Do you know why we have cities? Because people created neighborhoods with and for their families, also creating businesses to sustain said folks.
Then cities competed against each other, involving businesses and government. Who would get the city hall build next to them, who would get the pretty church, the general store, etc.
Then cities competed with high-rises. Who is going to get the tallest building, expressing how progressive those cities were by building structures that offered everything in them. Hotels, restaurants, stores, apartments. Living in houses meant chores, maintenance, the old world. Bigger buildings (steel and concrete making them fireproof, a giant technological advance at that time), services, meant progress.
Los Angeles built up skyscrapers in downtown almost exclusively to say “hey, we’re not New York or Chicago big, but we’re trying!”.
It’s 2023. For a decade now the zeitgeist is remote work, delivery for everything, internet shopping. How many downtown buildings in America are still needed-needed? Probably less than half of them. They never really recovered from the move to the malls and suburbs since the 60s, anyway.
The way we live today completely destroys the need for the classical city.
No need for high density that was needed to get multiple stores on one block, once. That is pointless today because people order from their couches. We just need lockers, storage and stores that are a few blocks away because otherwise we wouldn’t walk ever (and we need to).
I keep thinking about the wild inertia between the ways we live and how we shape our worlds. Crazy, 50-year lag.