I did, mainly London and Dublin, and few brief excursions outside these metropolitan areas. However, I did not witness much of what most visitors to the US notice immediately - inordinate amounts of trash and noise and the dearth of public spaces (those that exist are converted to junk and junkie yards). This is not just me - I've heard that time and again from visitors.
I understand that a tourist view of a city is much different from a native view, even though in all my travels I stay away from tourist areas as much as possible, use public transit and stay in small neighborhood hotels. But there are certain thing you can see right away, regardless of the 'Potemkin village' images that most cities of the world employ to some extent.
On the pain of oversimplification, I I'd venture to say that in the European cities you have to specifically look for dilapidation and ugliness, since the well functioning urban and urbane areas is what you typically encounter. In the US cities, by contrast, you have to specifically look for nice well functioning areas, since dilapidation and ugliness is what you typically encounter.
A train ride from Dc to NYC reveal the full scale of that ugliness: from trash and junk infested bowels of DC (one would have never guessed that this is the capital of the wealthiest nation on earth!) to junky back yards of suburban residences, ugly strip malls and billboard infested business routes , to abandoned factories and more junk yards in the bowel of Philadelphia, to sterile and boring cinderblock wasteland of suburban New Jersey. Actually one feels like being in a civilized place only after emerging from the Penn station in Manhattan.
The US man-made landscape is butt ugly, and the farther inland you go the uglier it gets. There are three things that make it ugly:
- the temporary and makeshift nature of most structures - built and then abandoned and left to decay, or just neglected - there does not seem to be any of what is so nice about the old world - generations after generations adding to or improving on existing structures and land improvements (this is particularly striking in places like Istanbul where three civilizations left their mark on the shape and the character of the city)
- the incredible cheapness and utilitarianism of most structures - erected solely to serve some commercial or utilitarian purpose with zero concern for their aesthetic appeal (old Victorian houses might be an exception, but these are the leftover from a different era) - most US localities consist of hideously ugly cinderblock big box commercial establishment, some of them trying to add some "decorative" elements which make them even more unsavory, residences built in the cheap of plywood and plastic siding, surrounded by sterile lawns of trashy yards, ubiquitous billboards that litter the landscape, an ugliest of them all - ubiquitous parking lots and parking garages - but everything projecting the image of a temporary encampment, people stopping there to do some business, leave their junk behind and move on.
- - the almost perfect discord between man-made structures and natural environment - the same cookie cutter design, bulldozed land filled with repetitively standard (and cheap) landscaping features - a sterile lawn and a few trees here and there.
Of course, the US has no monopoly for ugliness - I've seen more than enough of it in Eastern Europe - but EE was a bunch of poor countries trying to quickly rebuilt war devastation, whereas the Us is supposedly the most prosperous nation on Earth. Except that you have to read about that in a paper, for you would have never guessed that by just looking around.
Wojtek