You can but change is measured in decades and even then often doesn't happen.
Starting "fresh" with a single leading implementer is really how it needs to be done.
Take San Francisco. There's the planning board, the planning department, environmental lawsuits, HOAs, abusing "historic landmarks" designations, political showmanship, developers, affordable housing, community meetings, unions, community groups (the cycling people are borderline militant) etc. etc.
All of those can bring any change to its knees. And they have, repeatedly. There are good parts of this process and people shouldn't not have input, but I might not oppose a dictator coming in for two years and just having at it.
It's still managed by Waterfront Toronto, the goal is still for it to be pre-planned in a smart way.
However, I didn't see much in Sidewalk Labs that was so innovative. You talk of "without prioritizing road" but there was still zero dollar allocated for any kind of transit project, 2.5 years into it. Not that it's all Google's fault, but really for me lack of concrete plans for transit in development showed me it wasn't serious.
San Francisco has changed immensely in just the last decade.
It may not be noticeable if you live there because you only see the incremental day by day changes, but as someone who only sporadically visits the Bay Area: it's nothing like it was in 2010. It's significantly more built up (and out), more skyscrapers, more apartments, more condos, more everything.
Housing prices would tell you there is actually less of everything, relatively. Demand has surged, sufficient supply has yet to be constructed, queue housing crisis. Not enough housing is being built in California's cities.
14 new residential high rises were built in SoMA in the past 5 years. 3 more are going up as we speak and opening in the next few months. That's a LOT of residential construction in a very short amount of time.
(Mind you that's just a 15 block area in East Cut/SoMA - I'm not even talking about ALL of Mission Bay which didn't exist 10 years ago or the Van Ness corridor or Mid-Market.)
The problem here is we only started building about 10 years ago (with One Rincon being the first major new building in a long time) and the rest of the Bay Area (for example, Brisbane notoriously) is nowhere near doing its fair share of building.
This type of mentality is exactly what led to "urban renewal" in the 1960s and the complete destruction of American inner cities to be replaced with 18-lane freeways and grimy concrete housing projects that concentrated poverty and sent crime rates skyrocketing.
Because planners' hubris, similar to the insane technocratic Silicon Valley hubris these days, led to them making terrible decisions with zero community input and a team of yes-men around them.
> I might not oppose a dictator coming in for two years and just having at it.
Ironic a culture that fetishizes free markets and an open marketplace of ideas favors totalitarianism because they find the idea of being part of a larger human community with all its flaws icky. Step away from the keyboard some more and maybe, I dunno, go outside and talk to people? Problems like these are never solved with Docker.
Local HOAs and similar have loud voices against these kind of projects. It might take another big voice (like Sidewalk Labs) to counter.
I've tried calling my local reps to support walkable community projects and have been told, nearly verbatim, that if the HOA doesn't like it, they won't be voting for it. Then when big tech offices started moving in, the redevelopment projects finally started too.
Unless you've got a few billion to throw away you're going to have a hard time convincing any developers to build something other than the most economically productive building. and for that location, that's a big glass condo building that looks like every other big glass condo building and doesn't benefit anybody other than the people who can afford to live in big glass condo buildings.
