>

You go ahead and live on top of a bakery then.  Ill keep my 1 acre lot , green space & drive to the local bakery which is like 10 mins or less away.   Stacked housing sucks.
I wouldn't say I liked where we lived when we first moved to Omaha in 1989. It was half a mile from our house to anything. Heck, the nearest grocery store was 2 miles away. 
But it was a "nice, quiet neighborhood" with "good schools".
By the late 90s, the office park across the 'stroad' finally got some in-fill with restaurants and a couple of stores. We still lived a quarter mile from the stroad.
I went to college in nearby Lincoln. When I moved off-campus I lived in what some derisively called "South Central" or "Alphabet town". But I loved how walkable it was. There was a fantastic bakery, a small grocery store, and a couple of locally-owned restaurants within 3 blocks of my apartment. 
I want to live in such a neighborhood again, but this time without the crack houses and ever-present streetwalkers. You stayed on the Runza side of south 13th... >

I truly think part of my political journey was more influenced by NotJustBikes than other properly political content creators. >

friendly edit: NotJustBikes
edit: Only noticed because I'm subscribed. Fascinating content. >

Done. Thank you. >

Absolutely it does, check out Jane Jacobs' Death and Life of American Cities, she has some awesome points that may interest you. >

Been meaning to read that one, worth it? >

Easily one of the best books I’ve read and I say that as someone who has very little background in urban planning. Her writing is amazing and reading her ideas is cathartic for anyone who lives in a major city. >

It's an interesting question, and one worth considering - but I think the answer is no. 
First, I want to discuss why I don't think our city planning is materially responsible for polarization, and then, second, I'll go into what I think actually causes it. 
I've lived in all three types of generalized environments - urban, suburban, and rural. I grew up with blue collar parents, and am now a white collar attorney. I've run the gamut, and I've experienced a lot of different ways of living in the US. 
When I lived in a major city, I didn't have a car and did all my travel via foot, bus, and subway. Based on this experience, my take is that personal cars and sprawling suburbs are not nearly as isolating as people make them out to be. As much as people like to romanticize the community aspect of city life, when you actually live in it, day to day, you end up just trying to get through that community to wherever you're going. There are people all around you - crowding the sidewalk, packing the subway car like sardines, and ahead of you in every line. You're surrounded by community and other people, but they all just become NPCs that you try your best to avoid. You don't try to strike up conversation with random members of the community on the bus.
And I think the same is true for the supposedly isolating nature of single family homes. I never got the sense that I knew my neighbors any better when I lived in the city than I do now. In fact, I'd argue that I've known my neighbors in the suburbs far better than anybody in any apartment complex I've ever lived in. In a suburban single family home, I know that my neighbors are going to be there for a while - I can rely on building those relationships. Meanwhile, the guy in the apartment next door is probably going to move somewhere else in the next 18 months. While I might only talk to my neighbor once every other week, there were stretches for years where I never spoke to a single soul in my apartment complex. It always completely felt pointless to get to know anybody in the building. 
Now that I live in the suburbs, I don't feel like my connection to the community is really any different at all. I talk to exactly the same amount of people in my car now as I did when my commute was via subway - exactly zero. My 30-minute commute via car isn't any different than my 30-minute commute via walking and subway. Seeing political bumper stickers or panhandlers at a traffic light is exactly the same as when I'd try not to make eye contact with people handing out flyers or begging for change. The difference with the commute via car is that it's far more pleasant, at the expense of being occupied while driving instead of being able to read - but there's simply no functional difference in terms of community involvement. 
There is a lack of a physical "third place" in modern society, I'll agree with that - but I'd argue that, this two, has nothing to do with city planning, and is lacking just as much in urban areas as it is in the suburbs. A 15 minute bus ride to the bar in the city isn't any different than a 15-minute drive to the local suburban bar. The truth is simply that people are going to these places less regardless of where they're located. 
And this is tied in with my second point - what I think is actually causing the problem with polarization and lack of community.
The rise of in-home media, social media, and the internet in general has made the physical "third place" a hard sell. Why go to the movie theater when you could stream it at home? Why go the mall when you can browse Amazon from your couch? Why go to a friend's house to play games when you can all do it digitally from your computer? 
It's not that the private car has made you pass these things by - you did and do pass them by while you push through the crowd to get on the subway, too. It's simply that it's hard to motivate yourself to go out to a "third place" when the internet has become the ultimate "third place." 
Now mix in social media algorithms designed to get clicks through rage and you have a perfect storm. People are staying home to participate in the new digital "third place," and in the process aren't ever seeing a real cross-section of the world anymore. All they see is the carefully curated internet environment that they've subconsciously (or consciously) shaped for themselves by blocking everything they don't want to see, except for the very most extreme things that piss them off and that the algorithm knows will make them click. 
You never meet Bob, the generic moderate Republican who actually agrees with you about universal healthcare anymore. On the internet, you've blocked Bob and any media that presents as aligning with him. For all intents and purposes, he doesn't exist for you. But you absolutely hear about Karen the shrieking Qultist, because no matter how much you want to or try to block that, the algorithm knows that you'll immediately click on it. Meanwhile, you've curated your "friendly" feed in the opposite direction. You never meet Debbie, the generic moderate Democrat who doesn't agree with your progressive politics. She doesn't exist for you. But your feed is full of Bernie and a mishmash of Twitter personalities parroting exactly what you want to hear - specifically because you invariably like those tweets and click those links. 
So you end up with a "third place" where only two groups exist: those who agree with you completely, and those who  agree with you on nothing. You start to lose perspective that most people aren't in either group.
Edit: I don't think I'll be replying to anything else in this thread. I made a good faith effort to discuss this as calmly and as neutrally as I could, but I'm getting a number of aggressive, confrontational responses that are more interested in expressing their hatred than discussing the actual question in the OP. At least the OP seems to be extremely relevant. >


