Andrew Alexander Price

Jim Kunstler's podcast is good when he doesn't veer off into peak oil civilizational collapse speculation http://kunstler.com/writings/podcast/ Granola Shotgun https://granolashotgun.com/ http://www.andrewalexanderprice.com/ I really enjoyed the books 'The Great Good Place' by Oldenberg , 'Streets are for People' by Rudufsky and the Geography of Nowhere by Kunstler

Of course the daunting obstacle is changing the mindset of suburban planners and nimbys. The zoning ordinances that have dominated planning in the USA since the 50's ban this in large swaths of America.. New Urbanism made progress creating denser planning in the last 30 years, but focused too much on high density mixed use. Adding small shops to residential streets is definitely the one area that they've really failed on in my opinion. It's the reason older towns and cities still trounce the 'burbs on walkability and will for a long time. But while we're at it we should also think about other human-scale improvements, like narrow streets. Worth a read for anyone interested in retrofitting the suburbs: https://www.andrewalexanderprice.com/blog20130131.php#.XxptmPipGL4

I don't know about "from scratch", but ... Incrementally, as lean and resiliently as possible. An incrementally-built city is not a city in the beginning. It's a village at best. Here are some things that speak to this approach: https://andrewalexanderprice.com/blog20130330.php https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kChc7PVQFwA https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/12/12/the-power-of-growing-in…

I often think about big cities where people have reasonably priced housing options available. Two great examples for me are Tokyo and Berlin. I think a big factor in both is a combination of dense traditional city planning, and transportation. I really enjoyed this piece on traditional cities: http://www.andrewalexanderprice.com/blog20130330.php

> AFAICT, NIMBYism prevents that in most large cities (though why a tent city is preferable is beyond my understanding). It's no different than "banning abortions to reduce the amount of abortions". It doesn't work that way in reality, and rather than face reality, they dig in deeper, stick fingers in their ears and go LALALALA CAN'T HEAR YOU. Except that NiMBYism goes strongly across both major political parties. Though there's plenty to say about "affordable housing", many have argued we just need drastically more housing rather than a lot of government regulated housing prices. We're just not building enough in places people want to live, specifically because zoning (looping back to NiMBYism). [Andrew Price](https://andrewalexanderprice.com/blog20210125.php) and Strong Towns have plenty to say about this.

The imposition of residential only zoning all over the world is, in retrospect, a huge mistake. This has been posted on HN before, but the Japanese zoning system makes a lot of sense: https://www.andrewalexanderprice.com/blog20191002.php

NYC isn't the only model for density. Small houses on small lots can and does create lots of housing in places that don't typically come to mind when you think of dense (as this blog points out, Provincetown MA is one example: http://www.andrewalexanderprice.com/blog20141104.php#.XUHrGOhKiUl)

This looks eerily similar to an article by Andrew Alexander Price: http://www.andrewalexanderprice.com/blog20121015.php

Narrow streets :) http://www.andrewalexanderprice.com/blog20130330.php#.V47PTcspDqA

make sure it's 'human-scale' ala http://www.andrewalexanderprice.com/blog20130330.php

See also: http://andrewalexanderprice.com/blog.php for lots of pictures.

Reading this, all I could think of was that they had a once-per-century chance to do this [0], but they blew it. From the photos it looks like they built the usual gross car-centric suburban quasi city, with a few apartment buildings thrown in. Though the article did mention a metro. [0] http://www.andrewalexanderprice.com/blog20131204.php

You might find this interesting, it was posted here a while back: http://www.andrewalexanderprice.com/blog20131204.php#.VehYvrxViko He had an article on Tokyo, but I can't find it. Apparently Tokyo meets many of these criteria and is pleasant to be in, despite being new construction. Which is why I'm wondering if we have any North American examples.

>We've decided that our collective quality of life and the benefits conferred us by allowing private transportation far outweigh the harms Speak for yourself. At least in cities, cars and car-centric cities have absolutely destroyed our economies. People drive for trip less than a mile because walking is miserable, and walking is miserable because the city is built around driving and without regard for pedestrians needing to constantly cross major intersections. To be fair, cars aren't the root problem here - the root problem is the hypertrophic cities craze that started in the 1780s that made streets so cavernous and muddy (with incredibly wide streets, the middle was often left unpaved to save money, since there was plenty of room on the side to walk) and miserable that cars were a genuine improvement. ( A Traditional City Primer: https://www.andrewalexanderprice.com/blog20131204.php ) That link doesn't cover the history of hypertrophic cities, but it demonstrates quite well how terrible modern streets are.