Questionmarktarius posted...
Seems like the "optimal" structure would be a contiguous span of what's functionally rural small towns.
Basically a real-life version of the classic Sim City "donut" strategy.
Honestly, yeah. Denser than that, because rural small towns are too sparse to support more specialized businesses and services (including critical things like hospitals), but that is essentially the crux of the "15-minute city" concept: the whole city is semi-uniformly dense enough that it's possible for most people to live within a 15-minute walk of their workplace, in neighbourhoods that have the density to support essential services like small grocery stores within a similar radius. You end up with enough density to support a variety of small businesses that are much better for the local economy than big box stores, and the density means it's possible to provide frequent transit service that's conveniently accessible to travel further away to visit other people and/or attractions. In practice, you'll still always see pockets of density clustered around transit lines and some manner of downtown/city centre that's even denser, but that's not necessarily a bad thing and you can even it out by improving transit coverage.
And again, that's not necessarily for everyone, but it creates a much more resilient economy
Questionmarktarius posted...
The site seems to me to have more an anarcho-capitalist leaning than anything else. It largely considers small towns to be better than a metropolis, and warns against outside subsidies all the damn time.
They are, but if anything that just highlights why treating urbanism as a left vs. right issue is silly. More than anything, Strong Towns promotes towns and cities being self-sufficient, recognizing that that self-sufficiency needs to be considered at the local government level and not an individual one (they way people tend to think when they consider how driving works, and that's where the right-wing individualism and left-wing collectivism tend to clash). The issue they raise with metropolises is not that they're big, it's that they're fundamentally structured as a productive downtown/core financing all of the surrounding suburban tax sinks, which just doesn't work very well because getting people from those car-dependent suburbs into the core hurts the core's productivity due to the need for wider roads and additional parking.
It's less a matter of "everything should just be a rural small town" and more that inspiration should be taken from rural small towns in developing cities and neighbourhoods, aiming to have them sustain themselves instead of relying on other neighbourhoods. Intrinsically, that has to be at least a little anti-car, because car-centric design does so much to lower the productivity of land and hurts economic resiliency by promoting big box stores over local small businesses.
GanglyKhan posted...
Tokyo still completely reigns supreme as living situations go, the very complicated issue there is that they rebuilt the whole place after World War II. To get that kind of city planning in other countries, it would have to be deliberately done from the start with an entirely new city center, but who is going to just artificially make a new city with the intent for it to be the next Tokyo?
It happens more than you might think. Periodically, China builds train stations literally in the middle of nowhere. Like you come up from underground and it's just a forest with nothing there except the train station. Fast forward a few years, though, and the area's quite healthily developed, purely because the land became valuable due to its ready connection to the city.
(Example, with comments discussing how the area ended up growing: https://www.reddit.com/r/Damnthatsinteresting/comments/18gxozt/exit_of_chinese_subway_in_the_middle_of_nowhere/)
Historically, that's how most US cities were built, as much as people like to think that America was built around the car: Rail companies would build railroads, slap stations down where there wasn't anything else, then sell parcels of land nearby that people would buy because they knew they'd have easy access to the rest of the country. Boom, instant(ish) city, purely because the railroad made it a good location for one.
Now, is that a viable approach in the US today? Maybe, maybe not. The lack of a useful cross-country railroad and the prevalence of alternatives means you aren't going to see all that much success trying to artificially create a new city by connecting to that network. But if a city is looking to develop a large bit of land and makes a point of developing it as a transit hub - with useful connections to other points of interest in the city - before inviting further development, that sets it up from the beginning to have higher density and support more mixed-use development. Make a habit of that and of zoning new developments with a decent mix of multi-family residential, commercial, and mixed-use lots that have more useful transit connections, and you're on track to develop a city that's a lot more balanced. Bonus points if you rezone existing neighbourhoods in the same way and add new transit connections that promote similar redevelopment.
Questionmarktarius posted...
The main appeal of cars isn't really the alleged "freedom", but the "random access".
The flexibility is indeed the strength of cars. Theoretically, a well-developed neighbourhood would allow you to get that flexibility without a car. Taking a bus between 3-4 different shops isn't very practical, but walking to them when none of them are more than 15 minutes from your home certainly is (especially where, in such a neighbourhood, somebody bringing a case of beer into a taco shop to grab a takeout order isn't going to be all that unusual
because
it's so easy to get around).
Now, that does make it harder for people visiting the city to do that. If you're living an hour's drive away in a small town with no transit connections and need to come into the city to get those things, a city designed around walking/transit that has little parking is going to make it harder for you to do so. That's unfortunate, but I also can't really take issue with the idea of a city being designed for the people that live in it instead of the people that are just passing through because they want some Taco Bell.
At the end of the day, cars do offer flexibility that is useful. I'm certainly not going to deny that. The problem is not using cars for what they're good at (variable, low-volume transportation), it's designing cities around using them for everything. In a well-designed city, it should be pretty rare that most people actually need the flexibility of a car.