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Eeeeh... We don't need to go back to 1500 to find good urban design. We had good urban design happening all the way up to the second world war. In fact, cities built around streetcar networks in the early 20th century, like Denver and San Francisco, could be considered even more walkable than older cities like Boston, since the efficient streetcar network made more parts of the city easily accessible to people travelling on foot.

Meanwhile, I will note that while reforming sprawling urban areas will take a lot of work, it doesn't have to take a lot of taxpayer money. Reforming sprawling areas takes a three-pronged approach: reforming zoning laws and building codes; enacting pigouvian taxes and fees to incentivize pro-social spending; and reforming infrastructure and transit services.

Zoning and building code reform, like removing minimum lot size requirements, allowing parcel splitting, removing setback requirements, eliminating R1 zoning and making mixed use zoning universal, streamlining permitting processes, and freely publishing building codes makes it possible to build more densely (especially for individual homeowners and small developers), and to create businesses (like gyms, cafes, and corner stores) near where people live.

Pigouvian taxes and fees, like carbon taxes, vehicle registration fees, highway use and exit tolls, land value taxes, and utility connection maintenance fees, parking fees, incentivize people to stop doing things which harm the public good or hoard public resources. Tolling highway exits into dense urban cores, for example, encourages people to take transit into their downtowns rather than taking up valuable urban space with their cars. And land value taxes encourage people with valuable land (like that in urban downtowns) to do something useful with it, like build a mixed use apartment building - rather than speculating on it by keeping it as a surface parking lot while the land appreciates in value because everyone else around them are building something useful.

Infrastructure and transit services are things likeaiing BRT lines, increasing transit service to run frequently enough that people dont need to plan around it, and creating protected bike lanes.

But importantly, the first two prongs take minimal public funding. Rough implementations could be deployed tomorrow, and then we would just sit back and wait for individuals to make their own worlds better.