Also a huge number of people in the US travel to places that are walkable:
- Disney World
- Las Vegas (The strip is anyway)
- DC
- NYC
car free community
cover photo shows both a car and parking lot
I’m just being pedantic but this just shows how ingrained cars are in modern society that even “car-free” communities need them
Also Disney is not designed for public use. It’s built to extract as much money out of you without leaving their property.
Vegas’ strip is like 1/10 the size of Disney World and had zero central planning, commercial or civil. The individual properties are designed the way you’re thinking but that’s a footnote by comparison.
Disney world is 40+ square miles of engineered profit-extraction entirely managed by a single proprietor. It’s a very hefty case study in commercial and communal design.
Yeah, I agree with you. Being 100% without a car is hard in most cases.
And the answer I see is trains. For the amount of money that does into the car industry (+ multi lane roads, administration, maintenance, etc) we could have super fancy, comfy, fast, frequent, and cheap/free trains.
And people would have more mobility too, at a fraction of the cost and environmental damage.
Trains for long distance + trolleys and subways for local travel. There will invariably be people whose transportation needs require a private vehicle but this combo alone would clear up the majority of cars on the road in my opinion.
Even in countries with pretty good public transit like the UK and Germany, a large majority of families have a private vehicle. If we had better trains and subways in the US, I don’t think too many people would sell their cars, but only use them once or twice a week, rather than once or twice a day.
That’s a huge win in my book.
not gonna catch on as long as its sold with a price premium instead of a discount for what they save on not building and maintaining car infrastructure.
The rents are extremely reasonable for the area. Here’s a video where some residents discuss their rents: https://youtu.be/hf0L3blkNA4
Why is the architecture and placement so bad tho? And narrow. Seems like a poor southern Italian village, but uglier. Or like a dark futuristic movie set.
Open walkable spaces can be pretty, does wonders for (populations) mental health.
The answer is to create shade. At those angles, you can find shade at any given time.
This is in frigging Phoenix Arizona. Nothing is walkable in 120 degrees.
Phoenix has a couple of these self contained communities already. The parking lot could be for people outside the community to come and visit the shops.
That’s like 48°C, pretty hot! I don’t think I could walk around in that. I take back some of my criticism.
Surely they need trees and covered areas though, not just boxy houses jammed in together like crooked teeth.
This part is my speculation, but the tightness, aside from shade, might be to give the illusion of small community solitude from the inside. Tempe is a very built -out city. More open, and you’ll be looking at all the typical American sprawl bullshit and probably a freeway or two
Shade is good - been in the south for 8ish years for work - It gets toasty down here.
A combination of artificial shade and greenery can have multiple benifits. (where applicable obviously - not all regions can support it nor should they try)
Shade can be functional too. There’s been some interesting research into panels/pigments that radiate infared light at the wavelength that can escape our atmosphere producing a cooler than ambient surface that could have a variety of uses. A ton of recent advances in solar technology as well.
I watched a YouTube video on it and they mentioned they designed the structure to maximize shade.
This combined with the white buildings knocked more than 20° off of the ambient temps within the neighborhood.
Edit:
The video.
Kirsten Dirksen tours a lot of homes / areas that focus on sustainability or break the mold.
Yeah, I don’t understand, were trees or solar panels not available? Not to mention that maximizing shade could be achieved with a simple pattern and taller buildings or rooftop gardens/panels. Even a simple mesh tarp (mimicking leaves) over the allies does the same trick without claustrophobia :). At such latitude shading from the top is way more effective than from the sides.
And what walkable city/neighborhood doesn’t have a piazza for people to gather & eat, drink, shop, etc?
Dense structure placement like that def looks like developers maximizing buildings per land, not for the community.
A shade structure in Phoenix’s Civic Space Park
I do agree with you this would be a very sensible and effective solution. I also was disappointed that seemingly no thought was put into integration of solar / shade plants.
However I do want to stress the importance of having access to a broad view of the horizon and sky.
That said they totally could have made little pockets with this lattice and 10x’d the environment on the passageways and generate power/food.
Have you watched the video and has it changed your mind? I’m curious if it’s just the article only giving that shitty overview photo. I only watched the video and thought it was quite nice for high density urbanism. An alternative to suburbia modeled after classic European cities.
Besides shade, narrow streets might also reduce amount of walking distance. So if you make it bigger you end up with less functionality.
I’m sure if they replicate the concept it could look quite different in other climates.
I don’t suppose you have a link to said video? I’d be curious to see it in more detail.
Oh that’s gonna be premium in a year or two. Welcome to your ‘block.’. You get sunshine indirectly between the hours of 11 and 1. Curfew is at 10. Be back in your cube by then.
We have the capacity to build green open neighborhoods using existing block structures and infrastructure… we just chose not to because it’s prime real estate. Roads and repairs are expensive… but if we replace it with more homes it’s better revenue generation.
I’d love to see a proper balance struck but for an idea to take root the seed must be blessed by capitalism. For it to grow it must, above all, be profitable. For adoption it must be accepted by the elite.
I cannot go into details but - I’ve seen some outstanding ideas of how to convert a city block by block and they do give me hope… but listening to discussions and debates on it is soul rending.
I’d genuinely love to see it in my lifetime- And in a form that strikes a balance that is both sustainable and actually an improvement in living conditions.
Yeah direct sun can be a problem too - it’s getting toasty out. That said there are unquestionably better ways to do that without making anti car into a maze of alleyways.
@Evil_Shrubbery this, why is it so full of dark and creepy spaces?
I wrote that comment before reading the article - it’s supposed to be fancy/expensive. Wtf. Prisons have better views then those (and bigger windows).
I hope they are not innovating slums for middle class, lul. Tho they can be good, fun, & cozy (just not rich), James May portrayed one nicely in his India season of Man Abroad
If you image search Culdesac Tempe Arizona there’s some ground-level imagery. Most of it is artists’ impressions of what looks like people wandering aimlessly in the outdoor spaces of a mall.
Ok but Phoenix is shit. Just a terrible “city” even for US standards. Why would anyone wanting to live car free live in Phoenix?
I spent two weeks in a cheap OrangeTree Resort booking and got groceries, took a tour of ASU, and went to a bunch of restaurants using only a week-long bus pass which also covers metro. It was way nicer than living in buttfuck nowhere Dakota where I have to drive 30 minutes to pick up groceries. I plan to move to the area at some point.
Scottsdale was annoyingly a big block of houses, downtown Pheonix near the airport had tons of litter and the occasional homeless person, never went further towards Mesa, but overall everything was an improvement from where I had come from.
I’d argue cars are more necessary in Phoenix than most places. It is way too hot to walk more than a couple of blocks, so unless you can build dense enough to justify a public transit stop on every other corner…yikes.
Cars don’t ‘solve’ a climate being ‘hot’. Tons of cities have existed for thousands of years in arid environments. You build the city respecting the environment, with more density and walkability, shade and vegetation.
The urban heat island is no joke and it’s due to cars. Phoenix is a monument to humankind’s stupidity and ignorance of a place’s environment.
That first picture is depressing
The city is maybe car-free but certainly not asphalt-free