One popular way of talking about building for people is the concept of a "fifteen-minute city": neighborhoods where you can get to your daily needs in that much time by walking or biking. This does not require super-towers or any unusual level of density. My own neighborhood, about ten years older than yours, comes very close, and while it has some apartment buildings, none are taller than half a dozen stories, and there are just as many people living in townhouses or single-family homes as there are in the apartments.
The main issue is around equity.
15 minute cities work great for high-paid knowledge workers with flexible schedules who can chose how and where they can work (i.e. laptop + wifi). But this is not true for everyone - you cannot expect everyone to find employment within 15 minutes of their home (e.g. healthcare workers, factory workers, maintenance workers, etc etc are unlikely to e.g. find a factory within 15 mins of their house).
Making area support more active-transport (i.e. removing road space and replacing it with pedestrian and cycling space) also has the beneficial side-effect of making it nicer for people and thus more desirable. So property value and rents go up. And again, the high-paid knowledge workers and their families are fine, but the poorer and less well paid are priced out. The lower-income families have to move further out into lower-density areas where there is not enough density of population to support smaller grocery shops, pharmacies, etc so the 15 minute rule stops working and now they need to pay to run a car. And where you do retain roads for the essential transport needs (e.g. grocery deliveries, emergency services, garbage collection etc) you end up with the lower-income families living there since they are less desirable and cheaper and it is those who suffer from that the most (pollution, noise, safety etc)
If you remove roads of block access or removing parking etc to promote active-transport you also disproportionately impact those with accessibility problems. Not just "disabled people in wheelchairs" but also people who are not officially disabled but would benefit from driving, e.g. pregnant people, or elderly people who are fine but cannot walk distances regularly etc. 15 minute cities punish people who cannot easily walk or cycle unaided.
Basically the "15 Minute City" idea is only for rich white-collar knowledge workers. It forces lower-income families and workers out of a neighborhood. I am undecided on if this is "working as intended" or not.
It seems like the solution would be making nice cities less rare, and thus less of a hot commodity, rather than preventing them. After all, nearly anything that would make an area nicer to live in, would also make it more desirable, and therefore less affordable. I can't believe letting inner cities be hideous slums is the best thing for society overall (historically, indeed quite common).
You can't have the entire place be 15 minutes because some people have jobs etc that are just incompatible with that, and they tend to be lower income people.
Right now I live in a residencial bmneighborhood, not a city center and I have in a 5 min walking distance general, groceries , 2 pharmacies, veterinary, vegetables, butcher, fast food (roasted chicken, burgers, kebab), stationery shop, physiotherapist, 2 small chinese "sell anything" shops (basically aliexpress at your door), a swimming pool + multisport area (soccer, paddle, basketball + others), several hairdresser and nail/beauty shop, a shop selling hicking goods, one selling mattresses, a car bodywork shop, a general mechanic car shop, a gambling joint, primary and secondary school and 2 english schools, some place with activities for older people, a park to walk the dogs and several playgrounds.
A 10min longer walk distance and I have 4 other groceries supermarkets, lots of other smaller shops/specialties. The closest cinema is a 10min ride in a bus or bicycle, city center ~20min. Closest airport is a 15min car ride.
I ride my bicycles 10 minutes and I am in the woods in a natural park where I can only hear birds.
It doesn't seem that hard to replicate.
Yet this is no utopia.
It takes 20 mins to get to the area with the shops on foot (3 or 4 minutes driving - and these are small shops, not even big ones). Like what do you actually want it to have? A supermarket on every street corner? And a doctor's and a dentist and a cafe and a school and a cinema and a sports center and a museum and a library, on every corner? You can't have that density of things people want all within 5 minutes walking.
What you have is a 5 minute walk to the bus stop where you wait for 5 to 10 minutes for the bus to come, then you sit on the bus for 10-30 minutes while it slowly slowly slowly goes some indirect route and then you get out and walk 5 to 10 minutes at the other end. Then repeat the return journey carrying 15kg of groceries back home. Eventually, 2 hours later, you get back home.
Or just drive for 10 minutes to the shops and drive back. Which is what everyone does because people can't spend that sort of time buying food for the next few days or going to the doctors or getting the kids from school or whatever.
The tube is great but it's very very very limited in where it goes apart from the very center if London. Once you are outside zone 1 the gaps between stations and the "spokes" becomes considerable.