IMO the most important aspect of "urbanism" is whether things are built, scaled, & engineered around the car, or around the person.
Human-scale commercial districts should be cheaper to operate (and therefore to rent) than their car-sprawl equivalents. Mixed-use (apartments/offices above stores) spreads building maintenance costs across more entities. Parking requires lots of land which needs to be purchased, paved, and maintained. Building and maintaining the vast network of six-lane trunk highways and feeder roads to serve a relatively tiny number of businesses is extremely expensive for the government, which means higher taxes.
In this connection, one of the remarkable things I long ago noticed about many European cities and towns is the sheer number and diversity of tiny, independent shops, often in a space smaller than my bedroom. My wife's West European town of 15,000 people has two shops dedicated to selling nuts, several dedicated butchers and seafood/fish shops, three flower/plant shops, several for kitchen implements, and one selling only Japanese stuff. This is the essence of localism, but in the US the economic logic of car-sprawl has relentlessly exterminated this type of ecosystem and shifted it to Amazon, the handful of big-box chains, or a few local hangers-on who were able to scale and serve an entire region.
Urbanism is a way of life. In a preindustrial sense, it means separation from the means of food production. In a modern sense, it's grounded in the implicit recognition that geometry hates cars, and it's only an existing regime of subsidies and regulations that enables and maintains sub-urban bult environment forms. In any context where legal limitations enshrining the rights of cars (parking, lane widths, curve radii) can be violated or ignored, things get very urban very quickly. We practice 'parking socialism' and when we strip away those constraints, it's immediately obvious that urban land markets do not like cars, that there are far better and higher uses for the space.
IMO the most important aspect of "urbanism" is whether things are built, scaled, & engineered around the car, or around the person.
Human-scale commercial districts should be cheaper to operate (and therefore to rent) than their car-sprawl equivalents. Mixed-use (apartments/offices above stores) spreads building maintenance costs across more entities. Parking requires lots of land which needs to be purchased, paved, and maintained. Building and maintaining the vast network of six-lane trunk highways and feeder roads to serve a relatively tiny number of businesses is extremely expensive for the government, which means higher taxes.
In this connection, one of the remarkable things I long ago noticed about many European cities and towns is the sheer number and diversity of tiny, independent shops, often in a space smaller than my bedroom. My wife's West European town of 15,000 people has two shops dedicated to selling nuts, several dedicated butchers and seafood/fish shops, three flower/plant shops, several for kitchen implements, and one selling only Japanese stuff. This is the essence of localism, but in the US the economic logic of car-sprawl has relentlessly exterminated this type of ecosystem and shifted it to Amazon, the handful of big-box chains, or a few local hangers-on who were able to scale and serve an entire region.
Urbanism is a way of life. In a preindustrial sense, it means separation from the means of food production. In a modern sense, it's grounded in the implicit recognition that geometry hates cars, and it's only an existing regime of subsidies and regulations that enables and maintains sub-urban bult environment forms. In any context where legal limitations enshrining the rights of cars (parking, lane widths, curve radii) can be violated or ignored, things get very urban very quickly. We practice 'parking socialism' and when we strip away those constraints, it's immediately obvious that urban land markets do not like cars, that there are far better and higher uses for the space.