I know La Defense well and I don't think this is the solution. La Defense is not dense from a housing perspective. And it was built with a car-centric mindset.

I know La Defense well and I don't think this is the solution. La Defense is not dense from a housing perspective. And it was built with a car-centric mindset. The Esplanade itself is public transport friendly (thank god) but the surrounding area is a shit show. Thankfully most of the recent developments in the area are trying to reverse past decisions, but it's hard. Also, it's obviously very subjective, but to me La Defense is an ugly concrete jungle and not a nice place to live. Fundamentally, my core issue with la Defense is that it was centrally designed and planned with an Ivory Tower type of thinking. Today, we recognize the design was deeply flawed. But for some reason, we think we can play the same game again and design a new place from scratch and not make awful mistakes. I'd much rather see us grow existing cities and areas organically, making them progressively denser, rather than pursuing more of these big money-type projects that don't end up creating places people want to live in.