[choeger]

The central idea is that you want to live as close as possible to work. You shall pay lots of money for the privilege of a cramped, overages, badly maintained apartment in some central location. You are not to have any other constraints on your choice of living space than that. In particular, you are not supposed to live 20km outside the city. Unless that 20km happens to be in walking distance to some remote train station. But you're still weird then.

Edit: Everything I read about these urban Paradise concepts screams "small town" to me. Where I grew up, that was how a small town functioned and of course it was quite nice. But that is not how a city functions.

Personally, I wonder how long it will take cities to depopulate after they made commuting too hard. In my observation, the car just acts as a proxy for the conflict between people living in the city and people that merely work there.

[noobermin]

>But that is not how a city functions.

This concept of a city didn't stop cities from functioning before cars and it won't stop cities from functioning after them.

[sergiosgc]

A large city, like London, in the XVI century, would be in the low hundreds of thousand inhabitants range. Two orders of magnitude less than today.

[icebraining]

If we're going to use arbitrary points in time, at its peak Ancient Rome had over 1M inhabitants, and Chang'an had almost 2M, all before the IX century.

A more apt comparison might be London right before the car became common place, though.

[sergiosgc]

The moment in time you pick for London does not change the picture. Victorian London still didn't have a million souls.

Rome's 1M population is a disputed number. Cities of tens of million inhabitants are all post-industrial and none work solely on mass transit. The car is an essential piece of the equation.

Car-less cities are an interesting thought experiment, but none has gone past the implementation barrier. That part of the equation should go into the though experiment.

[icebraining]

> Victorian London still didn't have a million souls.

Can you provide a link? I'm either confused about what "Victorian" or "London" mean, because it seems to me that metro London definitely had over 1M people in the late 19th century.

[tonyedgecombe]

Pre-war London had a population of 8 million and cars were strictly for the wealthy.

[choeger]

What city did actually function before the invention of individual motorized traffic? Rome? London? Would you want to live there back then as a simple citizen?

[matthewowen]

Is this a serious question? Let's take 1900 as an example year that's before individual motorized traffic (the car existed but clearly wasn't popularized). New York had a population of 3.5MM. London was 6.5MM. Paris 2.7MM.

If we're going to identify something key to the growth of cities, surely it is mass transit. Much of this isn't apparent in modern cities in the USA because so many of them tore apart their streetcar systems in the middle of the 20th century as policies shifted to favor the private automobile. But mass transit seems to me like the thing that drove the growth.

[choeger]

Just research how 1900 London was like for the average worker and then tell me you'd want to live like that.

[spion]

Just research how London is today. Most people don't use cars at all.

[tonyedgecombe]

Well it wasn't full of diesel and petrol fumes. The great stink was forty years earlier, they already had decent sewage systems (many of which are still in place now).

[XCSme]

I live in Amsterdam and I love it, public transport is amazing and cycling lanes are one of the best in the world. I never used a car here and never felt that I have to. Yes, rent is expensive, but it's like that because there is demand for it. If I wanted to live in the country side, yes, I would leave 20 km outside the city, but why would I want to leave that far away when I that means spending hours daily just to get where I want to? I fell in love with being able to bike or take the tram to get where I need in 15mins average.