> The 2 existing models are a relic of a low technology past: suburbia with long car commutes to downtown, and dense cities built around facilitating mass daily movement to the office through subway/public transportation
I’ve been traveling Europe this month and visited several towns and cities both large and small. From tiny villages of a few hundred to 4,000,000+ people monsters.
One thing that struck me as vastly different than how USA does things was the mixed zoning. Every city, no matter the size, feels alive. People live there. They don’t sleep in one area then go live in another. Everything happens organically near where the people are and the city/town/neighborhood/village never feels empty.
> Instead, we need self-sufficient neighborhoods catering to different lifestyles and needs
This is exactly what Europe feels like. A high street is never far, even when you’re in a sleepy residential neighborhood. At the very least there’s a small grocery store and bar on the corner.
If you travel or stay long enough you'll find there's plenty of bedroom communities in Europe - you just didn't go to them because why would a tourist go to them? The typical layout is town->multi-family housing surrounding the town that is walkable->larger housing (mix of multi/attached and detached ) that is not walkable. Older parts of the USA (pre-war) are very similar in that there's lots of mixed zoned areas where people live among the shops and services local to them.
Well I was primarily visiting family so lots of bedroom communities that by USA standards feel almost like a downtown. Even a rural village had a boulangerie and coffee place within a 20min walk.
Also I spent the first 28 years of my life in Europe so I feel like I have somewhat of a grasp for what it’s like. Just that these defaults become more obvious when you live elsewhere for a while.
Even those bedroom communities are a lot more livable than their US equivalents, because they have local amenities, meaning you're not forced to go to some big-box store or strip mall for stuff like you do in the US. They function as small towns, not just vast swathes of houses, which makes them more sustainable.
When big box retail came around, we weren’t forced to go there, we chose their selection, prices, and hours over the smaller stores that couldn’t successfully compete. They’re worse job creators but better at distributing stuff to the region.
I agree that it's weird that people want to live in places where there's nowhere to walk to and the landscape is houses with nearly no landscaping except for lawns and some shrubs. Not even trees - just a lawn desert of isolated homes. It's not even a cost thing in many cases as the homes are not cheap or small, etc.
> Every city, no matter the size, feels alive. People live there. They don’t sleep in one area then go live in another.
Average commute time is the same in France as it is in the USA. (Of course, in both cases, it varies a lot depending on the area.)
I lived a short while in a suburb of Paris; that municipality had 1 bar/café/pub for 50,000 inhabitants...
I worked in a suburb of Toulouse in a public service. I was walking 1/2 or 3/4 of a mile to have lunch in 2 different schools depending on the day, that's about 30-40 minutes there and back; I basically never walked across any fellow pedestrian, even though most of the time I was walking along main streets and crossing part of the 'centre'. The whole place was covered in private housing developments, same as neighbouring suburbs. Everyone drives to the central area or to other suburbs specialized in offices, industries or retail where they have their job.
I worked in another suburb, just next to the border of the city. I was the only one in the whole building (shared by several small companies) who lived in the city, all other people lived in suburbs, often remote ones.
I am now back in the countryside. There are still a few shops where I am, but their disappearance (started looooon ago) hasn't completely stopped. People don't walk or ride to the shop 1/4 mile away from their home, they rather drive 2 times 10 miles to get to large supermarkets. The population slowly changes, many newcomers never walk out of their house, they only drive out of it. Recently a few shops/services have even closed doors in the centre, and reopened out of the village, on the side of the main road, with parking lots. Elders cannot get there by foot easily any more; one of those place even only planned an entrance for cars, not for pedestrians. Despite all the nice discourses, in the 2020s it keeps on evolving as it did in the 1970s.
Hrm. Try downtown Hamburg sometime. By that I mean the parts within the former city walls. Feels rather dead to me in the late evenings and nights. And not many people live there. Almost all commercial and office space.
I’ve been traveling Europe this month and visited several towns and cities both large and small. From tiny villages of a few hundred to 4,000,000+ people monsters.
One thing that struck me as vastly different than how USA does things was the mixed zoning. Every city, no matter the size, feels alive. People live there. They don’t sleep in one area then go live in another. Everything happens organically near where the people are and the city/town/neighborhood/village never feels empty.
> Instead, we need self-sufficient neighborhoods catering to different lifestyles and needs
This is exactly what Europe feels like. A high street is never far, even when you’re in a sleepy residential neighborhood. At the very least there’s a small grocery store and bar on the corner.