@anaisnein

I think that you’re paying an interesting, perhaps useful, amount of attention to envisioning a dense way of life aligned to the felt and latent needs and wants of suburbanites, but that you’re focusing on them to the point of more or less ignoring the needs and wants of urbanites, as well as ruralites. (Horrible lexicon but eh.) What you’re creating looks to me emphatically like a suburb, not a city; no city-dweller would want to live in it; there’s no there there. It is interesting though!

Blogger Infuriates Urbanites With This One Weird Trick! You Won’t Believe It!

That might be it.  I am a suburbanite at heart, and when I did live in the city, it was on an American university campus - which I liked - and American university campuses are often little medium-density villages within the city, taking up about 2km2 of space, permeable along the edges and with a self-selected population, a civic center for social clubs to gather, park areas throughout, predominantly moved about through walking.

If I were British, I might live in Milton Keynes entirely unironically.  Many of the residents love it there, even though it’s derided as a “non-place” by outsiders.  It just seems like a strange objection to me, and my intuitive response - to give different areas unique architecture or let them dynamically cluster businesses on some purpose - is probably not what the urbanites are looking for.

What I’m focusing on are, yes, questions of how to convince suburbanites to leave the sprawl and live more densely, without using social, economic, or governmental power to force them to do so.

What is a suburb?  It’s somewhere safe, with ample trees, grass, forest, where you can walk the streets at night.  You can ride your bike recreationally right from your house.  On the fourth of July, everyone has a cookout outside and the smell of food wafts through back yards (but otherwise you aren’t flooded with food smells).  Sometimes the neighborhood will put up a tent in a cul-de-sac and have a block party.  Children run free to play with little need for adult supervision.  Wild animals sometimes wander through yards.

People sometimes talk about those suburbanites and their darn autos and wasteful lawns (though it’s less wasteful if you don’t live in Arizona or California!), but there’s a real appeal there, something that has to be acknowledged and transformed in order to win people over.

How can I make the city safe like a suburb?  How can I make it green like a suburb?  How can I make this dense enough to pool resources for various goods and hit the threshold for public transit like a city?  So that they can hang out with people and walk to shops, fixing the sins of the suburb?

It shouldn’t be too much of a surprise for the result to be a densified suburb.

Though, perhaps you can help me to understand.  What does it mean for there to be a there?

Broadly speaking, I align with Andrew Alexander Price on what makes a city feel real and vibrant and interesting and comfortable and livable as opposed to exhausting and dreary and alienating and frightening and dystopian, and I’m on the Jane Jacobs side of the Jane Jacobs/Robert Moses fight.

But yeah, you’re asking a specific question that needs an answer, and I’m not sure how to answer it even though I think about this a fair amount. FWIW, I live in NYC, and I’m actually pretty jaundiced about it, I’m not a total cheerleader for city life and I see the appeal of suburbs. Good suburbs. Like I personally would only consider walkable places with shops and restaurants and good transit and manageable commute times. (I don’t have kids and loathe driving so obviously that’s going to be how my priorities shake out; I wouldn’t want to impose that specs list on like everyone in America because clearly a lot of people here feel very differently than I do, but also tbh they’re Wrong.) But the rub is that those characteristics I just listed are not! actually! sufficient to define a good place, a real place, a place that’s got a there there. New prefab suburbs do get built on all the right principles of walkability, etc, by people who think like me – didn’t they do something like that in Alexandria? Do I care, and would I move there? Not just hell no but feh.

So there’s something more to it. I’m on mobile or I’d go through some of the Price blog looking for better language or more specific specifics; he’s the clearest thinker I’ve ever come across in amateur smart as fuck urban planning (buries face in hands over own brain’s filing system) and what I want may be in there somewhere.

My irrational gut feeling, I’m afraid, is that it has something to do with the literal age of the place., which is the one thing you can’t address.

There’s a gravitas to older cities that only a very few places in the U.S. have anything of – parts of Boston and New England in general have some of it, TriBeCa in New York has a little, New Orleans has quite a bit. None of it is close to what you get in an older European city. When I go to Europe, I breathe more easily, I feel awake, it’s as if I suddenly realize, wait, what, have I literally been dissociating for the past several years, what did I miss. And it absolutely has something to do with the buildings being several centuries old, the older the better — I can tell by the PK/PD curve, so to speak. (The new part of Ulm, for instance, is no better than Boston; an intact medieval university city is pretty much an antidepressant-nootropic miracle.) Conversely, most of California doesn’t feel real at all to me, not even the objectively breathtakingly lovely parts, to the point that I’m low-key uncomfortable and conscious all the time of a slightly dissociated feeling whenever I’m there. The overnight fake Rock Ridge in Blazing Saddles comes to mind. This is unfair and irrational, but I’m sorry, I’m just like this. (I don’t even want to talk about Dallas or Salt Lake City.)

It’s not primarily about density for me, for what that’s worth. I like cities for all the reasons people like cities but my ideal scenario personally would probably be a large village or small town with decent <90m transit to the first or second city in a minor modest-but-functioning European country. My floor for density is basically decent Internet service and no need to own a car, and that means something very different in other countries vs here.