It's strange that people are so eager to export (and import) urbanism ideas around the world without much understanding of the cultural differences and needs.
> It's strange that people are so eager to export (and import) urbanism ideas around the world without much understanding of the cultural differences and needs.
It's not even just cultural differences and needs. It's the lack of questioning in decisions and groupthink.
Tax per acre used to be a metric that was used in urban planning decisions. That was mostly thrown away when people started to want cars. A primary metric then became level of service. LOS was a way to measure traffic volume but didn't necessarily mean increased net economic output, although it was nearly used as one. It doesn't paint the picture correctly for municipal urban planning in a financial sense.
For sustained economic vitality in a very simplistic form, the infrastructure and municipal services costs should be subtracted from the amount of tax revenue gained from the land. Basically, is this land making the city money or is it costing the city money. This info can be used to adjust taxes, plan better built environments, amongst other things.
If that was regularly being measured throughout the last 100 years and acted upon, I imagine much of the car dependent areas of the world would look a lot different. If you talk to urban planners today about this (which I have), many still don't use it at all.
Because it feels like prosperity. In a town with no public transportation and very few cars, getting a car would feel awesome. And it's just a lot easier for 1 well-off person to buy 1 car than for the entire town to get good public transit.
> it's just a lot easier for 1 well-off person to buy 1 car than for the entire town to get good public transit.
Sure, once the town is already built for cars. If it wasn't, having a car would be a pain with no parking and no space in the streets.
The question is why cities choose/chose to rebuild themselves for cars in the first place, and continuously in the third world as suggested by the OP and the book "Urbanism Imported or Exported: Native Aspirations and Foreign Plans" by Joe Nasr and Mercedes Volait.
A lot of bad decisions were made in Europe stemming from American city planners after the second world war. Like David Jokinen's influence on Amsterdam and The Hague: https://viewpointvancouver.ca/2019/10/27/the-1960s-when-the-...
It's strange that people are so eager to export (and import) urbanism ideas around the world without much understanding of the cultural differences and needs.