Here it is more a case of “cities were so beautiful before we destroyed them with all the firebombing by the Royal Air Force”…

Half of Wuppertal’s buildings were destroyed by the end of WW2. Some cities had the leeway to rebuild historical ornamented buildings, many others built as cheaply and quickly as possible because it was more important to create more shelter rather than prettier housing.

Edit: Though I very much agree on the ugliness of the excessive street furniture and car parking space!

Don't forget the reason for all that firebombing: Germans voted for a guy who promised to make Germany great again. Worked out great in the end. It was the greatest end of a war ever. What a great guy he was.

I don't think they questioned the reason for bombing civilians. They questioned the utility.

> Also modern buildings look really ugly. We need more ornaments in architecture.

Agree but who the fuck is gonna pay for it? Urban housing is already under massive price competition.

That's a common myth. Ornaments don't have to be expensive. Besides, many of the old buildings we consider beautiful today were meant for lower-income families back in the day.

ornaments are expensive now (at least, the ways done historically) because modernism put a generation of artisans out of work and no one trained to be skilled in a dying industry. now it's incredibly specialized.

RIP all those street trees too.

> Apart from it being entirely subjective

Maybe not entirely. Eye-tracking studies suggest that ornaments are what attracts people's attention.

People attend to detail whatever its aesthetic value. Look at an eye tracking study of people looking at faces - of course they look at eyes and lips rather than the middle of the cheeks, but if someone had a massive, suppurating boil in the middle of their cheek you can bet that's what people would look at.

So you're suggesting adding boils to buildings to make them more interesting and less plain?

Is that really what you think I meant?

Horse poop wasn't exactly great too.

Indeed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_horse_manure_crisis_of_1...

Not to step in with your good shoes, and the tonnages to remove in large urban areas like London and New York were substantial, sure.

Thing is, horse poop and straw is great for gardens, weed suppression, growing food and flowers.

Can't really say the same for tyre particles, fuel emissions, and while the bulk long term CO2 buildup beyond the established balance might make things "greener" it doesn't seem to advance nutritional returns of vegetation enough to offset the climate altering downsides.

Horse manure emits methane, ammonia and hydrogen sulfide. Dried up it also becomes brittle and susceptible to turning into PM emissions if disturbed.

It was way more of a problem than just aesthetics and cars, even in their early days, appeared cleaner overall.

The one thing we never got back are noise levels - modern cities are loud.

Disease was a really big problem. The history suggests there was far too much of it for gardens to make much of an impact in it. There was also a lot of horse urine to deal with too.

There are a bunch of problems with cars, but I'd much rather live in one of those cities as they are today than with no cars but mountains of horse manure everywhere.

Modern New York frequently has mountains of unremoved waste whenever there's a sanitation dispute .. it's a problem that hasn't been solved.

New York and London of yore had logistical challenges that could have been improved, London famously rebuilt its sewers to address the the miasma, and there are many uses for urine, horse or human, if gathered.

It's more an infrastructure issue, dealing with waste, than an intrinsic failing of one mode of transport over another.

It is exactly an intrinsic failing of one mode of transport over another, that it produces unsanitary biological waste which at scale makes life pretty unpleasant in big cities. "It's an infrastructure issue" doesn't help if the infrastructure to solve the problem didn't exist and wasn't getting built (London's sewer upgrade was built some time before the horse situation was considered critical and was primarily to address problems with human effluent).

CO2 isn't unsanitary, although it is biological waste (some millenia removed from its time of origin) and the first major London Sewerage upgrade was mentioned as an example of building infrastructure at scale not as an example of removing horseshit .. that situation wasn't seen as serious enough to address with a dedicated grand scale service prior to ceasing to be a problem as horses went away.

For many decades the lead additives in petrol met the unsanitary definition (second clause) being "unhealthy and therefore likely to cause disease" withoiut being biological.

It appears, to myself at least, that "exactly" is less clear cut than you make out; no major effort was made to address horse waste (past the daily sit carts and shovels) and petrol, rubber particles, noise, increased speeds, etc come with a new set of problems which have still not been addressed.

Horse poop is not great for gardens. Horses - unlike cows - don't have a digestive system able handle seeds so those pass through and end up in your garden. using horsepoop in the garden means the weeds grow very well.

I made this mistake once. It took forever to get the thistle under control.

We've literally put three tonnes of donkey poop (ok, not horse, but very similar) a year on the garden for the past decade (and longer, but I've not been involved in that prior) and had none of the issues you've raised.

They might track back to your fields of feed origin.

It's been fantastic for moisture retention, breaking down to increase soil complexity, weed suppression, making better figs, tomatoes, potatoes, oranges, lemons, grapefruit, grapes, etc.

( We've also used sheep manure scraped out from under shearing sheds, horse manure, sluiced out pig run waste, etc )

Call it a locale specific outcome perhaps.

Horse poop would be an improvement over some of the stuff on the streets nowadays.