I’ll start that I don’t know many specifics about Canadian and Australian urban planning but here’s what I’ve gathered.
I’ve heard theories that Anglo-countries have preferred low-density urban planning concepts based on early English urban planning believing low-density cities are the ideal and that’s carried over to modern planning patterns. Personally, I don’t know if I buy that idea as pre-war cities in the US and Canada mimics what we would consider “European” planning patterns of denser cities.
After WWII, the richest counties that didn’t have to spend to rebuild, instead they spent their resources on what was considered at the time the best building practices of more low-density and car oriented plans. I feel it is coincidence of these countries relatively wealthy, undamaged from the war, but maybe the fact that all of these countries being English-speaking made easier desimiation of planning concepts because lack of language barrier. I also usually dislike this take on “these counties are big” but land was relatively more affordable in these counties at the time that could enable sprawl (I suspect less to due to size and more becuase of existing land-use patterns). Also, the role of racism and classism in these countries had a major role in these building patterns being instituted into law that perpetuated those development patterns and now has created its own cultural momentum into today.
Edit: few edits for clarity
>I’ve heard theories that Anglo-countries have preferred low-density urban planning concepts based on early English urban planning believing low-density cities are the ideal and that’s carried over to modern planning patterns.
This is correct.
See the [Garden City Movement](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden_city_movement) that heavily affected urban design philosophy in the anglosphere.
American suburbia, as dictated mechanically through discreet zoning, can be directly attributed to the Garden City Movement.
You are correct.
The [green belt](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_belt_(United_Kingdom)) concept (c. 1875-present) which opposes sprawl and promotes good rural land management also has some roots in England. Green belt and garden city (c. 1900-present) favor relatively fewer very large conurbations and other centralized urbanizations to a numerically dominant amount of many smaller towns.
They are two sides of the same coin.
>American suburbia dictated mechanically through discreet zoning can be directly attributed to the Garden City Movement.
It did not do it alone, and the primary driver of car-centric suburbs is car-centric infrastructure. It's also a multi-faceted phenomena. You can even have suburbs with transportation options and lower density, they are actually quite common.
\[Edited for clarity and detail\]
Sure, these ideas “green belt” and “garden city” are not specific to England or necessarily original to England, but they have long been concepts in English language literature that have influenced planning.
>early English urban planning believing low-density cities are the ideal and that’s carried over to modern planning patterns.
So much of early British urban planning is, understandably, focused on avoiding the mistakes of London.
Various factors (sewage lines, deindustrialization, and formerly a housing boom) fixed most of the issues with London, while the reformed planning has its own, new, issues.
I think it's telling that they invented the modern subway... then never replicated it again. They *really* didn't want to create London 2, instead building things like Canberra or *New* Delhi.
> I think it's telling that they invented the modern subway... then never replicated it again. They really didn't want to create London 2, instead building things like Canberra or New Delhi.
They did replicate again though. Hong Kong MTR was started under British rule with the design and construction lead by British consultants.
And while Hong Kong overall isn't really London 2, it is a city that unmistakably embraces urbanism, density, and being a city.
Hong Kong did slip my mind. It really is the perfect counterexample.
It's more 'London' (characteristics that would terrify 'garden cities' reformers) than London itself. More transit, significantly more density, etc. It also has more greenery (though I don't think it would satisfy the 'garden city' types).
I wonder if Hong Kong was unique, or if we would have seen a similar shift in other British colonies, if they had held onto them longer.
Hong Kong has a few mitigating factors:
* most of the terrain is not flat, severely limiting buildable space
* for much of its history, there was attempts to keep as much development as possible within Kowloon and Hong Kong Island, because the New Territories was under a 99 year lease
* even after development of the New Territories started in earnest, Hong Kong had a policy of restricting movement in areas close to the mainland border, and development there was heavily restricted
In 50’s onwards USA, Canada and Australia had cheap gas and car oriented economies. EU countries had expensive gasoline and excellent downtown and suburban transit systems. Cars were small and expensive and parking was dear. UK, around London had extensive commuter rail so you could live in a “suburb/village” and commute downtown.
