Google "urban planning." The "dumb rules" may not be convenient for you or me in the short run, but they exist for a reason: water, sewage, traffic, pollution, supporting a sustainable quality of living for the long term.
I don't have the answer - and I notice that you don't really offer one - but I know that the answer is not to throw out all our laws in a short-sighted imitation of some polluted Chinese metropolis.
they exist for a reason: water, sewage, traffic, pollution
Not really. See Edward Glaeser's The Triumph of the City, Matt Yglesias's The Rent is Too Damn High, and Ryan Avent's The Gated City for more; pay particularly close attention to the sections about how urban life tends to be far more sustainable than alternatives.
You're welcome! They're all impressively researched while being relatively easy to read. If you want to add one more, Tom Vanderbilt's Traffic is good too.
As all four books point out, there's basically no intellectual case to be made in favor of low height limits, strict parking requirements, and lot setbacks in urban or heavily urbanizing places. The only "case", such as it is, comes from NIMBYism and existing landlords or landowners who are seeking to nominally protect their perceived investment.
Hey, I (much) prefer urban life. Starting from the ground up, I wish they'd built Palo Alto and Menlo Park to be real cities. I wish I lived in a city with a real subway, and the people density to support it. And women.
But all that's not the same thing as adding skyscrapers today's mid-Peninsula. Most of these responses are coming from an idealistic blank-sheet mindset. In the real world, we don't have the option to start from scratch.
Actually, they are "dumb" rules designed to create suburban sprawl. There is a new movement to create pedestrian friendly neighborhoods with higher density at transit nodes: SmartCode. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SmartCode
There are plenty of examples of cities that are prosperous, clean, and not stifled by pollution: Montreal, London, Paris, Zurich, Munich, Berlin, Vienna, and Sydney to name a few.
Montreal is a dying metropolis, with very high taxes, Greece-style debt and an out-of-touch central bureaucracy that is more interested in culture wars than good management. Former premiere Lucien Bouchard mentioned that he was "shocked" when bankers threatened to cut Quebec's bond rating; the idea of deficit spending was so entrenched that the idea of it having a negative impact was seen as laughable. Wall to wall graffiti (and not attractive graffiti) are the hallmarks of the town, as are the poorly built roads and collapsing overpasses.
I left Montreal to go to "30 year recession" Japan and the difference is night and day. I don't believe in the future of Japan, but I am even more skeptical of Quebec's. Bringing it up as a success story makes me doubt your comment, eventhough I strongly want to believe what you said.
Montreal is also thriving, creative and dynamic in ways few Canadian cities are. Its got an actual art scene, which is pretty rare for Canada. Its great food, decent mass transit, and fun neighbourhoods.
It may be falling down and overrun with student protesters but at least it is not the never ending soulless sprawl that is Toronto.
I support the student protestors. Not their violence, obviously, but I suppose violence is inevitable in these sorts of situations.
If the government cannot confront organized crime and its parasitic presence in its construction requisition system, it is basically engaging in selective budgetary restraint - which means it doesn't believe it "really" has to engage in budgetary restraint. Mind you, the budget problems are real - but attacking soft, weak targets means the gov't doesn't believe it.
It is easier to ask for sacrifice when you are seen as having tried to avoid it. That didn't happen. Now we see the inevitable outcome, and the media spin on it is shameful.
My personal belief is that Jean Charest's administration will be remembered akin to Nero's, except that JC's administration will actually deserve the dishonour.
In the words Bowser and Blue (barely) put into his mouth:
"Le déclin inexorable de la ville de Montréal
C'est pas ma faute
C'est la faute du fédéral!"
That said, it'll take a long time for the effect of the PQ on the economy (not their fiscal policy as much as the financial flight when separatism became "real") to stop echoing through the city. Desjardins does not an economy make.
All of these cities you list are actually stifled by pollution and are (very) far from being clean. I happen to live in one of those and visit regularly others in the list.
The problem is far from being solved. However, it's true that the pollution per inhabitant is much lower than in the Silicon Valley.
You must be crazy. You can lick the sidewalks in Zurich, although you'd probably be arrested. It's certainly the cleanest major city I've seen. And the tram come every minute.
That's either a pretty silly troll or you haven't travelled much outside of affluent Western Europe. I've also been to most of those cities and can only say, if you think they're "stifled by pollution" then your first 10 minutes in Beijing are going to be rather eye-opening (or is that eye-watering).
Zurich (and Geneve for that matter) consistently lead the list for the most expensive places on earth to live in not to mention that it is damn near impossible to find a place to live. Geneve's rental market currently has less than 2 promille vacancies.
London has a massive affordable housing shortage. London councils are moving tenants to other cities because of new government limits on state aid for rent payments[1] Earning £35K, expect to spend about 2/3rds of your salary on rent. A 1 or 2 bedroom flat in a 'normal' part of town will cost you at least £1300/$2000 per month.
[1] http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2012/apr/24/tory-westminst...
NYC doesn't belong on that list. Yes, it's prosperous, but it's dirty, polluted, and packed with jerks, to top it off. I live there. Forest Hills and parts of Brooklyn are about the only areas I know that are clean and beautiful in NYC, though I haven't been to Staten Island or the Bronx much.
Unfortunately these cities are part of the reason for the current problem.
You had poor people living in rookeries and tenements up against the wall of the smoke and pollution belching dark satanic mills. So philanthropic reforming politicians introduced zoning laws to separate industry and housing and move all the people out to fresh air of the suburbs.
100 years later it's not too much of an issue to have your air-conditioned condo tower in the same zip code as your air conditioned office tower - but the rules still apply.
The downtown core here is ringed with self-store, car lots, freight terminals and other low rent low density industry. While the area around every suburban transit station is ringed by condo towers.
But you can't build in the industrial zone around downtown because of planning rules and taxes. Amazingly you pay 20% tax to build on a brown field site and nothing to bulldoze trees in the suburbs.
It's not a binary situation. There is a medium between the high rises of Manhattan and the large single family homes of the suburbs.
More to your point, dense cities can be much more sustainable than suburbs. Money spent on infrastructure benefits more people. People living in apartment buildings use less energy for heating and cooling. Commuting doesn't necessarily require a car so you use less fossil fuels.
I don't have the answer - and I notice that you don't really offer one - but I know that the answer is not to throw out all our laws in a short-sighted imitation of some polluted Chinese metropolis.