Villages Within a City
This is Part 3 of Rule 6: Break Up the Blue Zones
Which do you prefer: an ultra neat neighborhood, or the ability to restore a car in your yard? Opinions differ.
Do you want nearby jobs or nothing but single family residences as far as the eye can see? Opinions differ.
Do you want calm traffic flowing down parallel streets, complete with bike paths or lanes? Or do you want the security of routing all through traffic around your neighborhood on enormous boulevards? Opinions differ.
Are you willing to put up with nearby commercial and industrial sites in order to broaden your tax base, or would you rather pay more in property taxes to live in a simulated hobbit village? Opinions differ.
Would you like the convenience and society of being able to walk to bars and other entertainment venues? Or would you prefer to be further from temptation, noise, and riffraff? Preferences differ.
How much noise are you willing to put up with in return for the freedom to make noise yourself? And what times of day or night are appropriate for making noise?
If you break up cities into villages, people can meaningfully vote their preferences -- with both ballots and moving boxes. We get a bit of the libertarian ideal of Choose Your Own Government using the proven tools of federalism and democracy.
And yes, by breaking up cities into villages we can have democracy, diversity, and harmony at the same time. With diversity, the Will of the People is a very weak signal, by definition. Where there is diversity, democracy should ideally be limited to measures which have the support of a supermajority. This is why the federal government was originally limited in its powers and duties. Now that we have moved too much up to the federal level, we govern not by consensus, but by whichever factions have managed to eek out a majority. This is a dangerous situation. Conversely, if we have more government down at the village level, opportunities for true consensus are far greater.
To some degree some suburbs have such villages in the form of homeowner's associations. I have lived in such places and found them less satisfying than traditional towns. While the amenities tend to be nice, and the neighborhoods tidy, the uniformity and rules tend to be stifling. I don't like living in a village which mandates the color of every mailbox! Granted, my sampling of the homeowners' association life is limited, and possibly bad, yet I will speculate on my to-date preference for traditional small towns over homeowners' associations.
For starters, the rules in a democratic town are dynamic, not contractual. This has the downside of unpredictability, which is bad for business. What do you do if you build a nude bowling alley, and then the town decides to outlaw bowling? But this also has the upside on making it easier to change or create a rule in response to events particular to the town. For example, if all that bowling messes up the local mad scientist club's gravitational wave Wednesdays, then the town requires that the bowling pins be clothed on Wednesdays to dampen the vibrations. Because of this upside, traditional towns need not anticipate every possible complaint-generating externality in advance, and thus end up with fewer regulations than a contract-based community. (Conversely, traditional towns can accumulate some truly weird laws. If a town was once terrorized by someone who sang out of tune in the bathtub on Wednesdays, then the town might have an obsolete ordinance against singing in the bathtub, or bathing on Wednesdays.)
Another difference between traditional towns and homeowners' associations is that towns govern businesses as well as residents. Get too anal retentive about externalities and a town can chase away the lion's share of its property tax revenue.
This brings up a very important point about dividing a city into villages: those who live near a stinky factory or brightly lit used car lot should be in the same village as these nose and eye sores. Let the poor who live near such ugliness get the tax base to pay for their sidewalks, schools, or free community nude bowling alleys. And let polluting businesses surround their plants with golf courses and estates for their executives if they don't want to pay high taxes. (I suspect Nassim Taleb would approve of this arrangement -- definite Skin in the Game.)
I spend most of my time in Colombia, South America. Although I am not sure how the taxes work, much of what you suggest is basically how the barrios are organized. You simply choose a barrio that suits you. The downside of a busy street is traffic noise. The upside is that you can open a small store in your garage. I don't think they have ever heard of zoning laws. You just choose a neighborhood where the combination of businesses and residences produces a vibe you like. In fact, one of the charms of Colombia is that most people get along most of the time with virtually zero law enforcement.