Because we have mainstreets, buildings, blocks, community centers, parks, American-style squares, and so on. The sense of community that Americans are hungry for is ultimately the post war sort that has been dying out in recent decades; the ideal. We are a country in transition but the transition will probably not be shortened through planning, that is a bit too close to the dying post war ideal. Growing pains, we are still young.
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> The sense of community that Americans are hungry for
But also, we only hear the loud, lonely voices yelling online. The people that aren't terminally online, and have great offline community aren't going to go find places where people are being depressing lonely and try and get everyone to touch grass. In science, that'd be a sampling bias.
Depends on what you mean by "young". By some measures, the U.S. is one of the oldest nations in the world.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_modern_sovereign_state...
I am not talking about political borders. The countries of the new world are completely separated from the culture of the land, uncharted territory.
The city I live in practically didn't exist by most measures until the 1940s. Meanwhile many cities in Europe draw roots back a few thousand years BCE. The lot my house is on was barely even used as farmland in 1960, and got turned into a residential area finally in the 80s.
But sure I'll trust you in telling me this is a much older civilization than Greece. Makes sense.
Mesolithic Greece, starting in 13,000 BC is more or less on par with civilisation in North Texas: https://www.thestoryoftexas.com/discover/campfire-stories/am...
Where Greece has it over your region is Paleolithic Greek history which stretches back further.
Revisionist history you're pushing here. I'm well versed about the native tribes in the area, definitely more than the average North Texan. A very interesting history, don't get me wrong. They didn't develop cities like anything you'd think of as a city today. Small roaming developments of maybe a few hundred people tops mostly. So when we're discussing "urban design" it's pretty irrelevant. That some branch of a nomadic tribe might have used my neighborhood as a hunting ground 15,000 years ago has little impact to the discussion of it's urban development.
The Caddos would be the closest to making cities in the area, but the people living around there date back over a thousand years these larger communities we might call towns were still mostly small enclaves that didn't last more than a few hundred years at the longest mostly. And they were mostly a pretty recent, being a few thousand years newer of a civilization than Greece et. al., as they appeared well after 1,000CE
Meanwhile Athens and what not can easily be seen as an actual city even 2000BCE.
> Revisionist history you're pushing here.
Which part of the Texas history link is incorrect?
Civilisation is civilisation . it comes with and without attributes such as cities and agriculture .. the point made is that the timelines in Texas strecth back 13,000 years.
> has little impact to the discussion of it's urban development.
Their urban development consisted of light footprints, seasonal migration in worn patterns, walking, etc.
That can be contrasted with how contemporary US citizens live, how the Dutch live, how varies other people still live today.
This is a discussion about urbanism, not just broadly "civilization". Nomadic tribes didn't live in urban environments.
The city I live in practically didn't exist until very modern times. The fact some people used to to hunt around here 16,000 years ago has little impact to the modern way the city was laid out and designed or the people who mostly live here today.
There's practically zero way to draw the roots of this town back to some group that camped here 16,000 years ago. Any form of lineage of civilization was lost a looooong time ago. Extremely few people would even draw their roots back to the Caddo, who are far more recent than anyone you're suggesting here.
This is a discussion about community - See thread title.
Some communities move - Not a hard concept for most.
Not trying to compare Greece with North Texas(or Louisiana) in 13000BCE here. There are ancient sites with "sophisticated" cultures/societies that spanned large parts of the current mid to east US -- and were also unlikely to be nomadic tribes passing through.
There is evidence of major construction projects, large trade centers/complex societies along the Mississippi Valley covering large areas with a trade network across the mid/eastern/southeast US. Watson Brake is currently the oldest* at ~3500BCE[0], but less studied and smaller. Poverty Point ~1700BCE[1] is more like a city or major trading hub. The effort to build the mounds and ridges is far more impressive than is likely from a roaming tribe. The construction is not haphazard, there is evidence of housing and many astronomical markers/alignments throughout the mound builder cultures of North America.
Cahokia Mounds[2] (far more recent) is considered an urban settlement, occupied from around 800CE and at its peak 1050-1150CE, thought to be larger than London or Paris at that time.
* Watson Break was discovered in the 1980's and the 6th mound at Poverty Point discovered in 2013. There could be many more that have been overlooked/undiscovered or razed -- being that we still don't fully understand them and they hardy look like what we are use to.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watson_Brake
I'm well aware of these. And yes, lots of areas around North America had quite complicated and developed societies with large trade networks and even "highways" connecting ancient cities.
But, these things are practically entirely disconnected to the societies of people living in the US today. And that's the point I'm making, this area is very young in terms of what is here now. That some other group developed something like a city several hundred miles away thousands of years before this town existed has effectively zero impact on the development of this place and the lives of the people who live here. This isn't necessarily the same for cities that have existed for hundreds or thousands of years which still even has some of the same streets and buildings of history.
You'd be hard pressed to find a single structure still used here today that was older than 1940 in this town outside of a few notable rare examples dating back to the 1920s, that's a closer example to my point. What's the age of the oldest building in Paris? How about London? Athens? Trier? These are places that have had a practically uninterrupted flow of people living in dense urban places for many hundreds to thousands of years. This is just not true for massive parts of the US. Few cities draw their roots back to even the 1500s, with many having their roots go to the 1800s or even newer.
You’re absolutely right about this.
The Republic of Venice, Holy Roman Empire, and Poland-Lithuania Commonwealth were all still around when America was founded.
Malta was still under the control of the Crusaders. Mongols still occupied Crimea.
The modern European map really comes from the 19th and 20th centuries.
Many European memories of nationhood are quite fake, and often deliberately so.
Yeah, but it doesn’t fit into the American mythos, I guess.