Via Beyond the Beyond Adam Greenfield’s Urban Utopia.

- A zone or zones with the density, skyscraping verticality and walkability of Manhattan, or maybe central Hong Kong, for identity, legibility, and let’s face it, excitement;
- Flabbergasting ethnolinguistic diversity, with all that implies for the eating experience;
- Lots of mixed-use close in to the core, and lower-density, more purely residential outlying districts with the easygoingness, human scale and hardy housing stock I remember from my adolescence in West Philadelphia;
- These connected to the downtown(s) and to each other by something like the vividly multimodal transitscape of central Amsterdam, where a road, a sidewalk and a bustling bikepath will all converge in crossing over a canal (and I’d thrown in Portland’s light-rail network);
- Enough cheap housing so that everyone who wants one has a room to call their own - and enough cheap warehouse/event space to support an arts community like Berlin’s;

Sounds good to me.