Downtown Houston has that interesting windowless department store, Foley's that was built in the 40s I think. I like that building, I hope it will be preserved. I hear a lot of the old modern landmarks are being threatened with demolition. I also like Houston's new street cars. Very European-looking.

Houston is much better than Dallas, sorry, but it is true. Mad sprawl and traffic, but it does have a core, a heart. Allen Parkway to downtown then over to Med Center and Rice has as much character as any place in Texas. Dallas always seems like a collection of isolated fractured communities who don't really want to know each other....I am biased tho-ugh, as my Dad has lived in Plano for the past 8 years...I hate to visit that place....it like one block surrouned by mirrors.

Interesting. I would definitely agree with you. I go to school in West Texas and have to drive through DFW to get to my school. I hate it as well. When I visit the area with my friends, I am amazed at the amount of concrete and stretch malls. Every road is basically a highway...it is very different from where I am from(Nashville, TN) which is beautiful and has some sense of identity. I have a hard time identifying with the DFW area as far as being able to describe its character. Anyhow, does anyone recommend any books on urban planning and design. I am interested in it. All that I have read really is Le Corbusier's proposals for France and the paper models he refers to of other architects.

Thanks

Houston is doing some pretty interesting things in their downtown right now. Their light rail system is starting to bring some life into the downtown.

I think it's a fascinating city to study how development occurs in the absence of zoning and how planners (yes, there are planners in Houston) work with tools other than zoning. The question is, if Houston is so much like the rest of the southwest, is does zoning really matter?

Wow, I'm in Plano for business, and this place is just like what you guys said. Can't believe every road here is a damn freeway. There's so much space here in between the buildings that I feel like I'm driving in a park sometimes.

mike judge modeled the movie office space after Plano. large corporate complexes and strip restaurants and long drives to work on crowded highways, sounds pretty accurate.

Park.
Office park.

I like the part in Office Space where they walk thru the parking lot grass ditch. Plain Ol' Plano.

Wasn't office space filmed in Austin?

I read once that Kansas City is the most sprawled city in America per capita. Personally I always thought DFW should own that title. Realistically though, I'd say sprawl has caused more destruction in cities like Atlanta and Seattle than has happened around Dallas.

Every time I watch the beginning of Office Space I'm thinking, "That's so 635 from a few years ago."

I think parts of Bottle Rocket were filmed here, too.

Atlanta is beautiful though...DFW is pretty ugly

I grew up in Texas (went to high school in Houston), and I always have a knee-jerk reaction when people complain about how much LA is sprawled out (I currently live in LA). My response is always, "You think it's bad in LA, try Houston."

Yet, for some reason, I have a soft spot for in my heart for Houston. San Antonio is about to be horribly sprawled out, with massive developments going on beyond the outer loop of the city.

And here's an interesting statistic: given that LA is the de-facto exemplar of urban sprawl, so you know that it is also the densest city in the United States? At least that's what Ed Soja (my advisor) says.

yes, bottle rocket was filmed here. used to shop at the taylor's bookstore that they robbed (i miss taylor's - damn half price books for putting every decent bookstore in the metroplex out of business)

the motel in the film is in hillsboro. i know a guy who is a hardcore wes anderson fan that actually took a trip down there just to stay in the same room as in the film.

also the house in the film is the frank lloyd wright house on rockbrook off of northwest highway.

Smoke-

Somerville, Massachusetts has been said to be the densest city in the US, according to some stats I've seen cited when I was in grad school and living in Somerville...

But LA might be the densest metro area. It's all in how you define the density parameters.

I think we need to realize that despite the fact there is sprawl, we need to design appropriately when there is need to move out...

how can new york city not be one of the densest cities in the US?
both in terms of people per sq. foot and overall built-up area:open space

i just cannot believe LA is the densest city in the US

second that.
i thought I lived in the most sprawled city per capita too. several cities must brag that title.

