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Comment by 6d6b73 | Hacker News Reader

Why can't we have small cities where in the center we have libraries, medical facilities and schools. Next let's build parks and recreational areas. Around that we should have residential area. Next zone retail, and another one industrial . This, or a similar setup would change how cities work. Kids could walk to school, libraries and parks. Adults could walk/bike to stores and to work. Medical facilities would be close to most of the population. The whole area from retail to the center of the town could be car free, with just few areas for transportation, but even that could be moved underground.

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I built a city in Sim City 3 exactly like this and it was pretty stellar. The entire city was split into 8 wedges, between each wedge was a continuous span of parks, trails, and water features, which all ran to a grand central park. Light rail and subway connected radially and tangentially. Roads were small and limited mostly to connecting blocks (a quasi-necessary feature due to the way SimCity simulates traffic, though later I learned I could construct without any roads).

How did Sims react to this hyper-planned city? Massively booming commerce, health, longevity and education through the roof. The only downside was the insane upfront cost to build in such a structured way (though interestingly, a huge chunk of that cost was subway. If I were in Sim City 4, there are more raised rail options).

I actually tried an annular highway (beltway) around the whole city (as is found in many real-world cities), and much to my chagrin, it was a headache that largely made traffic worse, just like real-world beltways.

Oh, Brasilia was designed that way.

People don't want to restrict themselves only to the nearby school, and the nearby hospital, and the nearby groceries. And they want to compete for far away jobs.

Good thing the city was also designed with a huge collection of streets going around those neighborhoods, because everyone is on those, all the time.

My idea would work best with a lot of small cities like that (about 100k-200k population). Have these cities connected through some rail system, self-driving buses etc and you could work at one city and live at another without having a need to own a car, or spend long time in traffic.

It doesn't matter what you design, everyone will still want to work at the same place for some reason.

People are much better served by an excellent public transportation system than by making cities walkable.

> Oh, Brasilia was designed that way.

Hardly. A 3-lane highway plus frontage roads cuts straight through the center. Then you have L4, which hugs the waterfront and cuts off much of the city in a very Robert Moses-esqe fashion. Its metro/rail system is completely anemic.

> Good thing the city was also designed with a huge collection of streets going around those neighborhoods, because everyone is on those, all the time.

I'd say that is precisely why it has more driving and less walking/public transport.

(disclaimer: never actually visited it, but this much is apparent from maps and such)

Between the highways are blocks designed basically the same way the GP is talking about. That were expected to provide everything, and completely walkable.

Never worked as designed, because people don't work that way.

You just described London.

But I don't think huge metropolis are the way to go. It would be better to have many smaller cities.

To create and maintain smaller cities you would need to enforce controls on population growth and distribution. Controls which are abhorred by the civilized world.

There are thousands of small cities all over the world and nobody has to enforce population growth.

> There are thousands of small cities all over the world and nobody has to enforce population growth.

Yet, there are many instances where population growth or decline has become an issue due to economic drivers, alone. Over the last 23 years Detroit has lost 34% of its population while Austin has gained 44%. You can't just assume people will distribute evenly into nice small groupings when they are granted freedom of movement and the right to pursue happiness.

Like everything else, you build for scalability and do your best to maintain.

Many well-functioning huge metropoles are poly-central. A notable example is Berlin, which was merged from many cities in the 1920s, and was split by a national border 1948-1991.

Each little town acts approximately as a little city with retail, offices and services at it's center, and residential around it. Many of the 'centers' have rapid transit a connection to the two or three main employment centers, and many big cities have peripheral lines as well.

This means most of the services you'd use in your life are in your little town, hopefully reachable in walking distance, except your job. It may be located near another center, or in one of the CBDs (central business district). You'll have a walking or short bus connection to your local rail station, which in turn connects to the other centers, so most people will have reasonable connections to get to work.

One way to get to this paradigm is to leverage rail lines and subways to encourage this sort of development, building towns around stations. Unfortunately the tendency is to build transit along highways, which is cheap, but ultimately toxic to the idea of building walkable/human-scale towns surrounding the stations (see e.g. REM light rail proposal in Montreal). Another tendency is to build large parking lots around stations instead of towns.

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