At any rate, bars DO exist in the United States and last I heard they didn't all go out of business in the last week.
Contrast this with public spaces that are attended by diverse people, because their attendance isn't constrained by ability to pay or having a particular interest.
The advantage of a public space is that it isn't an exclusionary club.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_modern_sovereign_state...
But sure I'll trust you in telling me this is a much older civilization than Greece. Makes sense.
Where Greece has it over your region is Paleolithic Greek history which stretches back further.
The Caddos would be the closest to making cities in the area, but the people living around there date back over a thousand years these larger communities we might call towns were still mostly small enclaves that didn't last more than a few hundred years at the longest mostly. And they were mostly a pretty recent, being a few thousand years newer of a civilization than Greece et. al., as they appeared well after 1,000CE
Meanwhile Athens and what not can easily be seen as an actual city even 2000BCE.
Which part of the Texas history link is incorrect?
Civilisation is civilisation . it comes with and without attributes such as cities and agriculture .. the point made is that the timelines in Texas strecth back 13,000 years.
> has little impact to the discussion of it's urban development.
Their urban development consisted of light footprints, seasonal migration in worn patterns, walking, etc.
That can be contrasted with how contemporary US citizens live, how the Dutch live, how varies other people still live today.
The city I live in practically didn't exist until very modern times. The fact some people used to to hunt around here 16,000 years ago has little impact to the modern way the city was laid out and designed or the people who mostly live here today.
There's practically zero way to draw the roots of this town back to some group that camped here 16,000 years ago. Any form of lineage of civilization was lost a looooong time ago. Extremely few people would even draw their roots back to the Caddo, who are far more recent than anyone you're suggesting here.
Some communities move - Not a hard concept for most.
Insane you're really arguing a suburb of North Texas is older or at least as old as Rome or Athens.
So yeah, as an identity, this area is extremely young in comparison. It absolutely does not draw its roots back 16,000 years. We are not an extention of the Caddo people, they were not an extension of the first peoples who were here.
> Because we have mainstreets, buildings, blocks, community centers, parks, American-style squares...
Seems to me we're talking urban design here! That's kind of the whole point of the article, looking at urbanism in Europe to the US. Maybe you're imagining some other topic, but urbanism is deep in the discussion overall. I don't think nomadic groups had a lot of thought to how wide their highways were or planning our their parking lots.
That's your strawman.
I merely pointed out the area you live in has a long history of civilisation.
As pointed out in part by @1659447091 upthread, and as does North America in general - there was a great variation in culture across that area, some parts had very stable communities and reportedly taught the Europeans a thing or two about trade agreements and democracy <shrug>.
There's an odd bit in the HN guidelines
Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously;
You have a nice life. All the best.
It was a throw to now removed usage by the person I replied to in this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46342642
That and a few other choice phrases were well over the line.
They significantly edited their comments after I started using their own words in my replies.
Cleaning up after I quote the guidelines citing their usage leaves me looking the worse .. but so it goes.
I have a genuine interest in human history across the globe, they had a visceral reaction to the mere suggestion of prior occupation and use of land in Texas .. let's just mark that down to them having a bad day.
There is evidence of major construction projects, large trade centers/complex societies along the Mississippi Valley covering large areas with a trade network across the mid/eastern/southeast US. Watson Brake is currently the oldest* at ~3500BCE[0], but less studied and smaller. Poverty Point ~1700BCE[1] is more like a city or major trading hub. The effort to build the mounds and ridges is far more impressive than is likely from a roaming tribe. The construction is not haphazard, there is evidence of housing and many astronomical markers/alignments throughout the mound builder cultures of North America.
Cahokia Mounds[2] (far more recent) is considered an urban settlement, occupied from around 800CE and at its peak 1050-1150CE, thought to be larger than London or Paris at that time.
