I live in Canberra, a planned city that in many ways is amazing and wonderful - but it too suffers from the assumption of the time that cars were the way of the

I live in Canberra, a planned city that in many ways is amazing and wonderful - but it too suffers from the assumption of the time that cars were the way of the future, as well as assumptions about population growth that didn't quite pan out. We've ended up with a city of 400,000 that's 40km from north to south and 15km east to west. Public transport is, as a result, highly problematic, and pushes by government to increase housing density (which I think is quite a sensible idea) meet with some resistance. Planned cities aren't necessarily bad on the whole though - I will quite happily take "soulless" over "gridlocked" and "clean" over "gritty" any day. Canberra may be a bit "soulless", but the more organic cities around us have a very different set of problems with their own negative impacts on livability.