Neighborhood and Housing Innovations

When comparing my current neighborhood, the avenues in Salt Lake City, with the city of Freiburg, Germany obviously there are differences in age, topography, and climate that make these two places very different. However, I would like to focus on the two aspects that separate these places most, which are the social and cultural attitudes of the inhabitants along with the built infrastructure of these places.

The picture above gives us great examples of the infrastructure differences we can find in cities like Freiburg. Firstly, its important to notice the density here, all the buildings along this street are four stories high and tightly packed. This is certainly justified by the mixed land use and land use intensity of this space. As you can see there are lots of ground level shops with what is most likely residences above and a busy street dedicated to trains and pedestrians! So in this one picture the brilliant planning of Freiburg can be seen quite clearly and you start to understand why the nickname "the city of short distances" was given to Freiburg.

In contrast, here is a picture of a typical street in the avenues. The main difference here is the main mode of transportation is clearly the automobile with fairly good sidewalks for an American city. It is also important to note that the density is drastically less, there are seldom mixed land uses here, and only a few bike lanes (see below) and bus routes.

While the infrastructure is a huge portion of what makes these two places dissimilar, it is the way that this infrastructure plays out socially and culturally that I find to be most important. As seen in the multifamily housing example in class, density can bring people together socially and cooperatively. When you concentrate families through density you see people start to behave differently than they would in a sprawling nation like ours. They start to run community gardens, help each other with childcare, organize small grassroots organizations, and even take turns making meals for multiple families. In short, these places become more "human" than the places we have designed here in America, where conditions help activism, mutualism, entrepreneurialism, and community to grow.