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New Cities

blog.ycombinator.com

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101–110 of 710 posts

Re: New Cities

#101

Post by handl4r »

aestetix wrote: post #83

I'm going to get downvoted for this, but here is a sentence by sentence response for as far as I could take it: Leave it to engineers who are detached from emotion and any sense of duty towards other people to act with a guilt complex to try to remake society in a way so they don’t feel so bad about fucking over everyone who is not a tech worker. “We want to study building new, better cities.” How about a profile of…

I'd love to give you the downvotes you wanted but I don't have enough points yet. Help, users!

Re: New Cities

#102

Post by verg »

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…

The lack of on-street parking was something I noticed visiting Japan. Streets can be much smaller when they don't have 20-24 feet of parking. In the US, a massive percentage of our most valuable land goes to subsidized vehicle storage. It's insane.

Re: New Cities

#103

Post by dclaw »

aestetix wrote: post #83

I'm going to get downvoted for this, but here is a sentence by sentence response for as far as I could take it: Leave it to engineers who are detached from emotion and any sense of duty towards other people to act with a guilt complex to try to remake society in a way so they don’t feel so bad about fucking over everyone who is not a tech worker. “We want to study building new, better cities.” How about a profile of…

The only place new cities are built anymore is China. And most of those remain empty for years.

Re: New Cities

#104

Post by massysett »

kafkaesq wrote: post #50

The biggest gap in this discussion, thus far -- the elephant in the room, as it were: there's almost no room left on the planet for building "new" cities of any significant scale (meaning of course not just the meticulously designed city core; but the whole meta-city that will grow around it -- with suburbs, transportation links, etc). Sure, there might be a few -- a very small few -- bona-fide brown zones here and t…

New cities aren't going to happen, but it's not a space issue. There's plenty of space in the middle of Kansas.

Re: New Cities

#105

Post by [deleted] »

sama wrote: post #78
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.

[deleted]

Re: New Cities

#106

Post by toomuchtodo »

massysett wrote: post #93

"How can we make rules and regulations that are comprehensive while also being easily understandable? Can we fit all rules for the city in 100 pages of text?" If you give arbitrary power to those who enforce the rules, sure, they can fit in 100 pages. If you don't value predictability and consistency of enforcement, sure, they can fit in 100 pages. In fact, the rules can fit onto one page. The Ten Commandments are pr…

I disagree. If you site the city in the US, you can use the existing governance models. Most of the what YC wants to do can be done with local zoning ordinances (tied together with restricted deeds or community lands trusts/co-ops), with the populace (hypothetically made up of citizens who are conducive to this experiment) voting at the local city government level.

This is not new territory. They're building a master planned community (with what you might consider an HOA on steroids), and based on their requirements, I think they going to do an incredible job compared to your average real estate developer.

Re: New Cities

#107

Post by mikeash »

chris_7 wrote: post #90
ars wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 becaus…

Cars do not amplify throughput, they reduce it. http://urbanist.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83454714d69e2017d3c37d8a...

The throughput of a column of people walking from NYC to LA would be quite good. But I certainly wouldn't want to cross the country that way. Other things matter too.

Re: New Cities

#109

Post by athenot »

sama wrote: post #78
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.

Cars in tunnels is a great idea, just like the subway: burry it so as to not impact life on the surface.

Unfortunately, it is very expensive to operate that way. The easiest tunnels to build are the ones Paris did for their subway a century ago: dig up the soft limestone under the street, lay tracks, close it up. But you still need to deal with ventilation (especially for non-electric cars), fire suppressant, evacuation, flooding and general maintenance. In the best-case scenario, tunnels are just very expensive.

Then there are places like Atlanta (sitting on granite) or San Francisco (in a fault zone) where things get a lot more complicated.

Re: New Cities

#110

Post by massysett »

Finnucane wrote: post #3

Why start from scratch? Just send 100,000 nerds and hipsters to Detroit or Buffalo with some VC funding and see what happens.

Detroit has the advantage of being in the middle of an enormous well-developed network of streets and highways. I see no need to start from scratch when we already have underutilized infrastructure.
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