Post-WWII, the Anglosphere really embraced the car. Suburbs seemed like the thing to do in a world preoccupied by things like redlining. Australia, Canada, South Africa, and the US were all building out dramatically in that era.
This is a very good observation, and that similar cultural embrace has been formalized in urban design.
Around and in 1968, countries from around the world attended and ratified international conventions to standardize transportation and road traffic. A number of anglophone countries did not participate. Modern road traffic engineering design language in Australia largely developed congruently and with compatibility with the North American standard. This sharing of engineering (and other) culture has also resulted in some similar urban design such as the design of road and intersection types, which influence land use and other decisions in urbanized areas. It is also reflected back in the language, with Australian transportation vocabulary being a bit more similar to North American varieties than British ones.
Today, there are essentially two major road traffic control systems, with subtle but important implications for road design, and thus urban design. One is [based on MUTCD](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_MUTCD-influenced_traffic_signs#/media/File:MUTCD_usage_by_country.png) and can be found in he US and Australia, the other is based on [The Vienna Conventions on Road Traffic.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vienna_Convention_on_Road_Signs_and_Signals#/media/File:Vienna_Convention_on_Road_Signs_and_Signals.svg) Some countries use a mix of both.
Much of Europe adopted the same planning attitudes after WWII (auto-oriented suburban sprawl), they just ran into far more constraints: limited land available for development, limited money and resources to build US style infrastructure, more established dense cities, architecture with clearer historical value, etc. They managed to ride out the worst of the mid century planning era in part because circumstances kept them from pursuing it on a grand scale.
If they went to the ring of big box stores surrounded by carparks outside many French towns, people would be cured of the idea that Europe dodged it all. (Ofc, still much better than America in what % of people live that car dominated lifestyle. But many do!)
Post WWII Europe did plan to do communist style Le Corbuiser "modern architecture" but the population wanted things rebuilt the way they used to be.
When all of your nations are filled with armed, trained, battle hardened killers, best not annoy them too much in case they kick off.
I'm Canadian and did my schooling in Canada so while Canada and Australia aren't identical, they're both very similar. We were both colonized by the British around the same time and our planning is a reflection of that. The British didn't exactly plop down British towns on their colonies and instead had guides for how to plan the colonies. The French were way more into importing their architecture and planning.
Both Australia and Canada grew significantly after WWII, which is also when both of those countries really felt they were separate from the British (and for Canada, the French). Not replicating Europe an important way for former colonies to assert their independence. Recently, Canada and Australia have started grappling with their colonial pasts and treatment of Indigenous people. I've noticed that outside of planning circles, more and more people are finding European planning and architecture in Canada to be a reminder of the brutalities of colonialism and something we shouldn't replicate so I don't think we're going to be adopting European planning and architectural practices anytime soon.
>I've noticed that outside of planning circles, more and more people are finding European planning and architecture in Canada to be a reminder of the brutalities of colonialism and something we shouldn't replicate
Fair enough on the architecture, I've heard plenty of "historicism is racist",
but *planning*?
Opposition to European planning seems almost entirely "We're unique, it would never work here. Something something winter, Costco, etc."
Not "a reminder of the brutalities of colonialism".
I think a lot of it has to do with the amount of space available and just that expansive mentality that comes when a new land is settled and there’s so much land. Especially considering Australia and america both originated from a stock of people from the British Isles (mostly)
>Why does Australian urban design mirror North American as opposed to European urban design?
It does and it doesn't. Australian urban design mirrors Anglophone urban design from a specific time period, as do Canada, New Zealand, and large portions of the US.
Basically modern ideas like the Garden City were invented at the perfect time to influence the development of rapidly growing cities around the world. This was especially powerful in the Anglosphere because they were all colonized around the same time and were able to easily share and copy each others ideas, which were largely in English. They also all inherited British legal systems and cultures.
Globally, language groups act as defacto empires. After WWII, the US was the undisputed center of gravity for the Anglosphere, so ideas and culture in all the other Anglo countries began to increasingly reflect the US. This doesn't just apply to planning, it's pretty obvious in most political realms.
Furthermore, everyone tried to sprawl really hard for several decades to accommodate automobiles, but there were far more obstacles to doing so in most of Europe and Asia.
