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Comment by jasonkester | Hacker News Reader

Sounds like you want Europe then.

The best thing about living here (coming from the 'states) is the density in the cities and towns. You can realistically have a town with a vibrant center full of cafes, bakeries, a bar/brasserie or three, and a grocery store in a town of a couple thousand people, all living within the area equivalent to 4 square city blocks.

Walk a few hundred yards the other direction and you'll find yourself in the countryside.

It's quite refreshing after living in an American suburb where you can drive in a straight line in any directions and pass nothing but Albertsons, Starbucks, Apartment Complex, Walgreens, Albertsons, repeat for 20 miles... without ever escaping into the country.

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Yep. I was there last summer; loved it. Vilnius was my favourite, but there were lots of little places all throughout that I just adored. The only city I didn't really like was Kiev. The city was very car centric, the wealth gap was too huge, and the Russian they speak / write is hard for me to understand given how basic my understanding is. People were very kind though.

But why can't Ontario have a town like this? Why can't we get 5000 people to kickstarter a town? Have really strict building codes and really pro-human policies.

Edit: What town are you, if you don't mind my asking. I'm planning on going back to Europe at some point.

European towns were designed before cars were invented, and density was also often a product of defending the city from attack.

To answer your question, it is because sprawling car-centric localities are the cheapest way (in the short term) to maximize the living space/cost ratio. European style cities don't spring up from empty fields anymore because they are more expensive to build. Your comment about building codes is telling. European cities did not form in the way they did because of building codes. They formed for economic reasons in a pre-industrial era. The same way American and Canadian, and newer European cities sprawl for economic reasons. That you bring up building codes is a tacit acknowledgement that to make a medieval city layout now would require forcing builders and buyers to pay more than they would otherwise.

Anyways, a medieval city layout nowadays would still be an inauthentic pastiche, sort of like a Tudor-style Celebration, Florida. Form ever follows function, and all that.

I don't think it needs to be. Plus, Celebration was still built with cars in the picture. What I want is a city with a perimeter. Within that perimeter you have all the buildings and zero cars. Zero combustion engines. Zero electric vehicles capable of going greater than some reasonable speed limit. Say 30km/h. At the perimeter you have cars for people to drive to other towns and a train station to get them to Toronto / Ottawa. Maybe a small airport.

Once you change from thinking "oh we just must have cars here" to thinking "how would we solve problem x without cars" the whole city can be made to be more vibrant. We can't let our children out of our sights in modern cities they're so dangerous. That's madness!

In terms of authenticity, here I partially agree with you. I do not intend to emulate an ancient European city. That's dumb. But I don't want the city to end up looking like shit like most of Canadian cities do with their completely mismatched building styles, billboard ads, tacky chains, and telephone poles all over the place. Instead, at the city formation you get good estimates of what types of natural building materials are near by (the types of wood, clays, stone, etc) and you hire teams of architects and city planners to design a set of cohesive style guides. There should be room for custom flourish, but the city should still look like a cohesive whole. There is no reason to use concrete for anything other than subterranean piles. Use large flat rocks for streets. Yes rock streets are more expensive but they look much, much better and because we have density from day one they might be 10x the price but we should only need 1/10th of the pavement by area.

Also, by creating a hard perimeter around the city, there could be a real set of community gardens just outside of the city for things like herbs and other expensive plants. We wouldn't have to choose between city life and connection with nature.

It sounds as if you were talking about Milton Keynes. Strange place, but doable without car.

Interesting points. Laurie Baker's work may interest you, if not heard of already, same about Christopher Alexander.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurie_Baker

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Alexander

>We can't let our children out of our sights in modern cities they're so dangerous. That's madness!

That has nothing to do with cars and everything to do with culture. I grew up roaming freely on streets filled with cars in the 70s/80s.

Banning cars won't fix helicopter parenting.

European cities did not form in the way they did because of building codes

Some actually did. Lisbon expanded rapidly in the 1960s, and the new construction was designed on purpose to be 4 or 5 stories high with shops on the ground floor and with primary schools and churches as main foci of community interaction. If anyone wants to check out Google Streetview, the neighbourhoods northwest of the Zoo and east of Campo Grande park are typical.

But in America it seems that no architect made it back alive from WW II, and that's why their cities are so awful.

Part of the reason to mention building codes is that building codes in the US enforce car-centric building in many areas, by mandating maximum densities, parking minimums, road setbacks, etc.

And part of the reason for that is that many towns buy an off the shelf municipal code called municode to start from.

I too wish Canadian towns weren't all about the car. Perhaps the university small cities are the closest: London (ON), Kingston, etc.

Lived in London during and slightly after university: it's not. City's pretty much dominated by cars, there's technically a transit system but it was slow and infrequent, and the way the city is laid out with three major N/S and three major E/W roads makes it hard to get around during constructions season. Downtown is...kind of walkable, but it's bordering on a food desert with only one (expensive) grocery store at the edge of the core.

Ontario can't have a town like this because of weather.

You can get close, but it is expensive. You'll need pedestrian tunnels. Given that people won't be on the streets, you don't need to be concerned about traffic on the streets.

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