They aren't inherently bad. The problem is bad urban design, which sorry, is because of cars. You can have dense, walkable villages and suburbs just like you can have sprawling, car dependent "cities". You can have wonderful countryside right outside your doorstep in a small town, as long as everyone lives tightly clustered in the village. This is basically how everyone lived 300 years ago. A couple thousand people in 1 square km (everything within a 15 min walk), then 10-25 SQ km of nature and farms vs now where everyone encloses off their own little 1/4 acre, and then naturally you need roads to get around which encourages further sprawl.
What is to be done is to do basically the opposite of now - enforce things like "maximum road sizes" to limit the amount of crap Not Place and maximize how closely people live together. Cars create a negative feedback loop where roads = wasted spaced = more spread out = more cars to get around = more cars and sprawl. Rural transit access can be done with buses, motorcycles, etc.
They aren't inherently bad. The problem is bad urban design, which sorry, is because of cars. You can have dense, walkable villages and suburbs just like you can have sprawling, car dependent "cities". You can have wonderful countryside right outside your doorstep in a small town, as long as everyone lives tightly clustered in the village. This is basically how everyone lived 300 years ago. A couple thousand people in 1 square km (everything within a 15 min walk), then 10-25 SQ km of nature and farms vs now where everyone encloses off their own little 1/4 acre, and then naturally you need roads to get around which encourages further sprawl.
What is to be done is to do basically the opposite of now - enforce things like "maximum road sizes" to limit the amount of crap Not Place and maximize how closely people live together. Cars create a negative feedback loop where roads = wasted spaced = more spread out = more cars to get around = more cars and sprawl. Rural transit access can be done with buses, motorcycles, etc.