Photographing A Town That Never Was – The Meta Picture
Beautiful pictures. They're even more impressive once you see the illusion. Even the fake greenery and curb and gutter seams are still hard to pick out even when you know they're there. And the lighting is excellent.But the look -- aside from car styling -- isn't a matter of charm and innocence. It's a way of life that has been outlawed in America.The mix of residential and commercial land use is illegal in almost all American communities, especially at the scale pictured. A few big cities still permit residential over commercial but whatever is left in most of America is grandfathered. If it's taken down, you can't rebuild it. In fact, my whole neighborhood is like that; if an earthquake hit, not one 1920s American railroad suburb bungalow on my block would meet zoning to be rebuilt.Also, almost none of those commercial establishments has parking in front and surrounding it. The minimum requirements in almost all of America is about double as much space for parking as for all building interior space. Floor area ratios and landscape buffers usually require even more space around parking lots because they're so ugly. Today, even the shots with parking wouldn't have nearly  enough and almost all the commercial buildings would be illegal. I don't see any of the residential buildings with the 2-3 independent parking spots usually required, either. Most of them -- for the sake of charm -- don't have any off street parking. Also, driveways usually can't abut the property line, so the garage has to dominate the front of the house, creating a snout house effect and eliminating the friendly front porches.Part of the appeal of these scenes is evoking an America that has been outlawed in pursuit of faster roads and free parking. The grace and community of neighborhoods, the diversity of age and social class, and affordability have been part of the cost. Certainly this is not the first time reversing those mistakes has made a scene prettier. [0][0]http://www.humantransit.org/2013/05/how-sim-city-greenwashes...