>“The city is the perfect size for pedestrianisation,” says local architect Rogelio Carballo Soler. “You can cross the entire city in 25 minutes.
This seems to be the key point why it works.
This seems to be the key point why it works.
you can walk from side to side of Paris in a tad more than one hour with a good rhythm, and two hours if you take it normally.
So, this city is about 2 km across, which is very small, a village, considering smaller cities are more sparsely populated than an European metropolis.
Drop into street view in the city centre and have a look around. It's not a village.
Additionally, Paris is not exactly a demonstration of how larger cities need cars considering that about 70% of its inhabitants commute without using a car at all.
In my country villages are very often https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_settlement , going on for kilometers along some road, with farming land on both sides.
Small to medium cities (< 100 000 people) are often very dense because they're mostly made out of commieblocks or old tenament houses.
It's much easier to live without a car in a city.
BTW: this village goes on for 20 km. It has 6000 people. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zawoja
For comparison https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legionowo is the most densely populated city in Poland, it has about 50 000 people, and is about 3x5 km of low buildings. And still about 10% of the city is a forest :)
Cars waste so much space that people are used to bloated cities.