The US neighbourhood that banned cars and built a Mediterranean village instead
Residents of Culdesac, a 17-acre neighbourhood in Tempe, Arizona, own no cars — and many say that’s what makes it feel like a Mediterranean escape rather than a typical American suburb.
When Sheryl Murdock walks home, she passes through a central plaza that doubles as an open-air living room, where traffic noise gives way to conversation and games of cornhole, then down narrow lanes lined with low white buildings, murals and bougainvillea. “It’s like being in Greece,” she says, despite being firmly in the Arizona desert. Architect Daniel Parolek, who designed the development, says his reference points were further afield still: the hill towns of Italy and the coastal villages of France, places built before cars existed, and therefore built around people. His question: why should such places only be holiday destinations rather than somewhere to actually live?
His answer: a “Faustian deal” societies made with the automobile, reshaping cities around traffic and producing sprawling, polluted, isolating, overheated suburbs. That consensus is shifting, though, as research links walkable neighbourhoods to greater happiness, less loneliness and better health, feeding a wider movement toward 15-minute cities such as Copenhagen’s Nordhavn and Barcelona’s superblocks.
Culdesac’s location makes it a bold test case: Tempe sits within greater Phoenix, a famously car-dependent metro area with patchy transit, and sceptics doubted a car-free community could survive there when the first residents arrived in 2023. The answer, in Parolek’s words, is to be “car free, but mobility rich” — restaurants, shops, a doctor’s office, a pool, a gym and coworking space all sit within the site itself, while light rail just outside links residents to both downtown Phoenix and the airport; for longer trips, self-driving Waymo robotaxis take over, and a local outfit rents e-bikes.
Murdock moved in partly to shrink her carbon footprint while she finishes a postdoctoral research project on ocean sustainability at Arizona State University; the light rail gets her to campus or the supermarket in about ten minutes, and she rents a shared electric car at $5 an hour for anything further. “Being in Culdesac has taught me that I much prefer the concept of the 15-minute city,” she says. The United Nations estimates that switching from cars to transit, biking and walking can cut a person’s annual emissions by 2.2 to 3.6 tonnes — meaning that once Culdesac reaches its planned 760 units and 1,000 residents, it could keep roughly 3,000 tonnes of greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere each year.
The design also fights the heat, essential in a city that logged 143 days at or above 100F (38C) last year. Parolek’s firm painted the buildings white, like the hill towns of Mykonos, to reflect sunlight better than Phoenix’s typical sand-toned homes, while having no car parking let architects pack buildings close enough to shade each other and the “paseos”, or walkways, between them, which also funnel in breezes. Harvard researchers found in 2023 that ground temperatures within Culdesac ran 30-40F (17-22C) cooler than the surrounding pavement.
Around 21 small businesses operate on-site, from a James Beard-nominated Mexican restaurant to ceramics studios, with zoning rules even letting some residents run businesses from their own apartments. “Once you pull the cars out,” Parolek says, “there’s so much more opportunity to make a vibrant, thriving community.” Pedestrian life also counters the loneliness often blamed on car-centric living, Murdock says — “it definitely feels more like a neighbourhood” — built on shared environmental values. “It’s like finding your people,” she adds.
Culdesac now plans to expand to other US cities, with interest already coming from local governments and transit agencies. “Culdesac Tempe has shown that people do want to live car-free in the US, even in a metro area like Phoenix that’s often seen as the poster child for car dependency,” says Erin Boyd, the company’s government relations lead. “This success has shifted the conversation around what’s possible in American development.”
Source: BBC News