Think of undergraduate colleges: why aren’t there any commuter colleges in the top 10 colleges?

Because universities get to the top 10 by having a lot of money in everything, which means they have money for dorms. It also means they need to engage in a lot of marketing to get their alums to donate money, which requires them to build dorms as a way of forging a campus identity. For the same reason, all colleges in the top 10 have sports teams and extensive extracurricular departments.

However, for what it’s worth, City College, a commuter school, used to provide top-rated education. It’s still the highest value-added college in one of the rankings.

Because commuting by car makes you stupid. (Okay, not literally less intelligent, but it exposes you to fewer ideas than commuting any other way). You rarely learn while driving. You learn all the time in dense, walkable campuses.

The core reason I moved to Louisville from the SF Bay, was that even though the infrastructure was infinitely worse in every physical metric, you can actually talk to strangers here without them assuming you’re crazy and a probable threat. Nowhere are these two features more obvious than on transit. Louisville boasts jovial, engaging riders … with absolutely terrible frequency.

The urban proximity effect that Avent mentions is another example that helps us to rethink density in the way you suggest.

I don’t object to downtown projects in concept. But I would put the priority on neighborhood commercial nodes or streets as the focus of mixed use that has a high residential component. These would probably start as near downtown areas like Indy’s Fountain Square.

Part of the problem is that even in Indy/Cbus style downtowns the land is very expensive because it all owned by speculators. This makes the condo prices in these downtowns end up well above market. If I bought a downtown Indianapolis condo equivalent to my one in Chicago, it probably would cost about the same. No surprise, many of them are just pieds-a-terre for race car drivers and such.

Also, a lot of the money that goes into downtowns are stadiums and such that do nothing to encourage sustainable neighborhood development or downtown residential. In fact, neighborhoods around most stadiums are generally pretty hostile to residential life.

We absolutely need better density. I just think there are certain functions it plays in larger cities that it is not necessary to replicate in smaller ones.

So, if I understand you right, your argument would be that density may not be so important for what you might call economic development through rubbing shoulders — that in a smaller city, or one with the easy traffic patterns that are the flip side of low density, it might not matter if commerce were concentrated in a ‘traditional’ CBD, in a couple emerging edge cities, or truly dispersed through a (small enough) region. This may be the case. But you also seem to claim (I’d agree) that city neighborhoods do need density to support neighborhood retail and walkability – that without these, they aren’t “city neighborhoods.” Instead, they are equivalent to suburbs, only (typically in the case of cities that have lost their density) equivalent to suburbs with higher taxes, crappy services, poor schools, etc.

I’d agree completely — one question, though. What does this say about the typical focus on downtowns in regional development efforts? I’m thinking, in particular, of the “get people to live downtown” type ideas. Wouldn’t your observation lead to the idea that moderate-density city neighborhood ‘clusters’ are a much more important focus than downtowns? (Setting aside tax-base or revenue sharing issues in cases where satellite centers of commerce are outside the city limits.) For what it is worth, lots of booming cities have had downtowns devoid of residential life, that “shut down at 5 o’clock,” etc. But they have had neighborhoods.

Obviously, where you can drive in 20-minutes depends on the context (time and place). We could map a 20-minute business transaction cache for each city. Any firm beyond the pale is as good as a flight away and different rules apply (i.e. not agglomeration economies).

There are a few exceptions to the 20-minute rule. From a time standpoint, a firm 10-minutes away might be on the other side of the universe. Imagine address status or being on the wrong side of the tracks. Perception creates geographic arbitrage opportunities. Not everyone jumps at the cheaper digs because of the risks associated with the move.

For example, the urban heart of the Netherlands is a ring of cities called the Randstad that spread over an area not much larger than greater London, but with protected rural bands between them. They include Amsterdam, Haarlem, Leiden, The Hague, Rotterdam, and Utrecht. Nowhere there will you find anything like an American highrise downtown — or for that matter, anything like the City of London or Paris’s La Défense. Yet they are among the most livable small cities in the world. And their collective mass supports all the features of a world city, and it’s still compact enough that people in different towns can meet for lunch, usually via train rather than car.

Kotkin likes to go on about how Americans are going to repopulate the Plains with small cities. There are actually great urbanist models that can meet him halfway on that notion, but to think about them, we have to let go of the classic unipolar downtown.