Before life got in the way, I wanted to be an urban planner. There are always relatively small projects you can do to improve walkability, encourage use of bicy

Before life got in the way, I wanted to be an urban planner. There are always relatively small projects you can do to improve walkability, encourage use of bicycles, etc. The reality is "planned neighborhoods" of the sort you are talking about typically fail. That's not how good neighborhoods come into being. Good neighborhoods grow organically out of good policies that foster such neighborhoods and they evolve over time. Jane Jacobs said something about the big developments that get all built in one go along the lines of "It was always dead, but no one noticed until the body began to smell." Yes, it has to work as a system. No, it doesn't need to get "born" all at once, like a human child or something. The book "How buildings learn" brilliantly documents that wonderful old buildings are typically wonderful precisely because they are old and that means they've had time to adapt and evolve. They weren't usually brilliantly designed from the get go. They had a lot of wonderful touches added to them over time in most cases. This tends to also be true at the larger scale of neighborhoods and cities.