this post was submitted on 06 Oct 2025
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Walkable "towns" would bed an interesting study in contradictions. By the time you get to walkability, you have a city.
And that replaces your 19 problems and adds about 50 more.
Nah, small towns can be walkable too.
There's just nothing to walk to.
Does that affect the ordinary day of somebody living there though? If their daily grind of home, work, groceries, school, etc switched from being car trips to being walks, it should still improve their life.
If they're already going out of town to find fun attractions on the weekends it occasional evenings, that part of their routine won't change much.
Towns of all sizes can be walkable, there just might not be as many things to walk to.
Some examples include
My town is very walkable, although it does have 60,000 so is not that small. We also have two colleges where the campuses are walkable but no real college town and two train stations, with a third planned. Does it “become a city” because we zone to allow five story apartment building near the train station at the town common?
I grew up in a ~250k pop town which had like 90% of the town in 1h walk from the center. Not something you'll do every day but it definitely simplifies getting home after night parties.
This is the most ignorant take I’ve heard in a long time, so congrats on that I guess. Walkable towns are in some ways easier than walkable cities. A city you need to be walkable across the entire city, over and over again, a town just needs to do it once. Anyway, I live in a walkable small town. One of several I’ve lived in. It’s great.
Take a look into archologies. Specifically Arcosanti. We can definitely do it, but we would essentially have to design the cities from the ground up with that approach in mind.
I don’t want to live in a Darco.
Sorry, but the thoughts I have with regard to arcologies go in very different ways from yours.
It's a panopticon. a complete police state where there's no privacy, no individual freedoms. Everyone is watched all the time because no one is ever outside the zone of control or between overlapping zones of control to create jurisdictional gray areas. Everything is rationed, because the arcology has to operate on the concept that everything you need is in the arcology. That means resources must be tightly controlled - and so only the rich & powerful get what they want, and everyone else might be allowed to exist. And of course they can't be allowed to leave, because then the labor force to support the rich people will be gone. So any possible arcology becomes a massive prison - at best.
Second, I'll admit that I'm a Shadowrun fan. Possibly one of the greatest tragedies in that setting was the horrific incident in the Renraku Arcology. And really it's just an image of what could happen. People are closed in and murdered by something they can't control.
I live in the densest part of the USA, in a metropolitan area that can give my friends and loved ones from rural areas a panic attack just by existing. More consolidation and more control terrifies me.
Me thinking about what an arcology would be like when I was playing the hot new game Sim City 2000: "Imagine the technology in these things, and maybe they're an important option for human expansion if propulsion technology doesn't make huge leaps, and oh maybe with some really good deep geothermal for power they can be so land area efficient..."
Me thinking what an arcology would be like when I exist in 2025: "Yeah they were pretty coo- wait... What about the governments? What about the corporations that build and administrate these things and employ people? Are all those entities even distinct from one another? This isn't a post scarcity Star Trek techno heaven, it is a real world Final Fantasy 7 shit pie with the haves living literally on top of the have-nots. No, no, forget that, these things are going to destroy the mental health of the people in them even before we add the evils of modern society!!"