How are you guys liking this sudden series of polygon-based urban planning posts?
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?