Parks with all the other people? Locked in a room in a 300 sq ft apartment with your family/roommates outside?
The interchange allows you to live far enough away from the overcrowded city that you can own a bigger piece of land where you're not packed in with your neighbors like sardines so you can actually go outside and sit and be alone without hearing 15 other families doing shit. It also allows you to have enough space to have a workshop space for hobbies or a garden or whatever else you want to do.
You understand that Italy has areas that are not as densely populated as the city center. In fact some places are down right rural. And the US has some very densely populated square milage.
This is such a wild, wild take on the US's cat centric build.
Most country, urbanist or not, do have wilderness, where you can live and die without people know.
You don't need to live in the city if you dont want to. You can live off grid, and burn your own feces for heat if that is the life of your choosing. What people here are fighting for is to keep this living style is outside of cities.
Basically, city is not the place for giant emotional support vehicles. And outside traffic should not disrupt the normal form of transportation in cities, which should be dominated by public transport, walking, and efficient personal vehicles (like bike, scooters, wheelchairs, etc).
Building/refurbishing furniture, working on cars, basically anything that is loud and requires power tools and space to lay out, assemble, or store materials, also gardening.
this is all stuff that in Italy goes on inside the city. There are fab-labs, maker-spaces, communal gardens and other communal organizations that enable you to do this without living in bumblefuck nowhere or renting a giant ass house.
There are garages underneath the apartment lot where you can do reasonably noisy work from 7:00 to 23:00, no need to go to a maker space or anything like that
Have you ever worked in a shared space? I have, and shit was constantly being lost, broken, or stolen. More people just means more chances some asshole will ruin things for everyone.
omg you're so American. These places have clear rules, systems to guarantee accountability, with software tracking every person using a room or a tool at any given time. They are managed by people that work there full-time and guarantee everything is in order.
All of those things can be done in a densely populated city. I do it and live near the city center in São Paulo, the world's 4th most populous megapolis. In short, your arguments are bullshit.
In 'murica it may be impossible (thank car-centered infrastructure and your insane zoning laws!), but here you can just rent a house instead of an apartment... an OK place (2+ bedrooms/ 150+ m²/ space for tinkering) at an OK location (safe enough, relatively close to the city center) is ~600 to ~800 USD, which is certainly more expensive than the local average, but not eye-wateringly so.
I agree with the premise of this sub. The way car first places such as the US does things is a problem. The cars themselves and the underlying infrastructure, such as that exchange.
But I also don't want to live in cramped multidweller unit housing. I've done so most of my life and I hated it.
I don't know what or even if there's a good solution that accomodates both, but I hope so.
And if you're someone that wants to live somewhere actually remote, having dense urban areas instead of suburban sprawl will leave more space for rural areas and nature.
I am no expert, but if we are allowed to design everything from ground up, I believe personal electric vehicle (e-bike etc, abbreviated as PEV) for suburb, transit/bike/walk in city, and high speed rail between cities are probably the way to go.
City should be mostly car free, people can transit to suburb via transit, and to other city via rail. People move within city using walk/bike/tram. Vehicle besides delivery and commercial vehicle should be discouraged from entering the city, by removing in-city parking and setup no-go zones for private vehicles.
Even in the U.S. most people in suburb live rather close to a town center (less than 15 mins with PEV or bike). Thus efficient transit from town center to city can be a good idea. People will be discouraged from driving to city due to the lack of road and parking within cities.
For long form travel, people should move via high speed rail. Then take local travel options once arrived. High speed rail provide a faster and more comfortable travel alternative to driving.
Finally, I believe for people living in rural areas (an hour to any town center on PEV), cars and electric cars are their only option. If they want to enter city or suburb, they can drive to the nearest town center and take transit.
Interestingly, with this type of town, it's easier and quicker to go out of the town than in American car centric towns.
Public transports are more efficient. You don't need cars. You have parcs and actual green space. The energy consumption is also reduced.
It's no magic that they built these type of towns in the past. They couldn't afford our type of energy consumption and land use. And, it was more practical for the daily life.