You start to lose perspective that most people aren't in either group.

At a certain point, which America passed long ago (which I write as a dual citizen), there is not more a question of "perspective." The Right burned that to the ground. Started before Nixon was elected, gained full stream under Gingriche's Contract On America, and was here to stay with Bush the Lesser paving the way for Trump and the Qanon and Christofascists.
The perspective you seek is a myth propagated by people who look to some - very long past - degree of dialog. I'm sorry my friend, that dialog doesn't exist any longer in any meaningful way. Your complaint that everyone is lost in their own media/existence bubble, while in some way is correct, is a false equivalency. Sometimes one side is right, and another is wrong and has been historically so for decades.
So, back to the question of third places, one needs only look abroad to Europe and even most of the other anglophone countries to find them, and see their merit. It's not just tony coffee shops. And it's not just the developed countries. The third place is essential in many developing economies. It's the football pitch where your son is playing with another man's son who just happens to live in "the ghetto." It's that "ethnic" (written in scare quotes because who knows where you are) restaurant that you frequent and get to learn the ways of the owners and workers because you love the food.
The USA used to have this decades ago. It still exists on smaller scale in middle America. But by and large the propaganda of the right has killed any desire of the average middle American to engage in any meaningful way with those outside their own "kind." 
i.e. the middle place had no place in America anymore. That doesn't mean it doesn't exist outside America. >


Sometimes one side is right, and another is wrong and has been historically so for decades.

I think you're falling into the same trap I described, above. 
You seem to be panning all Republicans with the Qultist brush, when the vast majority are just everyday people. Yes, you're right that sometimes one side is right and the other wrong - but each "side" here is millions of people with varying opinions. It's not two hive minds arguing with each other. 
I won't deny that the Republican party leadership has gone off the deep end in an attempt to wrestle with a crazy Qultist base, but you have to remember that there are 100 million Republicans spread across an entire continent. There's literally millions of boring Republicans who differ from you mostly in that they want a 35% tax rate instead of a 45% tax rate, or they want certain strings attached to welfare, or they prefer a different mechanism to pay for healthcare. >

No, they want a 35% tax rate and are willing to allow for a lot of atrocities to get it.  You're romanticizing the GOP party. >

Well, at the very least you've highlighted the polarization problem posed by the OP very succinctly. >