First of all, I think mm's correction is somewhat right ... LA is the densest metro area (it is all about the label and category), but a case can be made for LA being the densest city. As for the whole LA vs. NY density thing, NY is vertically dense, whereas LA is horizontally dense. LA also has more single family housing than NY (this is due to a contorversial piece of legislation passed in 1978 called Prop 13 that froze property taxes ... this allowed developers to build and build without incurring additional property or franchise taxes, and allowed single-family home-owners to hold on to their property and build more. And, keep in mind that most of new housing in LA consists of homes, as opposed to rental units. ... this, combined with a relative lack of mixed-use zoning, contributes to the LA metropolitan area being denser than NY. Also, using only 2000 census statistics as a function of people per square mile divided by total square miles, Los Angeles is America’s densest city. Los Angeles is also the 107th most dense urban area in the world, at 6,310 people per square mile. In comparison, New York City has only 2/3rds the density, at 4475 people per square mile.

You must also keep in mind that LA pretty much stretches out to the borders of LA county, whereas parts of NJ could be considered part of the the NY metro area.

On here is a list of most sprawled US cities. Not sure the source but it's consistent with what I've heard.

http://www.metrocouncil.org/directions/planning/sprawlstudy.htm

The only reason Atlanta doesn't show her sprawl as bad is the trees. Same goes for Houston, Washington DC, Seattle, etc.

My issue isn't so much with lower population density. What concerns me more is that the suburban communities we are building have no sense of place. They are not walkable communities. They do not encourage anything more than living your life out of an automobile and turning your back on your neighbors in your fenced in back yard. And that's not even commenting on the quality of design for most standard suburban spec homes.

Obviously Americans are searching for something to satisify themselves. Unfortunately I don't think they are finding it in 4000sf homes on massive lots.

The suburbs of NY metro area tend to be less dense than the LA ones. NY suburbs usually have bigger lots (1-2 acres) for individual homes than the ones found in LA suburbs. Tract housing (which NY has plenty of too) with small lots is denser than what you'll find in Westchester towns. New communities out west also stop abruptly when they reach the edge of the development, whereas on the east coast, houses tend to gradually spread out more and more until it hits farmland or just past the metro area boundary.

i believe that manhattan is the densest place in the US, but overall i could definetly see LA being more dense as both a city and a metro area. everyone associates NY with manhattan, but in terms of the broad comparison, manhattan really isn't THAT big of an island

23 square miles to be exact. Compared to around 300 or so for the whole city. Less than 10% of all of NYC.

A excerpt from a fabulous article in last October's New Yorker, David Owen's "Green Manhattan".


"My wife and I got married right out of college, in 1978. We were young and naïve and unashamedly idealistic, and we decided to make our first home in a utopian environmentalist community in New York State. For seven years, we lived, quite contentedly, in circumstances that would strike most Americans as austere in the extreme: our living space measured just seven hundred square feet, and we didn't have a dishwasher, a garbage disposal, a lawn, or a car. We did our grocery shopping on foot, and when we needed to travel longer distances we used public transportation. Because space at home was scarce, we seldom acquired new possessions of significant size. Our electric bills worked out to about a dollar a day.

The utopian community was Manhattan. (Our apartment was on Sixty-ninth Street, between Second and Third.) Most Americans, including most New Yorkers, think of New York City as an ecological nightmare, a wasteland of concrete and garbage and diesel fumes and traffic jams, but in comparison with the rest of America it's a model of environmental responsibility."


Here's the full text article, courtesy of the Greenbelt Alliance (half way down the page):

Green Manhattan

Check it out if you get a chance.

related:
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2005-03-06-texas-highway_x.htm

Well if our government's warnings about terrorism and our need to be vigilant are to be believed, then I can't believe someone would propose such a spatially concentrated grouping of infrastructure systems. Kind of the exact opposite of a network isn't it?

According to 2000 U.S. Census data, the most dense city in the U.S., is, by far, Union City, NJ, with 51,606 people per sq. mile. followed by West New York, NJ, with 45,768, Hoboken, NJ: 29,674, New York City: 26,403, Passaic, NJ: 21,890, Maywood, CA: 23,402, Huntington Park, CA: 20,449, Somerville, MA: 18,897, West Hollywood, CA: 18,797, Patterson, NJ: 17,764, Bell Gardens, CA: 17,621, Long Beach, NY: 16,886, and San Francisco, CA, at 16,632 per sq. mile.

Sorry that was so long, i wanted to include San Francisco, my home city.