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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
And part of the reason for that is that many towns buy an off the shelf municipal code called municode to start from.
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.
However, a common lament in these towns is that housing costs are increasing as people move there from the cities. It can be... socially awkward... to be a carpetbagger in a place where everyone knows everyone else's story. Maybe that's why you've mentioned taxes and basic income in your comment.
If they are popular that is a good reason to build more of them.
The first could be solved by something like the UK's New Towns, although that requires a level of government involvement that is likely politically impossible in the US and perhaps Canada, as well.
The second is the more important issue, since, based on many of the comments, people don't seem to merely want to live nearby to another few thousand people. They also want lakes, forests, mountains, or some other geographic or natural feature. They also need provisions and Internet, which means pre-existing infrastructure nearby.
I don't know that I agree. I live in a small Ontario town. Pop. ~2,000. I don't ever feel the need to drive other than when leaving town to visit people who live outside of town. Everything I need on a day-to-day basis is easily walkable.
> What I want is a hipster small town, built around bikes and walkability. Close enough to a lake to be fun, but not so close to make it all about "water life". I want a city where artists and computer scientists can both afford to be there.
I think you described the Ontario town I grew up in. Pop. ~1,000. Near the lake, hipster town that has a booming (relatively speaking) tech industry. The downside is that everyone wants to live in the kind of town you described, so housing there is now just about as expensive as Toronto. That includes me. I would love to go back. But the costs are tough to justify.
For what it's worth, 'car-centric' has nothing to do with actual automobiles. "Car-centric" is coded language for "unplanned therefore affordable".
Strip malls, billboard signs, 10 lane light intersections, none of this is "car-centric", none of this is designed for cars, no regular person enjoys driving through that. But it's always cheap, so it's everywhere. Those represent an absolute-cheapest-option thinking, ignoring all else. Cars are just as much an afterthought as pedestrians and bicycles and busses are.
Roads that are actually designed for cars are freeways direct to other freeways, with no pedestrians and no bicycles and no oncoming traffic and no stoplights and no intersections ever and parking lots/ramps directly attached to freeway exits. It just so happens, that these are generally the safest roads too (in both US/Canada, and Europe) despite also being the fastest roads. Of course, construction of this rarely-to-never happens, "car-centric" roads rarely get built because it costs a bit more money.
But a 5 lane 'arterial' road, with turn lanes and curb cuts for every random store that wants it? Slap some sidewalks and a bike lane on it? Pedestrians, bicyclists, and drivers will hate that, and it's terribly unsafe for all modes, but it's always the cheapest option to go with so it's the default. And it's so cheap that every municipality in the country can build them everywhere without thinking.
"Car-centric" has absolutely nothing to do with cars. "Car-centric" is complaining about areas being having the cheapest possible design (and therefore being somewhat affordable), with an unrelated jab against cars thrown in out of spite.
The US Interstate system and freeways into previously undeveloped land to create new suburbs near large cities would certainly fall under even your definition of "car-centric" design (and this could, arguably, be seen happening in Southern California to this day), but it doesn't in much of Canada.
I do expect some of the design is driven by a desire by citizens to live in low density (the "to each his own" idea brought up elsewhere in the thread), and it stands to reason that people attracted to suburbs would generally be those low-density seekers and would thereby encourage more of that kind of development.
However, that seems insufficient an explanation for a stand-alone town of a few thousand, that isn't a suburb of a nearby city.
Is building "out" really cheaper than building "up" a couple stories?
Maybe it's simpler than that, and city folk fail to understand that small enough towns are actually rural, without central sewage treatment, and every building needing substantial open space for a leach field. Even when centralizing becomes cost-effective, it may only be applicable for new growth, and it will still need land (and of a certain kind).
I visited recently, and if I was single I'd strongly consider moving there.
They wish they had left earlier.
> 5 minutes walk or 1 minute drive to a shop for groceries, hardware, lumber, restaurants, kid parks.
Almost every small town in Ontario is car-centric. The big ugly parking lots push the shops further from the street. There is no bike lanes to speak of. The coffee shops don't feel lively, they feel depressed, and the coffee is usually Tim Hortons or worse.
What I want is a hipster small town, built around bikes and walkability. Close enough to a lake to be fun, but not so close to make it all about "water life". I want a city where artists and computer scientists can both afford to be there. High property taxes, but with a per-person dividend / basic income so the effective property taxes are progressive.