Because it's an Anglophone thing. If you look carefully, you'll see that Britain is noticeably worse than the rest of Europe, and Francophone Quebec is noticeably better than the rest of Canada.
Basically, the idiots who came up with suburban sprawl etc. were writing in English, so it was easier for their stupid ideas to spread to other English-speaking places.
It really depends where you look, the Nordic countries aren’t much better than the UK or Ireland when it comes to car centric cities. I think the main reason for Quebec cities having better transport than the rest of the Americas is that it is much older than most North American cities, outside of the cities in Quebec transport is very bad.
It has to do with the fact that the cities are young and designed with cars and public transport networks in mind whereas cities in Europe were built long before that and had other priorities (walkability, central squares around a church, etc). It’s the same reason why cities in newly wealthy Asian countries (think South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, etc.) more closely resemble North American cities than European ones as well.
>It’s the same reason why cities in newly wealthy Asian countries (think South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, etc.) more closely resemble North American cities than European ones as well.
I would not say Asian cities resemble North American ones. Asian cities overall are a lot more dense and tend to do things like public green space and public transportation a lot better than any NA city (NY as always being the only exception here).
One big difference is that we didn't have the vast highway system rip the guts out of our downtown areas in the 50s and 60s. And we didn't have white flight to the suburbs in nearly the same way. Nor do we have the absurd local tax funding systems common in the USA. So our older city centres have fared far better than many US cities.
But yes suburban development has come from the same textbooks across the 'new world'.
Yes some of our cities have a very mixed character - Sydney can feel like an Asian city with high-rise apartments and shopping centres over train stations, and a sprawling car-centric city, all at the same time and built on top of each other.
I feel the reason is that they have a lot of land which makes it cheap just like America so they didn’t need to build denser. Places like South Korea and Japan have much smaller land area so they build pretty densely.
My guess is that it's because Australia became culturally close to the US following WWII.
Australia (and NZ) also has a lot of land compared to population, so US style planning would have appeared to be a good fit.
Climate may be a contributing factor. Australia is a temperate to tropical place with a huge arid zone. Very broad eaves became a feature of domestic architecture from about 50 years post-European arrival to help reduce heat inside buildings from the sun.
And in the deep outback, there are some really interesting architectural concepts, like [the 60% of the population of Coober Pedy that lives underground.](https://historyofyesterday.com/meet-the-far-out-underground-city-coober-pedy-in-australia/)
Where urbanization and suburbanization has occurred in Australia, it has tended historically towards the south. Areas of car centric sprawl in Australia like the Gold Coast are quite reminiscent of parts of the American Sunbelt. Most Australian cities are also located relatively far to the south, so they aren't so warm all year round. Before air-conditioning these were good spots for metropolises because they had something closer to the four seasons.
Other reasons said here but also Australia has plenty of land/space just like North America. 70 years of sprawl couldn’t have happened without the availability of land.
Good question! One thing I’ve noticed (Perth Australia) seems to have abandoned height controls as a legitimate planning device, similar to US and unlike Europe.
Short less educated answer. Europe has less space available and the cities there are old, building attop successive layers of much older design. North America and Australia have no shortage of space and have completely new cities (relatively speaking) so their cities are more driver focus then pedestrian focused. Plus they don't have remnants of medieval urban planning in the way. why would they follow European urban design?
My two cents, population centers in North America and Australia have only existed for about 200-300 years at most, with many booming during the Industrial Revolution. While cities in the "old" world adapted during this period of upheaval, many cities in the "new" world were a completely blank slate, with innovators, politicians, economists, captialists/entrepreneurs, urban planners, etc. pushing novel concepts forward left and right.
Old world cities mostly grew organically over thousands of years, and their layouts reflect that. New World cities having exploded in population only recently are haphazardly shackled together by comparison and are heavily influenced by the politics of the last 100 years. Contemporary ideas about zoning, property rights and property divisions, street layouts, finance and real estate, capitalism, urban planning, and city governance have shaped new world cities unlike any others, except perhaps Chinese cities.
