Livable neighborhoods

Livable neighborhoods allow local communities to flourish, discourage crime, and allow for a healthier lifestyle.

They come about either through a traditional pre-car infrastructure and layout of streets and houses, or through approaches to urban design and planning that draw their inspiration from these older neighborhoods - e.g. Traditional Neighborhood Development^W).

More specifically, such neighborhoods can be created through:

• Mixed use - appropriate commercial use
• Walkability - pedestrian-friendly design
• Cycle paths
• Transit hubs within easy walking distance of everyone in the community
• Fast and reliable public transport
• Public space
• Traffic calming such as chicanes and shared streets

Activities to encourage the new mindset can bring the community together:

• Carfree days
• Street parties
• For the more radically inclined: Reclaim The Streets^W events.
• Food garden activities

While high density city living offers many advantages in lifestyle and sustainability (see Green Manhattan) there is typically much less sense of being neighbors, compared to well designed medium density.

• Street gardens
• Social entrepreneurship hubs
• Urban design
• Urban planning
• Urban sustainability

• Wikipedia:Traditional Neighborhood Development (TND)
• Wikipedia:Transit-oriented development
• Wikipedia:New Urbanism
• Wikipedia:Urban design
• Wikipedia:Urban planning
• Wikipedia:Urban design
• Wikipedia:Transit-oriented development
• Wikipedia:Livable Streets (book)
• StreetsWiki (good content, but not very active)
• Congress for the New Urbanism