Vienna again named world's most liveable city

Sorry, but your teenie being able to get anywhere easily on their own is not always a great solution. Lack of safe affordable housing drove many into the burbs, the gated communities that some became merely copied the gated buildings some lived in.

Many cities are not walkable at all, they are far too large to be so. Sure some have subways or the like, but going by my friends account its an hour by train on good days to and from work. Most of his friends bring their lunches because local eateries are not a good use of money on a day to day basis. As for walking, yeah if the weather permits it.

But many old flats are not like these. They're weird semi-renovated things with modern amenities shoe horned in wherever they can fit, water heaters in living rooms, hallways snaking their way around, clothes washers in hallways or kitchens, aggregated bits of older flats glommed together to make new ones resulting in stairs in the middle of bedrooms or living rooms, tiny tiny kitchens so small that if you put a mini fridge in you can't open the door all the way so the fridge ends up in one of the bedrooms, or bedrooms which consist of a door that open to a wall, but if you look up there's a crawl space big enough for a mattress so it's called a "bedroom" (and so for privacy you get a full size door) and on and on and on.

I've been in flats that were the result of gluing two or three different flats from adjacent buildings together, only the floor heights were off by a meter, and you end up with things like an extra half bath down by the bedrooms, which useless so it gets used as a closet, so if you want to shower you walk down a half flight of stairs to the en-suite full bath that's in the bedroom-converted-to-a-living-room, or where the old door was for the second flat, it's been painted over and nailed shut, but if you open it, it opens into your neighbor's kitchen (which used to be part of the hallway in that building).

Or the one that had a fully renovated kitchen, but they didn't put space in for the fridge and oven at all, so you end up cooking on the coffee table in the living room on hotplates and the fridge is by the front door.

Why bother designating rooms for anything if they're just going to be used as semi-all purpose rooms?

You can get all the modern conveniences, sorta, but they might be in weird forms or stashed away in strange places.

These are not in poor areas, but in central parts of Paris or Barcelona or Rome or wherever. Decent areas, and some of them were multi-million dollar places that simply wouldn't be acceptable, or up to basic safety and construction codes in the U.S.

What I'm specifically referring to is that once you're in an urban center, is it more like a European or even an older American (pre-car) city where you can walk locally, public transit outside of that and then drive, or is it like Houston, LA or Dallas? Where the difference between living in the "city" and living in the country is that it shaves half the time off your drive to get anywhere and you have to drive to accomplish even basic daily tasks like grocery shopping?

LA is the quintessential example where urban planners decided to build around the car and invested heavily in freeway infrastructure instead of robust public transport (and the urban development model that implies). Building cities around vehicles and not around people (as has been done for millenia) is the experiment I'm talking about, and I think it's proven to not be the better model.

I think it can swing wrong the other way as well. Building only on the scale for people to walk around causes friction with entering or leaving the urban "zone". If you want to go visit a city, you have no place to put your car, this hurts the economy of the city. And if you want to leave the city, maybe for a trip, or to pick up a bulk good you can't hand carry, you may not have a car to do so (this is partially addressed by services like zipcar and similar).