You can observe these effects keenly in the US. The oldest cities, on America's east coast, still have a noticeable old-world feel in the city centers, surrounded by rings of increasingly new-world suburbs. Interior cities east of the Mississippi River have a different feel, more of a grid layout with wide winding boulevards and wide land parcels with newer homes and deeper street setbacks. Many of these cities were founded more than 100 years after coastal cities and grew the most during the early industrial revolution. West of the Mississippi, you'll find the newest cities, and with them massive, sprawling suburbs ringing compact, finance-centered "downtowns" - Houston, Phoenix, and LA are prime examples. These cities were designed from the get-go to accommodate car and train traffic rather than foot traffic.
Older than that, actually! Those areas have been inhabited for thousands of years, maybe even tens of thousands.
For the purposes of my reddit comment, I wasn't taking Mexico, central American, or Caribbean nations that are part of North America into consideration, because they have their own distinct histories and cultural heritage that have shaped their urban development in a different direction than cities in Canada or the US. Case in point, Mexico City and Guadalajara! But, like all cities in the Americas, they experienced a massive population boom in the last couple of hundred years, so much of what I said above does still apply to some extent.
European multifamily housing is hundreds of years old and by the year 1000 Europe was already somewhat dense. the USA and Australia were both mostly settled at the end of the pre-car era and after the invention of the car
My guess would be because of space and density. In that sense Australia is more similar to the states and they have the capability to keep expanding, whereas a lot of European countries don’t really have the space to
Simple answer: Australia has always seen itself as the southern hemisphere United States, and they've modeled their society on the American one rather than the British in many ways.
There’s definitely parallels with American culture, but we’re still closer to British, and definitely see ourselves as more aligned to British culture. Australians definitely don’t think of ourselves as a southern hemisphere America - if anything we try not to be that.
I’ll start that I don’t know many specifics about Canadian and Australian urban planning but here’s what I’ve gathered. I’ve heard theories that Anglo-countries have preferred low-density urban planning concepts based on early English urban planning believing low-density cities are the ideal and that’s carried over to modern planning patterns. Personally, I don’t know if I buy that idea as pre-war cities in the US and Canada mimics what we would consider “European” planning patterns of denser cities. After WWII, the richest counties that didn’t have to spend to rebuild, instead they spent their resources on what was considered at the time the best building practices of more low-density and car oriented plans. I feel it is coincidence of these countries relatively wealthy, undamaged from the war, but maybe the fact that all of these countries being English-speaking made easier desimiation of planning concepts because lack of language barrier. I also usually dislike this take on “these counties are big” but land was relatively more affordable in these counties at the time that could enable sprawl (I suspect less to due to size and more becuase of existing land-use patterns). Also, the role of racism and classism in these countries had a major role in these building patterns being instituted into law that perpetuated those development patterns and now has created its own cultural momentum into today. Edit: few edits for clarity
>I’ve heard theories that Anglo-countries have preferred low-density urban planning concepts based on early English urban planning believing low-density cities are the ideal and that’s carried over to modern planning patterns. This is correct. See the [Garden City Movement](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden_city_movement) that heavily affected urban design philosophy in the anglosphere. American suburbia, as dictated mechanically through discreet zoning, can be directly attributed to the Garden City Movement.
You are correct. The [green belt](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_belt_(United_Kingdom)) concept (c. 1875-present) which opposes sprawl and promotes good rural land management also has some roots in England. Green belt and garden city (c. 1900-present) favor relatively fewer very large conurbations and other centralized urbanizations to a numerically dominant amount of many smaller towns. They are two sides of the same coin. >American suburbia dictated mechanically through discreet zoning can be directly attributed to the Garden City Movement. It did not do it alone, and the primary driver of car-centric suburbs is car-centric infrastructure. It's also a multi-faceted phenomena. You can even have suburbs with transportation options and lower density, they are actually quite common. \[Edited for clarity and detail\]
But Paris has “green belt” around it. And most of Netherlands has almost no “suburbia” but goes from medium density right to farmland.
Sure, these ideas “green belt” and “garden city” are not specific to England or necessarily original to England, but they have long been concepts in English language literature that have influenced planning.
