European cities are very much design through urban planning and zoning laws.
They kept evolving during centuries. In French cities for example they destroyed the small alleys to make big roads for cars, and in more recent years we're back to giving priority to pedestrian, bikes and public transportation.
> grown organically around us over a few hundred years
But in the case of Chicago, nobody really lived there until recently. I'd bet that in the last thousand years or more, there were never more than 500 people living in the general area until 1820 or so. The first Europeans in the area were the French, who saw it as an amazingly good logistics hub for shipping between New Orleans and their settlements in what is now Quebec. But they had no real interest in living in Chicago any more than Native Americans - up until the "Raising of Chicago", it was a pretty terrible place to live!
If you are in Chicago and come across a road that is not on a grid with intersections at 90 degree angles, there is a fairly good chance that it is centuries-old Native American path. For example, Milwaukee Ave was a path that led to (what is now) Milwaukee, Michigan City Road was a path that led to (what is now) Michigan City (where it met up with the path that went from (what is now) Detroit to (what is now) Rock Island Illinois on the Mississippi River).
Lincoln Ave was an indian trail that went from Chicago to Waukegan. The Green Bay Trail (Clark Street to Ridge Ave to Green Bay Road to Green Bay, Wisconsin) has seen use since the days of woolly mammoths 12,000 years ago.
The cities rebuilt after WW2 are actually the worst for walkability and overall pleasantness, though in part of course they incorporate elements of the original city and in some cases they've even been rebuilt exactly as they were. Luckily they're a small minority of all European cities, although many jewels are lost forever.
Partly. It depends on how far you go back. The areas within former city walls (where people used to live) have pretty organically developed to being inner city business centers for most larger cities. Rebuilders honored this, but the initial development was probably not conceptionalized as a whole by a human beforehand.
This relates to the fact (and I think this is what the parent poster is referring to) that these cities started way before any cars or bikes existed, so cities had to work for pedestrians.
> The areas within former city walls (where people used to live) have pretty organically developed to being inner city business centers for most larger cities.
Hmmm. I disagree. In (continental) Europe the historical city centres are still the place where people live. Business areas have generally been built outside the historical part, except for the case where inner cities where destroyed in WW2. Maybe that's what you meant?
not to be a stickler but I think that the word would be designed. Otherwise you can apply that statement to anything, it's like saying smartphones weren't designed so much as grown organically. Just because requirements, and technology progress doesn't make it any less design for that time.
A human thinks about the smartphone as a whole, drafts it up and builds it [slightly simplifiedly].
Old cities started as settlements, which more and more people moved to. Those people considered things like walking distance. Maybe they "designed" the places to put their homes, but the thing as a whole was in many cases not planned-through.
And even with the cities that were, pedestrian comfort was the main (or one of the main) concern(s).
> Go to Europe and enjoy your stroll through the public streets of cities that were designed for walking.
Go to Venice and get hopelessly lost. In a hailstorm.
I kid, but, one, that did happen to me, and, two, the Classic European City is pleasant to walk but unpleasant to navigate unless you're head-down over a GPS-enabled phone with turn-by-turn navigation, in contrast to, say, Chicago or Manhattan, where the streets are a grid and you can plot a course almost instantly upon hearing an address.
If you expect everything everywhere to be a grid, sure, your mental model is not reality-compatible.
Thing is, that's also true of most "grid" cities, too - San Francisco offers you two grids, and then ignores both of them in hilly regions. Most cities I can think of in other places also are inconsistent.
There's a great story of some Parisian aristocrats that attempted to flee Paris, but became hopelessly lost! Turns out a map of the city hadn't yet been created.
By living in the same city for your entire lifetime and learning the quirks of the local layout by heart. Accessibility to newcomers was not optimized for.
I don't know, I visited almost every major european city back when portable GPS devices were not a thing, and I never had a problem navigating. Even now, I almost never use the GPS.
In fact the only time I ever got lost in a foreign city was a few months back in New York because instead of going with my gut I trusted the GPS.
I got lost plenty of times in Europe pre-GPS. I typically had a physical map, but this wasn't always sufficient. You'd simply have to fall back in things like payphone calls and asking strangers for help.
Also in places like Venice and Barcelona that are overrun by tourists, asking for directions disrupts the lives of locals. Imagine being asked for directions a dozen or more times a day. Thank goodness for Google Maps and data plans.
Older parts of European cities can be a bit harder to navigate. I’m thinking the El Gotic neighborhood in Barcelona and Alfama in Lisbon. But one does get used to it after a day or so.
