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New Cities

blog.ycombinator.com

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Re: New Cities

#71

Post by TillE »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #52

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, har…

> environments

I live about three minutes away from a large park near the center of a large city. It's a great place to walk around.

When I lived in American suburbia, it was nothing but houses unless you drove a few miles down a main road.

Re: New Cities

#72

Post by tmaly »

For me cities with great public transportation are key. New York still has a lot of cars, but the subway system is quite extensive. Portland, OR has one of the best bus systems I have seen. I wish they had more light rails than they do. When I was last there they were just completing the second one.

Paris has a great subway system that is very clean, and their roads are very walk able.

Montreal and Toronto have great systems.

I think a cities climate is always important to consider. If you want to have bike paths, but you get a ton of snow in the winter, how do you deal with that? At my university up in Rochester NY we had tunnels under ground connecting the buildings. This helped a lot with the brutal winters.

Re: New Cities

#73

Post by rm_-rf_slash »

kylec wrote: post #66
rm_-rf_slash wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If that's what you want and you don't mind shit weather, move to Ithaca, NY. I saw what the Valley had to offer when I worked at Apple and came away with the same grumblings you mention.

Upstate New York in general is a great place for the kind of living you describe. For not much money you could buy - or even better build - a home in the middle of nowhere with a 30 minute drive into town with very light traffic most times of the day. Like you say, everything you need is relatively close, and Amazon Prime still delivers in 2 days.

You just have to put up with the weather.

Re: New Cities

#75

Post by zw123456 »

This is a fantastic idea, I would expect no less from YC. A couple of thoughts I have off the top of my head:

1. Design with hyper-loop in mind from day one.

2. Easy access right of way for utilities, most cities bury everything which is silly, there should be an easily accessed common right of way so that fiber, water sewer etc. can be easily accessed for upgrades or repair without having to dig up the streets.

3. Consider driverless cars only, and electric only. Include bicycle or non-car personal vehicle pass ways that are safe.

4. Plan for green spaces with point source food production in mind.

5. Design in space for point source energy production, solar etc.

Most of these are pretty obvious. The other thing that I have thought about is the parallels to networks, if you had a high speed low energy use hyper-loop that could function like a ring topology with small low rise communities around the ring. For quality of life a lot of people enjoy the small community feel (think palo alto) I live in Seattle in a small sub-community (Kirkland) that has that walk around the neighborhood to all services feel to it and I feel that it adds a lot to my quality of life.

Re: New Cities

#76

Post by rwhitman »

One thing that really needs to be addressed is how to retrofit the glut of car-centric developments designed in the late 20th century, to better conform with the growing sense of value we have in walkable communities today. Navigating the minefield of local zoning politics to try and convert car-centric stripmall mcmansion suburbs into tighter village-like communities will be an enduring puzzle in America at least.

There's also an interesting question in what happens when we cluster too many people into one city based around talent markets for knowledge work.

The Brexit vote in England may well be partially the result of the fact that the younger workforce in the UK was all stuffed into London due to the high concentration of knowledge work employers there, preventing newer ideas and values from being evenly applied across more of the country. You see the same thing happening in the USA, with near total dominance of one political ideology in the larger coastal cities and dominance of the other in places further afield. We're seeing a reversion to city-states in this regard, and with the distributed nature of knowledge work, you'd expect to see the opposite happening...

Re: New Cities

#77

Post by riprowan »

Most cities succeed or fail based on their governance. Great ideas are awesome - I love them - but governance is where the rubber meets the road.

Solve governance, solve everything.

Re: New Cities

#78

Post by sama »

davidw wrote: post #17

I 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…

Cars have a place in cities but maybe they should be in tunnels underground or something.

I view money locked up in real estate as money in a very suboptimal place. We pay too much 'rent' in general; it'd be far better to try to make housing/office space cheap and have people invest the extra money in productive assets.

Re: New Cities

#79

Post by zephjc »

acgourley wrote: post #57
zephjc wrote: post #25

Look 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…

That's basically the north-of-mainstream thinking in urban planning, right? I certainly agree with you, but I also think it is a wasted opportunity to just build what leading thinkers agree is a good idea.

More or less. Some aspects of Western urban planning are rather big on things like Complete Streets, where you have segregated bike lanes added between sidewalks and street. These are fine for wider streets as seen in many American cities, but smaller streets which force cars to slower speeds don't necessarily bikes and even pedestrians segregated.

E.g. this slice of suburban Tokyo: https://www.google.com/maps/@35.7368825,139.5634333,3a,75y,2... Note the speed limit is 30kph, or around 18mph.

This seems to be the default building style in much of Japan. You will still find larger streets which are arterial in nature, but they're usually still very bikeable and walkable, and still porous to smaller streets like the one linked above.

Re: New Cities

#80

Post by mikey_p »

jsprogrammer wrote: post #43
rm_-rf_slash wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If you have single lane streets, what does an emergency vehicle do when the lane is blocked by vehicles, people, or debris? Wouldn't wider streets be better in every case?

Recent Philadelphian transplant here: They move or take a different street. It's interesting that people here have accepting that if they're driving and a taxi stops to drop someone off, they just wait 30 seconds to proceed, or backup and take a side street over a few blocks to proceed around the blockage.
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