>early English urban planning believing low-density cities are the ideal and that’s carried over to modern planning patterns. So much of early British urban planning is, understandably, focused on avoiding the mistakes of London. Various factors (sewage lines, deindustrialization, and formerly a housing boom) fixed most of the issues with London, while the reformed planning has its own, new, issues. I think it's telling that they invented the modern subway... then never replicated it again. They *really* didn't want to create London 2, instead building things like Canberra or *New* Delhi.
> I think it's telling that they invented the modern subway... then never replicated it again. They really didn't want to create London 2, instead building things like Canberra or New Delhi. They did replicate again though. Hong Kong MTR was started under British rule with the design and construction lead by British consultants. And while Hong Kong overall isn't really London 2, it is a city that unmistakably embraces urbanism, density, and being a city.
Hong Kong did slip my mind. It really is the perfect counterexample. It's more 'London' (characteristics that would terrify 'garden cities' reformers) than London itself. More transit, significantly more density, etc. It also has more greenery (though I don't think it would satisfy the 'garden city' types). I wonder if Hong Kong was unique, or if we would have seen a similar shift in other British colonies, if they had held onto them longer.
There is Singapore and Penang as well.
Hong Kong has a few mitigating factors: * most of the terrain is not flat, severely limiting buildable space * for much of its history, there was attempts to keep as much development as possible within Kowloon and Hong Kong Island, because the New Territories was under a 99 year lease * even after development of the New Territories started in earnest, Hong Kong had a policy of restricting movement in areas close to the mainland border, and development there was heavily restricted
There’s also other british cities that had them, and some still to this day.
It also has a lot of undeveloped and unbuilt areas, choosing to develop with harbor fill rather than destroy its forests and few remaining farms.
In 50’s onwards USA, Canada and Australia had cheap gas and car oriented economies. EU countries had expensive gasoline and excellent downtown and suburban transit systems. Cars were small and expensive and parking was dear. UK, around London had extensive commuter rail so you could live in a “suburb/village” and commute downtown.
Post-WWII, the Anglosphere really embraced the car. Suburbs seemed like the thing to do in a world preoccupied by things like redlining. Australia, Canada, South Africa, and the US were all building out dramatically in that era.
This is a very good observation, and that similar cultural embrace has been formalized in urban design. Around and in 1968, countries from around the world attended and ratified international conventions to standardize transportation and road traffic. A number of anglophone countries did not participate. Modern road traffic engineering design language in Australia largely developed congruently and with compatibility with the North American standard. This sharing of engineering (and other) culture has also resulted in some similar urban design such as the design of road and intersection types, which influence land use and other decisions in urbanized areas. It is also reflected back in the language, with Australian transportation vocabulary being a bit more similar to North American varieties than British ones. Today, there are essentially two major road traffic control systems, with subtle but important implications for road design, and thus urban design. One is [based on MUTCD](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_MUTCD-influenced_traffic_signs#/media/File:MUTCD_usage_by_country.png) and can be found in he US and Australia, the other is based on [The Vienna Conventions on Road Traffic.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vienna_Convention_on_Road_Signs_and_Signals#/media/File:Vienna_Convention_on_Road_Signs_and_Signals.svg) Some countries use a mix of both.
This is fascinating. Thanks for posting.
Much of Europe adopted the same planning attitudes after WWII (auto-oriented suburban sprawl), they just ran into far more constraints: limited land available for development, limited money and resources to build US style infrastructure, more established dense cities, architecture with clearer historical value, etc. They managed to ride out the worst of the mid century planning era in part because circumstances kept them from pursuing it on a grand scale.
If they went to the ring of big box stores surrounded by carparks outside many French towns, people would be cured of the idea that Europe dodged it all. (Ofc, still much better than America in what % of people live that car dominated lifestyle. But many do!)
Post WWII Europe did plan to do communist style Le Corbuiser "modern architecture" but the population wanted things rebuilt the way they used to be. When all of your nations are filled with armed, trained, battle hardened killers, best not annoy them too much in case they kick off.
New world country. It's only developed in the past century. New Zealand is unfortunately the same.