* Watson Break was discovered in the 1980's and the 6th mound at Poverty Point discovered in 2013. There could be many more that have been overlooked/undiscovered or razed -- being that we still don't fully understand them and they hardy look like what we are use to.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watson_Brake
But, these things are practically entirely disconnected to the societies of people living in the US today. And that's the point I'm making, this area is very young in terms of what is here now. That some other group developed something like a city several hundred miles away thousands of years before this town existed has effectively zero impact on the development of this place and the lives of the people who live here. This isn't necessarily the same for cities that have existed for hundreds or thousands of years which still even has some of the same streets and buildings of history.
You'd be hard pressed to find a single structure still used here today that was older than 1940 in this town outside of a few notable rare examples dating back to the 1920s, that's a closer example to my point. What's the age of the oldest building in Paris? How about London? Athens? Trier? These are places that have had a practically uninterrupted flow of people living in dense urban places for many hundreds to thousands of years. This is just not true for massive parts of the US. Few cities draw their roots back to even the 1500s, with many having their roots go to the 1800s or even newer.
The Republic of Venice, Holy Roman Empire, and Poland-Lithuania Commonwealth were all still around when America was founded.
Malta was still under the control of the Crusaders. Mongols still occupied Crimea.
The modern European map really comes from the 19th and 20th centuries.
Many European memories of nationhood are quite fake, and often deliberately so.
But also, we only hear the loud, lonely voices yelling online. The people that aren't terminally online, and have great offline community aren't going to go find places where people are being depressing lonely and try and get everyone to touch grass. In science, that'd be a sampling bias.
The crime wave of the 80s and 90s really messed up urban architecture.
Parks got a similar reputation- even now there’s still a “good park”/“bad park” mentality.
Mass surveillance has its downsides, but safer public spaces is not one.
Oh, that's what the main train station in any western European city exists for.
Citation needed.
I love this book, and it is used in many Urban Planning courses. She notes that Rockefeller Plaza works because it borrows life from the city. It is surrounded by offices, shops, restaurants, transit and used all day by different groups (workers, tourists, skaters, diners). Rockefeller Plaza succeeds because it is intensely connected to daily life and fed by continuous pedestrian traffic.
Other reasons my european mind can think of why this doesn't work in the US:
- weird car-centric zoning regulations that lead to weirdly unorganic space use. Where I have my grocery store, my gym, my record shop and my doctor all within walking distance of my home that would be often utopian in the US. Good spaces are mixed spaces, and for that mixing has to be allowed
- generally an egoistic cut-throat society, where some would rather burn the money, than risk the chance of having someone else profit from it. But good public spaces thrive from the surrounding owners caring about the public spaces and the people within it as well.
- commercial interest trumps everything. In Europe many nice places are surounded by shops/redtaurants that are family owned for generations. And while economics do play a role also in Europe, they are not the be-all and end-all, when it comes to decisions. If your business has meaning to your whole family, you decide differently than a faceless megacorp that looks to extract value like a leech from everything that makes life worth living
teeray•1mo ago
ofalkaed•1mo ago
WarOnPrivacy•1mo ago
For some minutes during a few months, in a minuscule % of a massive number parking lots.
It doesn't feel like an in-kind replacement for what we've lost.
ofalkaed•1mo ago
vel0city•1mo ago
Compared to a public park where anyone is free to loiter and play. Plus parks are usually segregated from cars so you don't have to worry about a random car not paying attention killing you, the ground isn't hot pavement everywhere, there might be playground equipment and benches and picnic tables, etc.
ofalkaed•1mo ago
vel0city•1mo ago
Every Walmart, every Target, every big store has its own parking lot that is private property.
ofalkaed•1mo ago
vel0city•1mo ago
So not the city, the stadium corporation (which might have ties to the city, but usually a wholly separate organization) or private third parties. Like I said.
> they are more willing to sacrifice their mostly empty weekend lots.
Once again I've had a lot of very mixed experiences on this one. Some don't care, some see it as an insurance liability. I've spent a lot of my life adjacent to commerical property management, I can't imagine most of these groups being thoroughly OK with unknown groups using their lots for whatever. Seems like a good chance to get sued.
hulitu•1mo ago
Not when you own a BMW or Audi.