Come and try Barcelona. I have a number of supermarkets within 5 minutes walk of my house. Driving is a bit of a pain in the arse here (mainly because I don't want to pay for parking for my crappy car, so I park it 15 minutes cycle away).

As someone living in a place "designed for people", my trip to the grocery stores means putting on my shoes, walking down the stairs and across the street. The next department store is about 200m down the street.

Is this Manhattan?

Because in Chicago I think that describes about 10 blocks (a few hundred staggeringly wealthy people in the most lavish of luxury condo towers). The rest of us have some tiny, price-gouging convenience stores nearby but have to go ~20 blocks for a real supermarket, 4-5 miles to downtown for a Target or Macy's. Taking the train is less of a hassle than parking in the Loop, but it's still a hassle.

In Vienna "maximum 5-10 minutes walk from the closest supermarket" would cover virtually the entire population.

I lived in three different apartments in uptown and edgewater and was able to walk to a supermarket within a half-mile. Two of the locations were also close to other general shopping choices. All three were close enough to the El to get us whereever else we wanted to go. Downtown Evanston is similar or maybe even better. I get your point that this model is not common in the US - but I believe that's the entire point of this article - how can cities be designed to be more livable?

It's Trondheim.

?? This wasn't true in Hyde Park and it certainly isn't true in South Loop.

The assumption here is without cars cities would be laid out exactly the same. What if there were by laws that every high rise above x floors has y retail space on the ground floor. In this case most of your daily needs would be serviced by a trip down. Once a week/month you may go to a larger store.

In San Francisco and Chicago, I experienced no shortage of tiny, expensive corner stores, restaurants, boutiques, etc. That's the kind of stuff that seems to go into the ground floors of residential towers. The hassle was accessing (the local equivalents of) Target, Kroger, Best Buy, etc.

What are the problems with the small stores that you describe?

- expensive? - few products? Something else?

If pricing is an issue the question becomes,

How do you assist small retailers compete with massive chains?

A problem I have thought about quite a bit as my dad once owned a small corner shop He had to close it as the chains make it impossible to compete on price with bulk buying discounts.

I believe what happens is due to the layout of our cities we end up with large chains, malls and big box retailers. It's a virtuous cycle...

> If pricing is an issue the question becomes,

> How do you assist small retailers compete with massive chains?

Is the problem that they can't compete, or that they don't have to? When driving isn't the main method of getting around, but instead walking augmented by potentially high-latency public transit is the main method, the cost to the consumer of small distance differences between notionally "competing" institutions becomes quite high, which means that they have less need to actually compete with one another: they have captive hyper-local markets with effective moats.

Being forced to live in a high rise apartment is very undesirable. Most people would choose to live in a single family house with a yard.

Many people would choose to live in a royal palace - but not many would choose to pay the full cost of their decision.

Cultural attitudes about apartments and raising children are just that - cultural.

Inner city problems are another kettle of fish.