wide, with just 3 connections between them. And also we really fucked up by allowing the big office parks too far from Caltrain and BART.

sictransitphl.bsky.social•91 days ago

Are you counting the entire Yamanote Line as one center, or a dozen?

alonlevy.bsky.social•91 days ago

I'm counting wards comprising about 100 km^2 because I don't have more granular data for Tokyo than the ward level. So I can't even get the exact shape of a 100 km^2 city center, gerrymandering e.g. Shinagawa Station to be in it but not residential parts of Shibuya and Shinjuku.

borners.bsky.social•91 days ago

Netherlands as a country: excellent non-car mode share.
Netherlands as a city-state: Lots bikes and lots of cars, some trains.
Or Kansai, yay polycentrism...wait why does half the population live in Osaka-fu?

tallentire.bsky.social•91 days ago

Osaka fu is huge? Wouldn't really call that a centre. Your centre there would be more ward level or better down to chome.

borners.bsky.social•90 days ago

You're confusing polycentricity of neigbhourhoods with polycentric municipal units. If Holland were a united province in NDL it would be Osaka-prefecture. But Osaka city is more dominant as CBD than Amsterdam or Rotterdam.

lonjil.xyz•38 days ago

Honestly I'd like a form of "polycentricity" where every center was so incredibly dense that it'd suck up the surrounding suburban population. You'd have a region of very dense but not always big cities and towns all connected by trains, with mostly nature and farmland in-between. Zero sprawl.

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