This has been tried before. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_City,_California
New Cities
31–40 of 710 posts
Re: New Cities
#32What about rethinking to what extent large cities are and will still be necessary? Thanks to the internet, lots of jobs that required going into an office every day can now be done remotely. As collaboration tools get better, I'm hoping that companies will become more receptive to allowing this.
The company I work at in SV does not allow remote work, but I've heard from a few of my teammates that if it did, they would seriously consider moving away from the area to someplace with a much lower cost of living. I would too.
Re: New Cities
#33Every time I travel to silicon valley I'm amazed how difficult it can be to find electricity. It may seem like a small thing, but I think accessible electrical outlets should be as important as public water fountains. Similarly, water fountains and bathrooms should be accessible!
I'm really fascinated by the way that Dubai is designed in terms of industry-specific districts, it gives you scalability but also network effects and serendipity. They also have overground driverless trains. Masdar city nearby has an underground driverless car system and sustainable architecture, a very attractive model.
Re: New Cities
#34To some extent I feel that if you go all in on education (and I don't mean schools by that) and access to information, the rest will follow.
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Re: New Cities
#35Cities are largely about people, and people are largely about the difficult-to-describe sense of 'opportunity'. Cities reflect networks effects as strongly as anything, which is why the same cities that were important 100 years ago are, by-and-large, the same cities that are important today: there has been no doubling of exciting, the-place-to-be kind of cities in at least North America despite huge increases in popu…
Basic income and the freedom to pursue things without having to worry about money, could be that opportunity.
Basic income is absolutely one route, but I can think of a few others. A startup could thrive in a smaller city where their employees could achieve a high quality of life without extraordinary expense. You'd still have to solve the recruiting problem, however, and employees would be wary of lock-in effects.
Re: New Cities
#36Look to how Tokyo does things. A few takeaways: - mixed use zoning: reduce requirement for long trips by mixing many compatible types of commercial with residential, and remove single housing type developments. Also, allow many smaller apartment complexes mixed with single family houses, instead of segregating housing types. - street design: No more hierarchical/dendritic street layouts. That is, no more dead-end str…
> - street design: No more hierarchical/dendritic street layouts. That is, no more dead-end streets, which lead to collectors, which lead to arterials - you're bottlenecking a huge population through a very small, fast, and unsafe road system. Instead, make the streets highly connected, and narrower to encourage slower but steadier car traffic, and blocks shorter. Porous streets networks can route around bottlenecks and can have many more concurrent cars than even crazy-huge Texas-style freeways.
Alternatively, you COULD use dead-end streets...that are only dead ends to cars, but have pass-throughs for walking and biking. For an extreme example, see Houten, NL: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Houten,+Netherlands/@52.03...
http://www.citylab.com/cityfixer/2015/06/a-case-study-in-bik...
Re: New Cities
#37I hope the winner of this call get all sent to live for 2 years in small (and not so small) unknown towns in Europe that have been growing organically for thousands of years and offer a great quality of life. Places where rich and poor, kids, young adults, adults and elderly all live happily together (modulo the usual father-and-son generational problems). Seriously, planners in "new" countries should be forced to sp…
Sometimes I wonder if Americans fucked themselves by creating cities with roads and cars in mind, thereby ruining the organic walkability of naturally sense cities which were historically limited by the distance one could reasonably walk in a given day for their regular necessities.
The only old American city that I think stands a chance is Philadelphia, which has a great number of single-lane one-way streets, which allow emergency services to get to where they need quickly enough while providing a decent amount of walkability. But then again, the original plan for Philadelphia is a hilarious testament to the utter failures of centralized city planning.
" Penn planned a city on the Delaware River to serve as a port and place for government. Hoping that Philadelphia would become more like an English rural town instead of a city, Penn laid out roads on a grid plan to keep houses and businesses spread far apart, with areas for gardens and orchards. The city's inhabitants did not follow Penn's plans, as they crowded by the Delaware River, the port, and subdivided and resold their lots" -https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philadelphia
Re: New Cities
#38It is surprise to me, that though a lot of technologies seem to make location less important (internet, video conferences, online stores, better transportation), ppl ten to cluster around few hub cities.
Importance of network effect is increasing faster than advantage of tech allowing distributed work. I wonder if this trend will be permanent or will shift at some point.
Re: New Cities
#39Cities are largely about people, and people are largely about the difficult-to-describe sense of 'opportunity'. Cities reflect networks effects as strongly as anything, which is why the same cities that were important 100 years ago are, by-and-large, the same cities that are important today: there has been no doubling of exciting, the-place-to-be kind of cities in at least North America despite huge increases in popu…
Basic income and the freedom to pursue things without having to worry about money, could be that opportunity.
Money is not a worry, but food and shelter.
If everyone gets money and freedom, where do food and shelter come from?
Re: New Cities
#40Cities are largely about people, and people are largely about the difficult-to-describe sense of 'opportunity'. Cities reflect networks effects as strongly as anything, which is why the same cities that were important 100 years ago are, by-and-large, the same cities that are important today: there has been no doubling of exciting, the-place-to-be kind of cities in at least North America despite huge increases in popu…
> Property in uninteresting cities is very cheap, because nobody wants to be there.
Many more people live in 'uninteresting' cities than 'interesting' ones. They're cheap because of the relatively big supply, not necessarily because of the lack of demand.