Basically European towns and small cities.
Higher density is fine but high density like Hong Kong or Mumbai is an anti-pattern just as suburbs are.
coming from exactly one such European town (or more accurately the rural area around it) this is a 20th century bucolic fantasy.
Well-paying jobs are increasingly non-existent as brick&mortar is being killed by tech, education opportunities are limited, as is cultural life increasingly as the economy goes down the drain. More and more people commute 2+ hours to get to the better universities or better paying work. Doctors are hard to get a hold off, and so forth. Internet access as well as infrastructure in general is in mediocre shape because costs are high for small, spread out towns. The demographic shift as young people leave makes it even worse, elderly isolation is awful.
The first time I actually moved to a big city (abroad to Tokyo of all places) it took me a week to understand that the small town is pretty much over and also ridiculously romanticized.
Instead of commuting two hours to get to better paying work, you end up commuting two hours to afford the house you want. Doctors you can't get ahold of because their office is too busy to see you, wait 7 months, etc. Universities are impossible to get into because there are too many applicants, or the cost is too high. You can work or be educated over the Internet. Instead of having no culture in the city, you can develop or embrace your local traditions or cultural aspects. If there are none, then you can be the first one to start (building cultures is hard work, like maintaining government).
You can have a bucolic fantasy just as you can have an urban dream. Both can be ridiculously romanticized.
I absolutely agree with you that Hong Kong from an infrastructure perspective has a lot going for it, but I think that skyscrapers are an anti-pattern. You can't repair them yourself, they require specialized knowledge to create and support, extremely dense environments are breeding grounds for contagious disease (this is a general statement), and from a natural standpoint they're quite sterile (the parks, while great, are illusions of nature - a toy or a simulation). I think we'll also find that skyscrapers cause anxiety and depression here in the near future as/if research is conducted. You also require massive infrastructure for cities, again more specialization. They're very much reliant on cheap fossil fuels to create and support, even if they're per-capita lower on emissions. If we run out of oil and I live in a 30,000 person city in Europe, life goes on. I still walk like I was before and farmers still bring their goods to the local market. If we run out of oil and I live in Hong Kong the entire thing crumbles to bits.
I think on aggregate, that is more expensive (financially and environmentally) than high density cities. Take all the infrastructure which needs to be built out for these small cities (roads, electric grid etc) which serve a very small number of people and now imagine if everyone lived like that and multiply that cost with building out this infrastructure for a many many small cities. Building 30 small idyllic villages instead of one hong Kong would end up having a larger environmental impact.
> Building 30 small idyllic villages instead of one hong Kong would end up having a larger environmental impact.
Depends. If they’re American-style sure. If they are (again these are your words idyllic villages) then I don’t see much impact. You just walk around the small village. Maybe a farmer comes buy and sells apples or whatever. These scale and the evidence is in the city, where you can see companies will create multiple instances of their stores because there’s an upper limit on the number of people served. Also for a right sized city 50,000+ you don’t need massive infrastructure investments which require massive specialization, massive costs, and so forth. They only exist because there are too many people.
Also for items like roads those are fine. You can walk or ride your bike in them. Maybe they’re even multi-purpose. Most wouldn’t be driving cars on them for any reason though which is a big inefficiency.
I wouldn't want to live in Hong Kong or a similar skyscraper supertall metropolis.
And single family homes everywhere with massive lawns are also broken because they make everything too car-ry.
But somewhere like London (less dense) or Paris (more dense) has a good balance somewhere. Like, here (London) we have streets and streets of "single family homes", but they're about 100sqm, they're terraced and thin. Walking by one takes like, two seconds or something.
On my street alone there are probably 200 of these things, and you can multiply that street by another hundred, and all of those are within easy walking distance of a high street and tube station. Those numbers are probably a bit off but you get the idea.
The thing is that people who get super into, well, anything, can't seem to resist going for one or the other extreme, and they seem to want to quantify everything, so it ends up being logically the case that like:
Beep boop
<the best thing to do is build loads of buildings just under the height limit at which the cost per square foot is optimal and then put everyone in them and then make the ground floor retail and then put the metro station>
boop beep.
But that's playing The Sims, not like, living in a world with real humans with wants and desires. Some people want to live in Manhattan and others want to live on 50 acres in Arkansas and that's fine.
Proponents of self-sustainment as the way forward advocate off-grid lifestyle that provides energy and large amount of food/materials internally / within family or homestead. A house and a plot of land, and some fruit/veggies/animals, with solar or geothermal, etc.
In my mind then, a 5,000 people town is as much on the other side of the spectrum from that, as a 5,000,000 people town.
In fact, in North America, small and medium towns in my experience (Minnesota, Manitoba, Ontario) are quaint and lovely, but worst possible compromise - no self-sustaining benefits of independent homestead, but with limited to no public transit, no high density dwelling, spread out infrastructure. You cannot live without a car in a small north american town - modern or old. They are beautiful lovely historic worst parts of sub-urban without the urban/core.
[edit/disclosure: In fact, I live in one now (moved there for love:) and it is fascinating how much we get none of the benefits of either farm or downtown living. City Council repeatedly rejects calls for public transit, on probably awful unspoken grounds of not wanting "undesirable elements". We do have a cute main street and the 5% of population who lives on or around it can probably walk there. Literally the rest of 95% of population MUST own several cars to live. I'm always amused when healthy 25 year old SF-downtown dwellers promote bikes as solution to everything - that's just not going to be relevant to the aging population of Canadian or USA snowbelt sub-urbia:]
Yes but this isn't possible with current population levels so it's a non-started from a practical standpoint. It also has downsides as you can't build things like hospitals or universities, particle colliders, or hardware/electronics to do self-sustainment. All and I mean all who advocate for this specific way of life only do so and are able to do so because it's subsidized by technological innovation throughout the rest of the world. To be clear I support people doing this. I think it’s really cool and good for society, but it’s important to be aware of how you’re actually able to do it.
> In my mind then, a 5,000 people town is as much on the other side of the spectrum from that, as a 5,000,000 people town.
I think this would be a great opportunity to recalibrate, because those are not even remotely the same thing in any way, shape, or form. Even ancient peoples who were undoubtedly more self-sustaining than anyone who exists today had settlements larger than 5,000 people.
> In fact, in North America, small and medium towns in my experience (Minnesota, Manitoba, Ontario) are quaint and lovely, but worst possible compromise - no self-sustaining benefits of independent homestead, but with limited to no public transit, no high density dwelling, spread out infrastructure. You cannot live without a car in a small north american town - modern or old. They are beautiful lovely historic worst parts of sub-urban without the urban/core.
I agree that this is the experience but you need to look to Europe for better examples. I'm also advocating for things like train service, majority of your experience being walking or biking (i.e. a 15-minute town), and very reduced car ownership. Having a car isn't that bad, it's having 2 or 4 cars and using them for everything under the sun. Europeans have cars, and they also have infrastructure, and farms, and self-sustaining areas. It's a great blueprint to improve upon. I'm not advocating for what is, but what could be.