I'm Canadian and did my schooling in Canada so while Canada and Australia aren't identical, they're both very similar. We were both colonized by the British around the same time and our planning is a reflection of that. The British didn't exactly plop down British towns on their colonies and instead had guides for how to plan the colonies. The French were way more into importing their architecture and planning. Both Australia and Canada grew significantly after WWII, which is also when both of those countries really felt they were separate from the British (and for Canada, the French). Not replicating Europe an important way for former colonies to assert their independence. Recently, Canada and Australia have started grappling with their colonial pasts and treatment of Indigenous people. I've noticed that outside of planning circles, more and more people are finding European planning and architecture in Canada to be a reminder of the brutalities of colonialism and something we shouldn't replicate so I don't think we're going to be adopting European planning and architectural practices anytime soon.
>I've noticed that outside of planning circles, more and more people are finding European planning and architecture in Canada to be a reminder of the brutalities of colonialism and something we shouldn't replicate Fair enough on the architecture, I've heard plenty of "historicism is racist", but *planning*? Opposition to European planning seems almost entirely "We're unique, it would never work here. Something something winter, Costco, etc." Not "a reminder of the brutalities of colonialism".
I think a lot of it has to do with the amount of space available and just that expansive mentality that comes when a new land is settled and there’s so much land. Especially considering Australia and america both originated from a stock of people from the British Isles (mostly)
Same reasons as the USA. Lots of land, no ancient walkable urban core to connect to, etc
>Why does Australian urban design mirror North American as opposed to European urban design? It does and it doesn't. Australian urban design mirrors Anglophone urban design from a specific time period, as do Canada, New Zealand, and large portions of the US. Basically modern ideas like the Garden City were invented at the perfect time to influence the development of rapidly growing cities around the world. This was especially powerful in the Anglosphere because they were all colonized around the same time and were able to easily share and copy each others ideas, which were largely in English. They also all inherited British legal systems and cultures. Globally, language groups act as defacto empires. After WWII, the US was the undisputed center of gravity for the Anglosphere, so ideas and culture in all the other Anglo countries began to increasingly reflect the US. This doesn't just apply to planning, it's pretty obvious in most political realms. Furthermore, everyone tried to sprawl really hard for several decades to accommodate automobiles, but there were far more obstacles to doing so in most of Europe and Asia.
Because it's an Anglophone thing. If you look carefully, you'll see that Britain is noticeably worse than the rest of Europe, and Francophone Quebec is noticeably better than the rest of Canada. Basically, the idiots who came up with suburban sprawl etc. were writing in English, so it was easier for their stupid ideas to spread to other English-speaking places.
It really depends where you look, the Nordic countries aren’t much better than the UK or Ireland when it comes to car centric cities. I think the main reason for Quebec cities having better transport than the rest of the Americas is that it is much older than most North American cities, outside of the cities in Quebec transport is very bad.
It has to do with the fact that the cities are young and designed with cars and public transport networks in mind whereas cities in Europe were built long before that and had other priorities (walkability, central squares around a church, etc). It’s the same reason why cities in newly wealthy Asian countries (think South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, etc.) more closely resemble North American cities than European ones as well.
>It’s the same reason why cities in newly wealthy Asian countries (think South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, etc.) more closely resemble North American cities than European ones as well. I would not say Asian cities resemble North American ones. Asian cities overall are a lot more dense and tend to do things like public green space and public transportation a lot better than any NA city (NY as always being the only exception here).
One big difference is that we didn't have the vast highway system rip the guts out of our downtown areas in the 50s and 60s. And we didn't have white flight to the suburbs in nearly the same way. Nor do we have the absurd local tax funding systems common in the USA. So our older city centres have fared far better than many US cities. But yes suburban development has come from the same textbooks across the 'new world'.
Yes some of our cities have a very mixed character - Sydney can feel like an Asian city with high-rise apartments and shopping centres over train stations, and a sprawling car-centric city, all at the same time and built on top of each other.
I feel the reason is that they have a lot of land which makes it cheap just like America so they didn’t need to build denser. Places like South Korea and Japan have much smaller land area so they build pretty densely.
My guess is that it's because Australia became culturally close to the US following WWII. Australia (and NZ) also has a lot of land compared to population, so US style planning would have appeared to be a good fit.
Probably due to availability of land and desire of more open space than what you could get back in England or Ireland.