Is the earth being round polarizing?  Some people think it's not.  Insisting that there's only one correct answer to the question isn't polarizing.
Quick edit:  The vast vast majority of the GOP (those in power) have condoned the 1/6 insurrection.  Sure, some (a lot?) condemned it on 1/7.  Then they realized they couldn't hold onto their power if the continued to condemn it.  So they condone.
There's no "but they have good policy" exception to that.  There was an insurrection, and while they may not have participated in it in real time (though many did), they are actively protecting the insurrectionists after the fact.  That's not a polarization problem.  That's a good vs evil problem. >

Exactly.  There might be polarization but that's because one side has gone to the extreme. >

Who our neighbors are and how we interact with them is a big part of shaping our politics.
City planning is only a part of the equation though. White flight, de-industrialization, defunding of schools, the explosion in segregation via private schools... these issues would barely be touched on by things like better zoning laws. >


defunding of schools

I thought that inflation adjusted per student funding has increased continuously for decades. Yet people wrongly bitterly complain about imaginary funding cuts. >

More money is spent as a gross figure, but less of it is going to actual education expenses (paying teachers, purchasing materials, etc) >

Where does all the money go? >

Growing administrative bureaucracy copying the private sector, private providers of bussing and food services that are more expensive over the long term. Basically, privatization and the imposition of business models on schooling >

I mean, it probably plays a role in the urban vs suburban divide that characterizes a large part of the left vs liberal tension in the Democratic Party, but the real gulf of political divide is between urban and rural voters, and city planning plays virtually no role at all in that particular divide. At the end of the day, people living out in rural parts of the country have thoroughly different wants and needs from those living in the city, and solutions to various problems that each group has would be wholely impractical or inefficient if applied to the other group.
No, what really fuels the primary divide is zero sum mentality and tribalism. Sure, there's a lot of ways that having a genuine third place could help unify the left side of the political spectrum, but it won't heal the divide with the right, because they're always going to live too far apart for that to be practical and will always oppose mass transit and other systems to make life better in cities and improve our impact on the environment because it doesn't benefit them directly. >


people living out in rural parts of the country have thoroughly different wants and needs from those living in the city, and solutions to various problems that each group has would be wholely impractical or inefficient if applied to the other group.

What "wholly different solutions to various problems" make the groups incompatible? Both want employment, education for their children, clean and sustainable water, and markets for their goods or services.
It looks like you're creating a division where there is no natural barrier and I don't see how it relates to OP conversation at all. >

Okay, let's take John and Susan. John lives in a big city, Susan lives in the middle of nowhere.
John is well served by public transit. He can walk five minutes to a tram stop and ride it for half an hour to within a ten minute walk off his office. It's a longer commute than if he drove, but he enjoys the excuse for a nice walk, and the half hour on the tram lets him catch up on news via his smart phone, since he doesn't need to pay attention to the the road.
Susan has no mass transit access and never will. There's no economical way to make even a bus work for where she lives, so she has no option but to drive to work.
John cares about education. He wants his children to have access to learn about evolution so they can pursue careers in STEM like he did.
Susan also cares about education. She doesn't know what CRT is, but someone told her it means she's a racist, and that means she needs to make sure it isn't taught to her kindergartener.
John cares about sustainable water. He sees that there's more than enough drinking water for everyone in the state, but definitely not enough for the thirsty alfalfa farms that exist solely to feed herds of cattle in an incredibly wasteful water:calorie ratio.
Susan also cares about sustainable water, because she works at one of those alfalfa farms, and so she's convinced that we just need more dams in order to solve the problem, even though the problem is ever decreasing amounts of rainfall and snowpack due to climate change.
Do I need to keep going? >

It's noones fault but Susan's that she is wrong. She can Google crt and not just read the things she agrees with. Ya know if her and her community really really wanted they could have public transport as well she could inform herself about lack of rain and snow pack and not just cling to her untrue assumption that dams will fix everything. You just claimed that the difference between uban and rural is rural pl choose to be ignorant. Can't say I disagree >

There are tens of millions of Susans in this country, and they are happy to be ignorant. They don't want to learn the truth, because all their neighbors are just as ignorant, and the ignorance helps maintain social cohesion. If you know the truth, then you can't keep dumbly nodding asking with the latest conspiracy theory or piece of political bullshit, because you know it's wrong. And when you stop nodding along, you stop getting invited to social events, you become a pariah. So they avoid anything that would result in becoming educated, and make sure their kids aren't exposed either. >


She doesn't know what CRT is... Susan also cares about sustainable water, because she works at one of those alfalfa farms, and so she's convinced that we just need more dams in order to solve the problem, even though the problem is ever decreasing amounts of rainfall and snowpack due to climate change.

