Now we have the freeway outside of Florence, Amsterdam, or Barcelona, contrasted with the walkable gridded core of Atlanta, Los Angeles, or Miami Beach.

At surface level, this meme is an amusing critique of cherry picking. You can literally put any two cities in the world into those two boxes if you’re not concerned with whether the images you’ve chosen are representative of their places. And if your goal is to make a misleading point, you can certainly do that.

Does the fact that any such comparison is at least a little cherry-picked mean the two-maps, one-scale juxtaposition is worthless? Hardly.

The latest round of these memes also make another point: they highlight exactly the same thing about car infrastructure that Mouzon was highlighting. Only they do it while also reminding us that the world isn’t so simple as “Europe good, America bad,” a mindset which some U.S. urbanists are guilty of adopting. The Suburban Experiment didn’t only happen west of the Pond. Americans just did it first, and bigger, and more completely.

The Real Point: Places Versus Non-Places

This nomenclature was introduced to Strong Towns by longtime contributor Andrew Price, and I keep coming back to it as a way of thinking about the world, because of its simple but profound implications.

A place is anywhere that people want to be and might linger—a building containing homes or businesses, a library or school, a sidewalk, a public square, a park, a farm.

A non-place is anywhere that people aren’t going to linger—either it’s devoted to getting them from place to place, storing their vehicles, or it’s the filler in the landscape between our places. Examples of non-places are vehicle lanes, parking lots, freeways, as well as medians, retention ponds and all other sorts of landscaped buffers (often lumped together as “open space” in planning parlance) that serve to separate places from each other and mitigate their impacts on each other.

There is a whole world of nuance that I’m going to ignore right now by making this simple generalization:

As a rule of thumb, places create wealth. Non-places consume wealth.

In other words, for any sort of financially sustainable community, there’s a need to strike a balance between place and non-place. Too much non-place, and you’ve almost certainly got too much infrastructure to maintain and not enough actual tax revenue to do so.

It’s hard to have too much place. Traditional city districts, in fact, are often almost 100% place, because even the streets are platforms for human activity that, directly or indirectly, generates wealth. (I mean “wealth” in the broadest sense of the word, too.) Here’s the core of Florence at ground level: