Vauban, home to 5,500 residents within a rectangular square mile, may be the most advanced experiment in low-car suburban life. But its basic precepts are being adopted around the world in attempts to make suburbs more compact and more accessible to public transportation, with less space for parking. In this new approach, stores are placed a walk away, on a main street, rather than in malls along some distant highway.
New York Times
Learn more at Vauban's website.
4 comments:
how come we don't have brilliant kid-friendly and bike-friendly neighborhoods like this in the US? i wanna live in one!
Sensible public transportation will always be needed for distances beyond a few miles and extremely localized employment will mean that one would have to move frequently or be limited to a very fragile job base.
An Ultralight Rail system that would also take local vehicles (bikes, Segways etc) would solve that problem but would need to pre-exist before such systems would be really viable.
@ FREEDEM Fortunately Freiburg (Vauban's metropole) is a small city in a country of compact cities. It presents another solution, besides light rail, to inadequate localized employment: pavement moratoriums, a.k.a. less sprawl.
@ BRIAN Didn't you link to this town a couple of years ago? Way to be ahead of The Times!
Note that the NY Times article quotes David Ceaser from CarFree City USA, the mothership of this very blog.
Seems we have become a resource for reporters.
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