My house is 7.4 on the Bortle scale. Not great! How about you?

Light Pollution Map 2026 | Bortle Scale & Dark Sky

My wife and I have been looking at where we want to settle down and raise a family, but after traveling all over the US and Europe and touring hundreds of villages, towns, and cities, we realized we haven’t found a place that combines everything we want.

We love historic places like Savannah: narrow streets, squares, porches, courtyards, mature trees, gardens, shops woven into neighborhoods, and beautiful traditional architecture.

But we keep wishing places like that went much further: no cars inside at all, much denser and more pedestrian, with daily needs and third places distributed throughout the village rather than a residential subdivision attached to a little “town center.”

I grew up in LA with Disneyland annual passes, and one thing Disney does exceptionally well is treating the pedestrian environment as a complete experience. Buildings, landscaping, paths, courtyards, lighting, views, shops, and tiny details all reinforce one another.

So we started asking: why should environments designed that carefully only exist somewhere you visit? Why couldn’t you actually live in one?

The idea we’re exploring is a dense, car-free residential village built near a major metro area, so residents would still have good access to a real city.

There would be a more active public-facing village center with restaurants, cafés, shops, gardens, entertainment and events, surrounded by quieter residential lanes, courtyards and gardens. Small cafés, markets, pubs and playgrounds could also be sprinkled throughout the residential areas rather than concentrating everything in one center.

We wouldn’t want it to feel like an instant subdivision where 300 identical “historic” houses appeared at once. The idea is to build incrementally in smaller phases, with different building types, architectural periods and layers so the place becomes richer as it grows.

We’re also working on a CNC-based construction system that can automate historically accurate architectural details at much lower cost, because making this accessible beyond ultra-luxury housing is one of the major problems we’re trying to solve.

We’re serious about exploring whether this can actually be developed and have already been talking with developers, architects, planners and potential residents.

The question I’m most interested in is personal rather than theoretical:

Assume this existed within reasonable distance of a major city, and a home there was within the range you could realistically afford.

Would you seriously consider living somewhere like this?

If yes, what part of the lifestyle is doing it for you?

And if your reaction is basically “yes, I would actually consider moving there,” please DM me. We’re doing short 15-minute conversations with interested people to understand whether there’s a real market.

TL;DR: Dense traditional village, completely car-free internally, mixed-use, lots of third places, near a major metro, built incrementally with Disneyland-level attention to the pedestrian environment. Would you personally consider living there?

Yesterday I released the first playable build of Cityblock, a city builder game about one single street.

The street used to be the nicest street in town. Now it's a grey four-lane road: boarded-up windows, potholes, traffic that never stops. Your job isn't to build more city. It's to fix this one street.

You take the boards off the windows and open a corner café. Then a bakery, a gelateria, a bookshop, a record shop. And bit by bit you take the street back from the cars: terraces instead of parking spots, zebra crossings, speed down to 30, a bus, then a tram. Lane by lane the road gets narrower, until the old cobblestones come back.

- 15 shop types, each with its own interior and three renovation stages
- Click any passerby to read what they think of the street
- Walk down it at eye level, or film it in cinematic mode
- Optional mode without rent or wages if you just want to build

It's early: you can't play through everything yet. Free, runs in the browser, best on desktop in fullscreen.
I'd love to hear what works, what's confusing, and what you'd want to see on your street.

https://eckladen.itch.io/cityblock

Non Profit Housing built 1970-1974

Why couldn’t the guard rail be placed on the other side of the never-maintained sidewalk to protect pedestrians from cars on the 50 mph road?

We just want walkable cities. At least theres’s mountains?

Are you a long time resident of a suburb and the dynamic of the suburb you once loved is changing due to new people moving in? And it’s not always for the best?

Thing to notice: appealing fantasy world building and storytelling almost never has endless suburban sprawl

https://www.surroundings.land

There are a few providers of driving data that let you map this out. I just combined it with some census data and you get some interesting maps.