New Cities • Hacker News Board

Re: New Cities

#391

Post by aestetix » Mon, Jun 27, 2016, 7:50 PM UTC

dang wrote: post #380

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…

This comment breaks the HN guidelines in a bunch of ways, starting from the "I'm going to get downvoted" cliché. The rules here don't require you to agree with anyone, but they do require you to be civil, not call names, and avoid gratuitous negativity. The things you're saying about others here ("engineers who are detached from emotion and any sense of duty towards other people", "Sand Hill Road Gordon Gecko wannabe…

"Be civil. Don't say things you wouldn't say in a face-to-face conversation. Avoid gratuitous negativity."

I would absolutely say these things face to face, because I believe them to be true. I'm happy to go into detail on the first comment, and the second is hyperbolic metaphor. You've seen "Wall Street"? I don't think it's so far off from the truth here.

Also, the "downvoted" comment was less a cliche, but more an acknowledgement based on previous experience. I'm happy to engage in deeply rational discussion around issues like basic income, the automation problem, and the issues specific to the Bay Area, but my comments keep getting downvoted far below the fold.

That said, do you have any direct responses? :)

Re: New Cities

#392

Post by andrewl » Mon, Jun 27, 2016, 7:51 PM UTC

rm_-rf_slash wrote: post #37

gioele wrote: post #18

I hope the winner of this call get all sent to live for 2 years in small (and not so small) unknown towns in Europe that have been growing organically for thousands of years and offer a great quality of life. Places where rich and poor, kids, young adults, adults and elderly all live happily together (modulo the usual father-and-son generational problems). Seriously, planners in "new" countries should be forced to sp…

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…

The other thing I think Philadelphia has going for it is that rising water levels from global warming won't affect it as much as they will affect cities right on the ocean, or islands like Manhattan. The Delaware and Schuylkill rivers will rise, but the city won't be hit as hard as the coastal cities.

Re: New Cities

#393

Post by hammock » Mon, Jun 27, 2016, 7:52 PM UTC

jseliger wrote: post #321

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.

Paul Romer has done a lot of interesting, adjacent work on charter cities; this Econtalk episode is a decent introduction to his work: http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2010/04/romer_on_charte.htm... . In the U.S., we've collectively done a lot, culturally and legally, to make real estate a principal savings vehicle for many if not most people, and this has had a lot of negative consequences. Zoning Rules!: The Econom…

>I'd be curious about alternate land-ownership structures or incentives that make people view housing more as a service than as a good store of value. I don't know what that might mean in practice, but the idea itself seems important to me.

Look no further than the BLM and leasing on public lands. Grazing, etc.

Re: New Cities

#394

Post by ido » Mon, Jun 27, 2016, 7:56 PM UTC

zephjc wrote: post #251

thaumasiotes wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So... You can't eat when you're hungry, because you don't keep food at home. A huge portion of your week is suddenly devoted to shuttling back and forth between home and the grocery store. And you think that's not a massive inconvenience?

I think you have this internal representation of what "going to the store" means which is based on the North American suburban lifestyle of doing everything by car. This is not the model most of the world uses, especially not in old European cities.

Right...I've lived in Vienna and Berlin for over a decade (including a wife and child) and we never owned a car, and generally popped into the nearest supermarket for fetching backpack-sized loot every couple of days.

It's not really an inconvenience.

Re: New Cities

#395

Post by hammock » Mon, Jun 27, 2016, 7:58 PM UTC

dhd415 wrote: post #375

rwhitman wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've thought about this. My thought has been, bump the street level up one story to create a pedestrian / bicycle promenade and move building entrances to the second floor. Keep the existing street below intact, with parallel parking etc. Essentially build a boardwalk above a commercial street, so that traffic can flow below. (Though for ventilation purposes, it would be best if most cars at street level were electri…

That reminds me of a 1920s drawing of the "city of the future" that had several levels of roadway with a promenade or pedestrian level on the third or fourth story: https://worldstreets.files.wordpress.com/2010/07/future-city...

Downtown Chicago comes pretty close with subway on the lowest level, trucks and commuter rail above that, and cars/pedestrians on the surface. There is also a large network of pedestrian tunnels which is useful in winter (and when coming from aforementioned commuter trains).

And until 2003, there was even an airstrip only 2mi from downtown.