So she's wrong and everybody needs to bend to her because somebody lied to her to politically advance his own career in the short term? Your example of water even shows "she knows she's wrong but because she can get some short-term economic benefit she doesn't give a shit about the price everyone else has to pay". That's somebody who is wrong not only economically but morally. I think you created a strawman caricature of a rural farmer and are trying to play "people should cater to her" no matter how destructive, hateful, or wrong she is.

There are tens of millions of Susans in this country

Millions voted for Mussolini, that doesn't mean he was in the right. Just that he had no ethical bottom and was willing to say any lie it took to get more power for himself.

ignorance helps maintain social cohesion

If treated in isolation and ignoring the consequences - like your own example of Susan's unsustainable water waste. The klan was a tool to maintain social cohesion as well, that doesn't mean they didn't take far more from the whole community, white and black, than they gave (exclusively to the wealthy and connected white community).
We could look at what the idea of unlimited individualism and "well it's their own fault, who cares" works in the past with farming. In the 1910s there were numerous crop failures and the price of wheat rose, getting into the 20s everybody who could grab land did and ripped up a light but sustainable sod in order to raise wheat. When the price cratered due to Ukrainian and other sources stabilized the farmers' solution was to grow more, which further damaged the price of wheat and not only drove themselves into poverty but also devastated the landscape which could never have sustained the water use massive wheat crops necessitated, leading to millions of desertification and literal millions of tons of blowing soil which made it all the way to DC. The only solution to prevent the midwest from turning into the great American desert was to force cooperatives and make the people look outside their own fences. It required regulatory institutions in the government to do so, as well as subsidization from people in cities who weren't doing so hot themselves, but it worked and not only saved the ecology but also prevented the depression from being multiple generations long. >

Gerrymandering, same the Obstructionist Minority Party strategy has been what's accelerated the polarization of our political system. Combine that with insular propoganda media bubbles, and you've got a recipe for extremism >

I've been saying for a while now that the fundamental problem in our society is loneliness. The way we've designed our cities and towns is the biggest contributor to that. 
Our people are extremely isolated. Most of us have no or few people to talk to but our media - internet, TV and radio. And the basic fact is, almost everyone acquires almost all their beliefs from other people. Most of the reasoning we do is ad hoc, trying to fit together the conclusions we've taken from other people.
This is aggravated by the cities' sucking away all the talent from rural areas. College ain't everything, but it ain't nothing, and the top-third of every graduating class in the country is coaxed into college, then to a city. Most of the would-be thought leaders in rural areas are gone, absorbed into the cosmopolitan bubble.
Unfortunately, right wing media is hip to the internet. The thing that would most help to bring people together - pedestrianism (or "fuckcars") - was barely more than a fringe issue before they started attacking it. Bummer. 
So, yeah, it would be nice to have a "third space," but as long as our cities are dominated by cars, there's no "space" for a third space to exist in. >

I think it is the other way around.  America's extreme politics dictates city planning.  And it has since America's inception. >

Oh this is deep. >

Absolutely. The increasing lack of social interaction with others, especially those outside your family and immediate neighbors, contributes to the destruction of social fabric and understanding of common bonds >

this likely is a contributing factor, but by far the biggest factor is urban / rural and how much political sway is granted to LAND instead of PEOPLE.
we need to protect the political minority, but we should not be giving them veto power over any progress at all. >

I always say if that is the case then we need to argue for some devolution of power. A tyranny of the minority is no better than a tyranny of the majority. Worse even. >

It’s not cities.
I’ll throw in a “hot take” here. It’s women. Women, for a very long time nurtured community. Women are excellent communicator and social bridge builders. Women excellent at building social capital which is what brings people together to form communities.
I am NOT saying women should stop doing what they’re doing. They are absolutely free do to as they please. But the basic truth here is without someone trying to bring families together and form communities locally, people will become atomized.
Women were glue. In a social sense and today they, rightly, have the same privileges and rights as men. This means, that we need to rethink how we are going to build communities again. Because men aren’t equipped and are too busy and women are too busy too. >

