> Cities and universities serve very different populations.

As Jane Jacobs observed many decades ago: you don't live in a city, you live in a neighbourhood.

* https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/09/26/jane-jacobs-st...

You design the urban environment where, with-in a fifteen minute walk, you have grocery stores, butchers, coffee shops, dry cleaners, pubs, a library, dentists, doctor offices, elementary school, bakery, flower shops, etc.

It's not that hard: we were doing it for a long-time before WW2.

You can have big houses:

* https://www.google.com/maps/place/150+Westminster+Ave,+Toron...

And small houses in it:

* https://www.google.com/maps/place/100+Geoffrey+St,+Toronto,+...

All with backyards and (laneway) garages. Throw in some (medium-rise) apartment buildings while you're at it:

* https://www.google.com/maps/place/150+Fermanagh+Ave,+Toronto...

High enough density for pubic transit, which makes car ownership optional and not a necessity.

Toronto is a bad example for sane housing, you have to pay over a thousand dollars for a single room that gets sunlight and the prices just kept rising until covid

The parent also mentioned Jane Jacobs who a lot of people like to remember for getting highway construction blocked and, as they say, supported walkable neighborhoods that were communities. I would also guess that Jacobs would also have been perfectly fine with Wet Village "NIMBYs" blocking high-rise residential construction if they didn't want it. Livable neighborhoods probably correlate better to high housing prices than low.

Is high-rise (>10 storeys) really needed? Or would mid-rise (5-10) be sufficient?

Certainly some areas could use high (near major transit hubs), but towers don't have to be planted everywhere.

Toronto is a good example where you can decent density without high rises.

The fact that so much land was wasted building low-density (North York, Scarberia) sub-divisions (not even getting into McCallion and her disaster of Mississuaga) now means there is high demand but limited supply. Of course now the regions of Peel and Durham (etc) have 'found religion' with regards to density.

It's also a bad example of density for a major North American city. Toronto (4,334.4/km2) has lower pop. density than San Francisco (7,255.12/km2), and Boston (5,531.93/km2) and its nearest comparison is probably Chicago (4,573.98/km2).

"Toronto" now officially includes things like North York, Etobicoke, etc, which are car-centric, post-WW2 bedroom communities.

Old Toronto is 8,210.4/km2 (21,265/sq mi):

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Toronto

Even Etobicoke may not be very low-density in places like Long Branch and Mimico.

Faculty and staff rarely live on campus. Often they live in suburban enclaves and drive to campus. They also tend to have spouses with jobs elsewhere and children who don't go to school on campus. Faculty parking can be one of the most contentious issues for any college or University.

This idyllic myth of presented a college campus is only true for the students.

Could you elaborate on a few of the hundreds of different groups you are referring to within a city, as well as their conflicting needs?

Small retail shops.

Huge retail shops (Wallmarts/Targets).

Non-profit retail (Goodwill).

Restaurants (Coffee shops, family restaurants, Olive Gardens)

Utility buildings. Utility Workers.

Housing; low- medium- high- and no income. Plus some for the 0.01%.

Schools; Pre- elementary- middle- high-schools and College.

Office space.

Pools.

Gyms.

Hospitals.

Doctor offices.

Animal shelters.

Green spaces.

Cinemas.

Amusement parks.

Fire departments.

Police departments.

Community centers.

Jails.

Courthouses.

City/County/State/Country centers.

Temporary housing (From hotels to short-term rentals)

Commercial shipping (by rail, road, and sea)

Car storage (travel between distant cities)

And perhaps most importantly, competition (that is, alternatives) for all of the above; since campuses tend to be monopolies for many offerings.

Notably, many college campuses seem to offer most of these services already: food courts restaurants, and cantinas, small retail for student and faculty needs, utility buildings, housing (undergraduate and graduate, including for students with families), childcare centers for the children of students and faculty, office space (duh), gyms and pools (which HN is fond of ranting at), access to medical services, green spaces, campus fire and police, and park-like green space around campus, and competing services in many of these categories located just off campus.

Speaking for myself, I've never seen a campus with all of: A full grocery store. Elementary, middle, or high schools (with associated sports facilities). Jails. Courthouses. Hospitals (not basic medical services, fully featured hospitals with Ambulance support). Police forces (not half a dozen campus cops, or loaned police officers)... and so forth.

And remember, we're discussing building cities like campuses - there is no "just off campus" space available for competition.

We're discussing campuses the size of Manhattan Island, without most of the roads (which will hugely impact the ability to deliver goods and take away waste; just see how New York is taken over by these two activities at night). Also, without suburbs, so the housing (and all of the support necessary for that population) needs to be that much more dense (and affordable).

I think it's interesting that your list omits industry/manufacturing/construction, typically very space- and vehicle-intensive. Industry is no longer a part of the urban core of a lot of cities in the west (and it can have significant negative externalities for the folks living around it), but it really needs to be solved in order to reduce car dependence.

It just didn't cross my mind; a side effect of the city I live in being a campus town, not a manufacturing town.

You're absolutely right - manufacturing needs to be solved.

I'm interested to find out what makes these groups so different that being a walkable area is incompatible between them.

i'll take a stab at what the author of that comment might have meant - how I understood it at least

there are 2 ways you can define "walkable"

1. it is physically possible to walk there - e.g. there are paved sidewalks

2. it is convenient to walk from the place you are to the place you need to be

i think that the misunderstanding here might be that you and the comment above are thinking about 1 while the problem is actually 2

to pull a quote from the article:

"students who live in dormitories are able to work, eat and worship all within walking distance of their homes"

there's also a link to this concept of a "15 minute neighborhood"[1] where everyone can walk to their basic daily needs w/in 15 minutes, or beautifully summarized as “Put the stuff closer together so it's easier to get to the stuff.”

so the proposed problem is that the set of things w/in that "daily needs" category, AKA the "stuff", might grow, due to the increasing diversity of the population you're servicing, to a point where its not possible to give that to everyone

[1]https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2019/9/6/7-rules-for-cre...

Also they aren’t considering Stanford which has one of the largest campuses by Area and you need shuttles to get from one area to another (even excluding the nature preserves).

Stanford is probably not a great example. It's exactly because the campus is and has always been so big that it's setup wide and grand.

Stanford is a perfectly fine example. I used to visit Stanford several times a week. Walking briskly, you can cross the core of campus, where most of the instructional buildings are, in about 15 minutes from one end to another. The athletic center and undergraduate dorms are located around the periphery of this core. I assume students don't typically go back to their dorms multiple times per day. The engineering campus is pretty compact. The medical complex is, yes, another brisk ten-minute walk, but I doubt many students need to go between the hospital and the rest of campus more than once a day. If your daily schedule takes you from the dorms to the core of campus, and then to the hospital, and then to the campus gym, and then to the student union or the main library, then yes, maybe you'll choose to take a shuttle. But for an able-bodied person, these are very reasonable distances to travel on foot, and certainly on a bicycle or scooter.

For comparison, I went to a university with a much smaller campus, and it was still at least a ten-minute walk from one end to another. And it was fine.