alt Hacker NewsAnd what does building for people look like, precisely? I live in a 1910s London housing estate with pretty ordinary single family sized homes with gardens and lots of green space. Cars were not really a big deal when they designed and built the place, pretty much everyone walked everywhere and had e.g. coal and milk etc delivered by horse. Its no slum and is generally seen as quite a desirable place to live even now and commands a premium.
Yet this is no utopia, despite being designed for people (...and horses!).
It takes 20 mins to get to the tube station or 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 tube station and 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 or even 10 minutes walking unless you build some sort of ultra high-density high-rise city of the future where 10s of thousands of people live in a single 250-storey building (and then you end up "commuting" inside that buildings elevator system...).
Back in real life what you do 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 (assuming there is a single bus route that goes roughly where you need and you don't have to get off and wait again to change to another route to get to your final destination...). Then repeat the return journey carrying 15kg of groceries. 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 multiple extra hours a day just for getting around on foot and bus to buy food for the next few days (and you can only do a few days at a time as your are physically limited by what you can carry) 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" of the different lines becomes considerable.
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I don't know. I have been living in south of Spain for the last 7 years, buildings aren't high rises yet in the 2 neighborhood I have lived in I had most of the commodities available.
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. I am pretty sure the main issue in some places are some sort of zoning laws that prevent commercial areas to be rented in otherwise residencial neighborhoods.
Worth noting a 20 minute walk is a ~5 minute bike ride. I live a 20 minute walk from my local train station and when I can't ride a bike (which is rare, but happens for one reason or another) it's pretty annoying.
Which gaps? Unless you're outside zone six, you can get pretty much anywhere in London by tube or train within 20 minutes walking and if 20 minutes walking is too much for you then sure use the car, but traffic is so heavy in London that plenty of people just train.
How did people shop for groceries when your neighborhood was originally built? Surely it was not designed to be so inconvenient: what has changed in the meantime?
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 within that much time via walking or biking. This does not require super-towers or any unusual level of density. My neighborhood - about ten years older than yours - comes close to the ideal, and while it has its share of 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.
We don't have a metro station, but we do have an express bus line which will get you to a metro station in fifteen minutes, and that bus comes every five minutes. Not so bad.
No, there's not a shop on every corner - but there are two grocery stores within five minutes' walk, and two more within ten. No need to carry groceries on the bus at all.