Andrew Alexander Price writes about urban planning, arguing for traditional walkable cities, small commercial spaces, and building incrementally rather than by zoning.
Commenters point to it in threads on city building, housing costs, and zoning, treating it as a source for incremental, traditional-city approaches.
>We've decided that our collective quality of life and the benefits conferred us by allowing private transportation far outweigh the harms
Speak for yourself. At least in cities, cars and car-centric cities have absolutely destroyed our economies. People drive for trip less than a mile because walking is miserable, and walking is miserable because the city is built around driving and without regard for pedestrians needing to constantly cross major intersections.
To be fair, cars aren't the root problem here - the root problem is the hypertrophic cities craze that started in the 1780s that made streets so cavernous and muddy (with incredibly wide streets, the middle was often left unpaved to save money, since there was plenty of room on the side to walk) and miserable that cars were a genuine improvement.
( A Traditional City Primer: https://www.andrewalexanderprice.com/blog20131204.php )
That link doesn't cover the history of hypertrophic cities, but it demonstrates quite well how terrible modern streets are.
> AFAICT, NIMBYism prevents that in most large cities (though why a tent city is preferable is beyond my understanding).
It's no different than "banning abortions to reduce the amount of abortions". It doesn't work that way in reality, and rather than face reality, they dig in deeper, stick fingers in their ears and go LALALALA CAN'T HEAR YOU. Except that NiMBYism goes strongly across both major political parties.
Though there's plenty to say about "affordable housing", many have argued we just need drastically more housing rather than a lot of government regulated housing prices. We're just not building enough in places people want to live, specifically because zoning (looping back to NiMBYism). [Andrew Price](https://andrewalexanderprice.com/blog20210125.php) and Strong Towns have plenty to say about this.
Of course the daunting obstacle is changing the mindset of suburban planners and nimbys. The zoning ordinances that have dominated planning in the USA since the 50's ban this in large swaths of America..
New Urbanism made progress creating denser planning in the last 30 years, but focused too much on high density mixed use. Adding small shops to residential streets is definitely the one area that they've really failed on in my opinion. It's the reason older towns and cities still trounce the 'burbs on walkability and will for a long time.
But while we're at it we should also think about other human-scale improvements, like narrow streets. Worth a read for anyone interested in retrofitting the suburbs: https://www.andrewalexanderprice.com/blog20130131.php#.XxptmPipGL4
I don't know about "from scratch", but ... Incrementally, as lean and resiliently as possible. An incrementally-built city is not a city in the beginning. It's a village at best.
Here are some things that speak to this approach:
https://andrewalexanderprice.com/blog20130330.php
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kChc7PVQFwA
https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/12/12/the-power-of-growing-incrementally-series
Jim Kunstler's podcast is good when he doesn't veer off into peak oil civilizational collapse speculation http://kunstler.com/writings/podcast/
Granola Shotgun
https://granolashotgun.com/
http://www.andrewalexanderprice.com/
I really enjoyed the books 'The Great Good Place' by Oldenberg , 'Streets are for People' by Rudufsky and the Geography of Nowhere by Kunstler
You might find this interesting, it was posted here a while back: http://www.andrewalexanderprice.com/blog20131204.php#.VehYvrxViko
He had an article on Tokyo, but I can't find it. Apparently Tokyo meets many of these criteria and is pleasant to be in, despite being new construction.
Which is why I'm wondering if we have any North American examples.