r/Urbanism

Hi everyone! Many of you have probably seen plenty of before-and-after photos of American cities, showing how their streets have changed in the past century. I’ve always been fascinated by the historic streetscapes, especially those from the pre-automobile era, when American cities were compact, pedestrian oriented, with active and continuous street facades. Interestingly, these are also the qualities that today's urban designers are trying to achieve.

In an effort to recreate this urban form in a city-building game set in the Gilded Age, one challenge I'm having is how did the developers decide the location, program and density of their development in an era before zoning regulations were available? I'm currently using simulated traffic level, distance to key features like park or harbor, and nearby land uses to make the prediction. But I know this could be a much more complicated system. Curious to hear what you think were the major forces shaping the form of 19th-century American cities.

I’ve attached a short preview of the game to show the current progress. It's called The Gilded City, and you can find its Steam page here. I’d love to hear your thoughts!

Hello everyone - this community is in need of a few new mods, and you can use the comments on this post to let us know why you’d like to be a mod here. 

Priority is given to redditors who have past activity in this community or other communities with related topics. It’s okay if you don’t have previous mod experience and our goal, when possible, is to add a group of moderators so you can work together to build the community.

Please use at least 3 sentences to explain why you’d like to be a mod and share what moderation experience you have (if any).  

If you are interested in learning more about being a moderator on Reddit, please visit redditforcommunity.com. This guide to joining a mod team is a helpful resource. 

Comments from those making repeated asks to adopt communities or that are off topic will be removed. 

A group of us in Ljubljana, Slovenia, have recently launched a public initiative + petition to bring back our city's tram network: tramvaj-ljubljana.si

Ljubljana had a tram network from 1901 to 1958, when it was scrapped for buses. Today, the city is heavily dependent on cars while bus ridership drops every year. We believe our main corridors desperately need real, high-capacity light rail.

We’re building bottom-up public support to push local decision-makers into real action, and we’d love advice from anyone who has experience with light rail advocacy or reintroduction:

1. Political Traction: How did your local campaign move politicians from "nice idea" to actual funding commitments?
2. Public Buy-in: What arguments best tackled local fears about construction disruption, costs, or car lane reductions?
3. Funding: How did your city effectively leverage national grants, EU funding, or loans to finance the rail infrastructure?

Any insights are greatly appreciated!

The American Community Survey began collecting data on housing supply down to the census tract level in 2010, so if you're wondering why these squiggles are drawn the way they are it's because they're defined by 2010 census tract boundaries. I started from the downtown census tract for each city and globbed on exterior census tracts where most housing growth is happening until I reached an equivalent land area between the cities.

I included Los Angeles here because a) because I think more people are familiar with the layout and scale of downtown LA which might provide some frame of reference for people less familiar with the Texas cities, b) they're all fairly similar in being downtown areas not built on an ocean front or large lake front (sorry Town Lake, I know you're technically a lake) and c) I was just curious what these numbers would look like for L.A.! I love all the growth that's happened there lately.

Truthfully I was only really interested in doing this up to the 5 sq mi area, but I suspected people would want to see other areas further out included, or feel I neglected this or that neighborhood, so I continued on to 10 sq miles. This is the result of a lot of tedious work so I hope you find it interesting!

Some renderings from the new Dallas 2036 master plan to revitalize the edges of downtown. Thought it was a great presentation, but some visual highlights, and a link to the full thing.

I investigated what driving risk factors are in your control, driving slower or driving less, but I ended up looking at residence choice's impact on driving safety.

Counted by home county, rural residents drove 18% more miles per person in 2017 (NHTS) but died in traffic at 2.2x the rate of big-metro residents (CDC, age-adjusted). Per mile, that's ~1.9x.

Rural roads, speeds, and EMS response times all differ, so this is a correlation and not a claim that density alone causes the gap. The post also compares the safety value of driving slower vs. driving less. Code and sources are linked in post:

https://maxmautner.com/2026/10/02/slower.html