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New Cities

blog.ycombinator.com

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Re: New Cities

#111

Post by fudged71 »

verg wrote: post #102
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.

Narrower streets, wider sidewalks, more trees.

Re: New Cities

#112

Post by aestetix »

maxerickson wrote: post #89
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…

Just for your clarity, I downvoted the generic slur that you kicked things off with.

That's reasonable. I was pretty upset when I started writing the piece, and feel more rational now.

However, by "aspie" I specifically mean someone detached from emotion and any sense of duty towards other people. Is there a better word you would suggest I could use?

Re: New Cities

#113

Post by gervase »

ars wrote: post #68
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…

> 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…

I think this is a valid point, in that it serves as the other side of the coin to the arguments of your parent poster. Other than transportation and carrying ability, cars also amplify things like consumption of energy, physical space, and so on.

I think this is probably why the question in the original article, "What should a city optimize for?", is really the MOST important one to answer.

If your goal is to keep housing costs low, for example, then presumably you'll want to optimize for space (based on the prevalence of suburbs, this seems to be the presumption reason for high housing costs). Since cars amplify use of space (parking, roads, gas stations, etc), then it follow that despite their other benefits, you would want to minimize vehicular traffic to mitigate this effect.

In other words, I think when people say things like "people should make cities that are for people" what they might be trying to imply is "people should make cities that are not for cars, because there are other things that I think should take priority".

Re: New Cities

#114

Post by cbr »

athenot wrote: post #109
sama wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, evacuat…

When building a city from scratch you can cut-and-cover everything, and you can choose somewhere with good soil conditions for what you want to build.

Re: New Cities

#115

Post by zephjc »

Nadya wrote: post #60
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…

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…

For sure. As I understand it a lot of the build-out in Tokyo into what were more rural areas was done by the railroad lines - build a km or two, add a station and more developed land, repeat.

Re: New Cities

#116

Post by antr »

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…

For anyone interested in this research subject should watch all the talks at the Architecture IO conference: http://www.architecture.io/

Talks include subjects such as walkability, city design, urban data visualisation, crowd modelling, new transportation systems, etc.

Re: New Cities

#117

Post by baybal2 »

BinaryIdiot wrote: post #13

> 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…

>Engineering a full city from the group up sounds good but the majority of the people using the city are, well, people. People change

Astana is a good example of this type of a designer city

Re: New Cities

#119

Post by zardo »

rm_-rf_slash wrote: post #54
jsprogrammer wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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…

I think open straight streets don't fire up our spacial memory in the same way, and as a result aren't really "places" in our minds in the same way as more intricate and varied environments.

Re: New Cities

#120

Post by jballanc »

Assuming that you can avoid the problems of "old" cities by simply starting out with the right "new" city is like assuming that you can avoid scaling a web application by starting from the very beginning building micro-services. The "new" city that plans for being big will never attract enough people to grow much like businesses that start with micro-services will never be agile enough to find market fit and grow to actually need micro-services.

Money and effort would be better spent looking at and solving the plight of cities that have seen hockey-stick growth. Then you could take those lessons and watch for the next city at the start of a population boom and ensure that it grows in the "right" way.

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