Quote:
Originally Posted by Acajack
All good points, though on the last one I do think that more than a miniscule share of the city needs to be built that way in order for things to be optimal. Even if you have a super awesome but very tiny urban inner city, if 95% or more of the city is super sprawly and low-density, it'll often choke that area due to so many residents insisting on driving to get there and soak in the atmosphere. Even if you try and wean them off driving they will exert pressures (political and otherwise) and may end up killing off the area or at least compromising it.
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I think much of the misguided urban "renewal" efforts between the 1960s and early '80s suffered for trying to please the suburban crowd. Make everything new, just like the suburbs... make it drivable, ensuring parking was plentiful and cheap. Put a mall downtown to "attract" the people shopping at the ones in the newer parts of town. The result in many cities was a loss of heritage building stock (which seemingly wasn't valued as widely back then as it is today), blocks emptied for massive parking lots, and shops killed off, first by losing business to the newer suburban retail and then by the downtown mall that sucked away much of the remaining spending.