Have you considered revitalizing depressed cities rather than building new ones? There are a lot of once thriving cities that became depressed due to lost industries/jobs. Building out a tech hub and bringing in tech jobs/workers into these cities could bring new life to them.
New Cities
61–70 of 710 posts
Re: New Cities
#62With many people having the ability now to work remotely, I've seen a big influx into small to mid-sized cities in the last decade. Anecdotally, I moved to Charleston, SC five years ago and since I've been here, I've seen a huge influx of people moving here for quality of life reasons. Charleston is one of the fastest growing cities in the US for this reason. There are opportunities here as well, with larger companies like Boeing shifting a lot of their operations here as well, but more than anything, I think people want to be here because it's a place that offers an incredible food and beverage scene, access to beaches, and a city bathed in history and architectural significance. It's bikeable, walkable, and practically every address could be copied onto a postcard. Most importantly, in my opinion, the influx of people here are younger, optimistic, entrepreneurial types and it's so easy to get to know others in town and to feed off that energy. Roll in cheap, fast direct flights ($100-200 round trip) to almost any northern city (DC, NYC, Boston) and that really adds to accessibility from other cities. I've been doorstep to doorstep from Charleston to my friend's apartment in Brooklyn Heights in under 3 hours.
That said, I've lived in quite a few cities and the most important aspect of anywhere I've lived is the type of people I'm comfortable surrounding myself with. I think that's fairly true for anyone who has job mobility. After that everyone places different weight on a host of other factors (access to fast/efficient transport, culture, outdoors activities, sustainable utility supplies, weather, food, demographics, proximity to family, local school quality, etc, etc).
Re: New Cities
#63Some options for doing this:
1. Bootstrap an existing "small town" with access to lots of resources. This has advantages, such as potentially existing highway connections, water infrastructure, sewage, school districts, etc. The downside here is that the existing community would have to buy-in, and agree to be part of your experiment. This is not a small feat. Additionally, you need to convince a large group of people to move there.
2. Build from scratch. Here, the biggest problem will likely be building out the infrastructure (such as roads, water treatment, schools, etc.), convincing people to move to the "middle of nowhere", and finding an affordable area that has access to enough clean water, that isn't already somewhat built up. I'm from Arizona, and have driven through much of the state: even as a large Western state with lots of available land, I have a pretty hard time thinking of potential areas that aren't already semi-developed, unless you want to constantly fight surrounding municipalities for water rights.
3. "City within a City". Basically, find an under-developed suburb or area of a major city. In Phoenix, this might be the town of Queen Creek, or if you were OK displacing a multi-generation, poor community in the heart of the metro, Guadalupe. Here, you get all the advantages of the small-town takeover, with the added bonus that your community is still close to a central hub of employment and existing options. The disadvantage is that you now have to deal with regional politics, and face backlash (potentially) for displacing existing residents. You also don't get to define your main roads and police system much (due to county-level planning). But, depending on what you mean by "city", you might be able to grab 2-4 square-mile-blocks that are not yet incorporated into a large city, and start developing almost immediately (as there's already water/electricity access nearby, and there is likely latent local demand for the kind of development you want to build).
Re: New Cities
#64Look 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…
Those are pretty recent designs, but I like them for the most part. I agree, as long as you are not hampering human movement, keep car traffic slow and safe for said human movement, networking with bike paths is fine in my book. In an existing dendritic US-style street system, retrofitting with bike paths between streets is a really cheap and easy way to encourage biking (the hardest part is probably dealing with existing property rights)
Re: New Cities
#65Three words:
Christoper Woflgang Alexander.
Re: New Cities
#66What 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 woul…
When cars and planes drive themselves and 3D printers are as good as Star Trek replicators, then maybe cities will be unnecessary. Until then, you will always need to live near the things you want - including friends.
I don't really see what self-driving cars and plans and 3D printers have to do with it. You can have friends and be near everything you need in a small town of 20,000 people. They have grocery stores and hospitals and pretty much anything else you'd need. Amazon will still deliver in 2 days with Prime shipping.
What I'd like to avoid are the large financial costs associated with living in a large city. I'd also like to avoid other issues caused by large population density, like the fact that traffic is always backed up getting to the ocean on the weekends here. Also, people like me leaving cities would mean that there would be less demand for housing, less traffic, etc for the people that want to stay. Everyone wins.
Re: New Cities
#67From the footnotes:
> [1] Two out of three people will live in cities by 2050 - an influx of 2.5 billion new urbanites.
How much of that is by choice? I know quite a few people that wouldn't give up their rural lives willingly.
Re: New Cities
#68I think "old cities" are pretty good too: the kind where they were built for people, rather than cars, and where you could build things without a dense thicket of regulations almost entirely unrelated to safety. Another thing that seems to work well is limiting the amount of up-front large scale projects and growing incrementally. No one can plan for everything ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_calculation_pro…
> built for people, rather than cars
I wish people would stop with this drivel.
There are PEOPLE in the cars. The cities are built for people.
A car is a human amplifier - it takes human transportation and carrying ability and amplifies it. A lot of people find this amplification very very useful (parents with children, elderly, people who buy in bulk, etc, etc).
Taking it away would be like removing computers because they are too fast so we should all do things by paper again.
Re: New Cities
#69Understandably, 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…
I'm rather dismal on the ability for city planning to positively affect communities - or to even work as planned in the first place. Look at the original grid plan for Philadelphia to see what I mean.
I think the "know your neighbors" problem is a lot bigger than city planning. It has a lot to do with our society itself. For example, it is assumed in America that one must eventually own their own home to achieve the "American Dream." The implication is that if one just has a house, a car, and a job that pays well, that person doesn't even need other people. They can get all their entertainment from the Internet and all of their food and other goods delivered. It is an efficient system, but it lacks heart. A change in city design will only scratch the surface of the isolating world we live in.
Re: New Cities
#70> We now have major technologies such as smart grids, autonomous vehicles, etc Not really. Autonomous vehicles are still coming. We don't know what infrastructure we'll need to support them just yet. Will there be a standardized way of powering / recharging them? What non-autonomous needs will they have and how to we handle them (because there will be some e.g. mechanical repair, rescue, etc)? Sure we can "guess" bas…
> Autonomous vehicles are still coming. Autonomous privately owned vehicles on shared rights of way are still coming. Centrally managed autonomous vehicles on dedicated rights of way are here already -- think inter-terminal trains at airports. If private car ownership is up for discussion (and it's explicitly called out here), you could imagine, for example, an urban plan where people got around on a macro level on a…
That would be pretty awesome and is very doable today. Good idea! You wouldn't even need roads really just stations everywhere to get on some sort of train type of vehicle that you can hop on and get to any part of the city. Hell make them smaller and more frequent and when you get in you put where you want to stop so it can skip stops, etc.