Underground Traffic makes the City Center attractive
A key point with putting the entire road system under ground is to make the city a more pleasant place to live, shielding the inhabitants from traffic noise and pollution. This would make it considerably more attractive to actually live downtown, close to work and other everyday activities.
The joys of medium-sized closed communities
For many people, the main argument against living in the city center is not being able to send your kids out to play in the yard. A solution that works very well is to create a closed community for each apartment/condo block, with some common gardens and facilities with restricted access for the public.
The advantage of having closed communities is that if communities become too large they tend to stop being closely knit. Too many different people moving through an area makes it difficult to keep an overview of who’s there and who they are, making it easy for instance for criminals to operate. In a closed community people will get rubbed together with the same people repeatedly, making it more likely they will get acquainted, something that increases the trust and community feeling.
These communities should not be too large, otherwise these effects will disappear – the condo project shown here is much too large for my taste. Care should also be taken to develop common or semi-private areas where the residents will hang out and spend time and where it is possible to get into casual contact with their neighbors. These areas could also be designed as spheres with increasingly public arenas – perhaps a veranda/BBQ pit shared by 4-5 units, a playground shared by 20 units and a swimming pool, tennis court and gym room shared by 200 units.
Now there would be no excuse for not kicking the kids off the sofa and out to play some ball in the yard!
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