New Cities

It is a mistake to assume that because cities were the most efficient way to organize people in the past, they will continue to be so in the future. Given the trend towards remote work, socialization and shopping, there is a lot less of a need for density.

Instead of asking "how can we make the city of the future" we should instead be asking "how can we create a habitats for humans that promote happiness, health, harmony, and do so in a way that is economically and ecologically sustainable."

I believe that people are happier when they have a sense of connection and belonging in their community. Cities discourage this.

I believe people are happier in environments that feel more natural and alive. Cities discourage this too.

I believe people are happier when they have a sense of personal space and privacy. Another mark against cities.

Cities make efficient use of space, density lets you produce buildings cheaply in terms of living units/dollar, and they are more efficient in terms of distributing goods and services. I believe that alternative building techniques can mitigate much of the cost of reduced density. I also believe that by integrating permaculture based agriculture into the landscape design you can mitigate some of the efficiency losses in terms of distributing the most important good - food. You could further reduce the distributional inefficiency using a system of neighborhood based co-ops - I'm sure people would adapt to quite easily to the reduced selection of snacks and processed food.

Wider streets are good for getting a lot of stuff through - up to a limit. Los Angeles and Atlanta are full of massive highways of cars that barely move.

Larger streets also hurt street side commerce. Nothing chokes off wakability and storefront business vitality like multi-lane one-way streets.

EDIT: I feel compelled to mention from my experience that in Rome, the most active streets with the most vibrant businesses were not the arterial roadways - those seemed to mainly serve large businesses, government buildings, and tourist traps - but rather the tiny twisted streets in place for many centuries.

Understandably, I'm sure there will be a lot of focus on physical and transport infrastructure. I think it would be worth also looking into ways to transform the social infrastructure of a city.

I'm sure most people would agree that cities tend to bring a certain degree of isolation. Once upon a time people would know everyone in their town, but in a large city today it's pretty rare to even know your neighbours.

Of course, in the year 20x6 we have lots of social infrastructure, but mostly it starts with an assumption that you want to choose who you interact with. But what if you shouldn't always choose? In the wake of the Brexit some commentators have rightly asked "how didn't I know anybody voting leave?"

For better or worse, we are stuck in proximity to a certain number of people, maybe people quite different to us. In cities, we tend to ignore that as much as we can, and our social tools follow suit. Could we build new ones that instead embrace this restriction and turn it into a good thing? Could we bring a sense of local community back to our cities? Could we build slightly-out-of-your-comfort-zone-as-a-service and pierce the filter bubble at least a little?

I'm not sure, but I think it's worth finding out!

The list of high-level questions is missing the most important question: how do you bootstrap the economy? There are plenty of awesome locations in the United States that have cheap land with great geography, but that have no jobs. The reason people flock to cities with such insane real estate prices is because that is where the jobs are.

This is where Y Combinator could play an interesting role though. Could you imagine two or three San Francisco tech companies all uprooting at once to a brand new city, where costs might be half the cost in San Francisco? And at the same time, maybe you could convince a couple other big tech companies to open satellite offices in the new city. To get more economic diversity, perhaps the startup-city could also buy up established, small-scale manufactures and move them to the city. Still -- these kind of moves would be very, very hard, as it would be very difficult and risky to try to uproot enough employees to actually make the move successful.

Any other ideas for how the economy could be bootstrapped?

Re: Street Design

Japan is designed with public transport in mind. Most everywhere in Japan is within train/bus/bike/walk distance. You don't need 4 lane high ways when there are maybe a few dozen cards on any particular stretch of the high way at any given time. I drove from Nara, Nara to Naruto, Tokushima via highway and saw maybe ten other cars on the highway. That's a distance of 174.5km; roughly a 2 and 1/2 hour drive. If I drove for 2 and 1/2 hours on any stretch of highway in California, I'd see ten cars every few minutes.

Less cars in the road, in general, means roads can be more narrow.