Re: New Cities

#396

Post by Jtsummers » Mon, Jun 27, 2016, 7:58 PM UTC

BinaryIdiot wrote: post #70

apendleton wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Trollies. They leave the roads open for other forms of transportation. They can be made to move slow enough that people can embark/disembark while it's in motion. Some level of automation can allow them to realize they're full and skip stops unless requested by a passenger. Hell, you could put a button or offer a phone app so people can request it to stop at a particular stop instead of flagging it down like a bus.

Automation is easy, they follow tracks. Put them on various, intersecting loops. They could probably be more self-contained, rather than using the grid constantly. If personal vehicles are banned, you only have to contend with pedestrians, cyclists, emergency, maintenance, and perhaps delivery vehicles.

Re: New Cities

#397

Post by dclowd9901 » Mon, Jun 27, 2016, 8:01 PM UTC

simonswords82 wrote: post #175

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 underground is a great idea but you'd need to find a way to make GPS work, especially since GPS is necessary for autonomous cars which are obviously a thing of the future.

I'm sorry: what is it about cars underground that is a terrific idea when it costs more than the moon to build a tunnel these days?

Re: New Cities

#398

Post by HillaryBriss » Mon, Jun 27, 2016, 8:03 PM UTC

People who give startup founders advice sometimes say things like "Don't limit yourself. Think big. Try to solve a really hard problem that no one has tackled before." That advice is relevant here.

Don't think about how to create new cities. That problem has been solved many times already.

Instead, think about how to create new planets. If you do a good job, the cities will take care of themselves.

Re: New Cities

#399

Post by dang » Mon, Jun 27, 2016, 8:05 PM UTC

aestetix wrote: post #391

dang wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This comment breaks the HN guidelines in a bunch of ways, starting from the "I'm going to get downvoted" cliché. The rules here don't require you to agree with anyone, but they do require you to be civil, not call names, and avoid gratuitous negativity. The things you're saying about others here ("engineers who are detached from emotion and any sense of duty towards other people", "Sand Hill Road Gordon Gecko wannabe…

"Be civil. Don't say things you wouldn't say in a face-to-face conversation. Avoid gratuitous negativity." I would absolutely say these things face to face, because I believe them to be true. I'm happy to go into detail on the first comment, and the second is hyperbolic metaphor. You've seen "Wall Street"? I don't think it's so far off from the truth here. Also, the "downvoted" comment was less a cliche, but more an…

You broke the rules badly and it would be better to simply take responsibility for that.

> I would absolutely say these things face to face

There's no reading of the HN guidelines by which the claim 'no really, I would be that rude to someone's face' makes it ok to post what you posted. I often hear this from people who think they've found a loophole in the civility rule. But obviously there's no such loophole. 'Don't say things you wouldn't say in person' is there as an example of incivility, not as a limit outside which hey it's ok.

Besides, I believe better of you than that you'd really tell someone to their face that they're an "engineer detached from emotion and any sense of duty towards other people" or the other horrible things you said. Keep in mind that you're talking about real humans here. The anonymous internet makes it easy to feel like you're simply slamming the Man in the service of righteousness. But that's what everyone who's being uncivil always feels, and none of us has the right to indulge it here.

Re: New Cities

#400

Post by dcosson » Mon, Jun 27, 2016, 8:05 PM UTC

devinhelton wrote: post #58

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 ima…

The point about transit to other big cities is another interesting possibility, and I could imagine that as a path to bootstrap a city's own economy. If this hypothetical new city was ~30 min from somewhere like downtown SF or the Google campus via a high speed rail (admittedly a huge "if", given the poor track record of getting high speed rail or really any new rails built in the US in a reasonable timeframe), I think you could get a lot of people to move there for cheaper housing and commute to work. Then you could (somewhat simultaneously) get restauarants, bars, grocery stores, a hardware store, etc. to open in the new city to serve the new residents.

Once there are a lot of people living there (and, importantly, the area is widely accepted as cool and up-and-coming), startups and other companies would have incentives to move there or open offices there.

This basic process seems to have played out in places like downtown Oakland and in DUMBO and Greenpoint in Brooklyn in recent years. But Brooklyn and Oakland both have their own rich histories and existing neighborhoods and economies, which keeps them from evolving quickly, and big changes can cause big problems like gentrification.

It's definitely a moonshot idea but I can imagine this process being even more successful, and avoiding some of the biggest drawbacks, in a new city.