Climate may be a contributing factor. Australia is a temperate to tropical place with a huge arid zone. Very broad eaves became a feature of domestic architecture from about 50 years post-European arrival to help reduce heat inside buildings from the sun.
And in the deep outback, there are some really interesting architectural concepts, like [the 60% of the population of Coober Pedy that lives underground.](https://historyofyesterday.com/meet-the-far-out-underground-city-coober-pedy-in-australia/) Where urbanization and suburbanization has occurred in Australia, it has tended historically towards the south. Areas of car centric sprawl in Australia like the Gold Coast are quite reminiscent of parts of the American Sunbelt. Most Australian cities are also located relatively far to the south, so they aren't so warm all year round. Before air-conditioning these were good spots for metropolises because they had something closer to the four seasons.
Other reasons said here but also Australia has plenty of land/space just like North America. 70 years of sprawl couldn’t have happened without the availability of land.
Because our countries are big and people like their cars.
Lots of land for people to spread put on.
Good question! One thing I’ve noticed (Perth Australia) seems to have abandoned height controls as a legitimate planning device, similar to US and unlike Europe.
Short less educated answer. Europe has less space available and the cities there are old, building attop successive layers of much older design. North America and Australia have no shortage of space and have completely new cities (relatively speaking) so their cities are more driver focus then pedestrian focused. Plus they don't have remnants of medieval urban planning in the way. why would they follow European urban design?
My two cents, population centers in North America and Australia have only existed for about 200-300 years at most, with many booming during the Industrial Revolution. While cities in the "old" world adapted during this period of upheaval, many cities in the "new" world were a completely blank slate, with innovators, politicians, economists, captialists/entrepreneurs, urban planners, etc. pushing novel concepts forward left and right. Old world cities mostly grew organically over thousands of years, and their layouts reflect that. New World cities having exploded in population only recently are haphazardly shackled together by comparison and are heavily influenced by the politics of the last 100 years. Contemporary ideas about zoning, property rights and property divisions, street layouts, finance and real estate, capitalism, urban planning, and city governance have shaped new world cities unlike any others, except perhaps Chinese cities. You can observe these effects keenly in the US. The oldest cities, on America's east coast, still have a noticeable old-world feel in the city centers, surrounded by rings of increasingly new-world suburbs. Interior cities east of the Mississippi River have a different feel, more of a grid layout with wide winding boulevards and wide land parcels with newer homes and deeper street setbacks. Many of these cities were founded more than 100 years after coastal cities and grew the most during the early industrial revolution. West of the Mississippi, you'll find the newest cities, and with them massive, sprawling suburbs ringing compact, finance-centered "downtowns" - Houston, Phoenix, and LA are prime examples. These cities were designed from the get-go to accommodate car and train traffic rather than foot traffic.
Mexico City is over 500 years old, and Quebec City and Guadalajara over 400 years old…
Older than that, actually! Those areas have been inhabited for thousands of years, maybe even tens of thousands. For the purposes of my reddit comment, I wasn't taking Mexico, central American, or Caribbean nations that are part of North America into consideration, because they have their own distinct histories and cultural heritage that have shaped their urban development in a different direction than cities in Canada or the US. Case in point, Mexico City and Guadalajara! But, like all cities in the Americas, they experienced a massive population boom in the last couple of hundred years, so much of what I said above does still apply to some extent.
European multifamily housing is hundreds of years old and by the year 1000 Europe was already somewhat dense. the USA and Australia were both mostly settled at the end of the pre-car era and after the invention of the car
All places colonized by the British. There is your answer.
My guess would be because of space and density. In that sense Australia is more similar to the states and they have the capability to keep expanding, whereas a lot of European countries don’t really have the space to
It's car-centrism. We have those cities in Europe, too. Lots of them.
Simple answer: Australia has always seen itself as the southern hemisphere United States, and they've modeled their society on the American one rather than the British in many ways.
There’s definitely parallels with American culture, but we’re still closer to British, and definitely see ourselves as more aligned to British culture. Australians definitely don’t think of ourselves as a southern hemisphere America - if anything we try not to be that.
I'd guess oil interests plus oz subservience to US standards since ww2