I mean, if you want to make the question seem trivial, look up "redlining."
Disregarding that, I think the issue with third places is that they are reversing cause and effect -- Americans don't like interacting with each other in general, and that made such spaces less popular. There's plenty of opportunity to talk to strangers on, say, the subway in NYC or in line at a coffee shop, at sports bars or events -- we just don't do it. As far as I can tell, that behavior is older than the automobile, though I'd appreciate some better sourcing than the older movies and books I've seen depicting people's behavior during those periods.
Maybe we think of each other as threats, maybe we're just busy and distracted, maybe our generally more diverse culture made us less likely to be rewarded with like-minded people when we tried to interact, or maybe it's something else or all of these things and more. But I don't think blaming city planning for the problem makes sense -- people chose to isolate themselves, and planning helped them do that.
Which of course, brings us back to redlining. Frankly, racial and religious tensions are almost certainly the main cause of all of this, but it'd be difficult to prove that -- just my instinct talking. >

I'd say people go with whatever options are available to them. It's not so much that Americans wanted to live in suburban areas that promote isolation, it's just that it is what developers were building and it's what cities mandated that they build. Now it is the only lifestyle that we know and therefore we've become conditioned to the social isolation that it creates.
Architects and developers have been criticizing our suburban city planning literally since its inception, again that is why shopping malls were created way back in the 60s because people already knew how detrimental this isolating city planning could be.
If you gave the typical American a nice place to live that is affordable, they will live there. If we made affordable, medium density neighborhoods that prioritize community the norm people will gladly live there as well. >


It's not so much that Americans wanted to live in suburban areas that promote isolation

That's just incorrect -- suburbs were created specifically so White people could get away from Black people. Them being cheap and away from decaying urban centers helped, but racial fear was the driving factor. Just do any research on William Levitt and it'll become quite apparent what the motivating factor was. People wanted to live with other people like them -- to get away from the diversity that cities create by merely existing.
That is no longer the case, obviously -- suburbs are actually more racially diverse than other areas (which is, in and of itself, a sign of the decay of inner-cities, but that's beside the point). But it's not as though they'll disappear overnight -- streets and houses are rather permanent, and it's far easier to just keep the same design for an area than raze and overhaul it.
And, yet again -- there's plenty of opportunity for interaction. Just because you can't walk to it doesn't mean the opportunity doesn't exist. Americans don't like to talk to each other. Feel free to try it -- you might have some luck in the South or certain parts of the Midwest, but good luck striking up a conversation with a stranger in Chicago or LA. 
We're just not a culture that values interaction with strangers, for whatever reason, and putting all of that on a single cause, especially one as vulnerable to demand as city planning, is just working backwards from the outcome. Our society (for better or worse) is capitalistic -- almost everything you see is because people wanted it that way. Somebody (William Levitt) tried the suburb idea. It worked, so people copied his success. Your argument is the same as trying to blame companies for manufacturing jobs going overseas -- people want goods for cheaper more than they want to buy American-made, so they go to cheaper places to manufacture them. It's one of the few things about capitalism that holds true in almost all cases -- it's democratic to a fault. >

Hmmmm.  City planning.  Sounds like another catch phrase thats just another way to screw with suburban zoning so the "do gooders" can start dropping low income apartments all over middle class suburbs.  We've been given the sales pitch a millionn times and we are still NOT buying.  Sorry.  It turns out that productive people actually want & enjoy:

Privacy
Low crime
Sustained property values
Back yards with pools and patios
Green space
Their cars & having the freedom associated with that
Not having eyesore apartments in their neighborhoods.

You get the idea.  This isnt rural vs urban, its more about the anti-suburban crusaders trying to screw over middle class suburbanites.  The answer is no. Zoning works as designed. >


Zoning works as designed.

Said nobody who's seen the past 100 years of American cities. Merely on cost of infrastructure suburbia was always less sustainable than multi-use zoning such as a bakery on ground floor with several stacks of housing on top.