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New Cities

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Re: New Cities

#451

Post by st3v3r »

davidw wrote: post #255
st3v3r wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, markets are a great way of finding what makes the most money for those who build the stores. That may be "the best" solution that is also aligned with the interests of the people who live there, but it might not be.

Central planning has been a colossal failure both in terms of the economy at large, and in terms of urban planning. If someone can make money by building a store, that's great, what's wrong with it? Zoning should be about keeping truly noxious activities away from residential areas, not about keeping a corner store away from where people could possibly walk to it.

"If someone can make money by building a store, that's great, what's wrong with it?"

There can be plenty of things wrong with it. I don't subscribe to the idea that whatever makes money is instantly the best thing.

And I never said that I want to keep corner stores away from where people could walk to it. I said that leaving everything up to the "free market" doesn't always yield the best solution for everyone. It only yields the most profitable solution for those with the money.

Re: New Cities

#452

Post by derefr »

athenot wrote: post #407
dhd415 wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

For an extreme (and somewhat tongue-in-cheek) version of that, see The 5th Element. Everything happens in the sky and street-level becomes this shady area filled with trash and thugs. :)

Or Star Wars' planet Coruscant, or Futurama's New New York.

Re: New Cities

#453

Post by mason240 »

ismail wrote: post #265
superuser2 wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed. With a car, in a place designed for cars, I can go from ideation to grocery store or department and back inside of half an hour. In a place "designed for people" where neither homes nor stores have parking, such an errand consumes an entire afternoon. (Walk to bus stop, wait for bus, take bus to train, wait for train, ride train, walk, etc. Though I suppose it's easier if you can afford to live a short walk f…

The assumption here is without cars cities would be laid out exactly the same. What if there were by laws that every high rise above x floors has y retail space on the ground floor. In this case most of your daily needs would be serviced by a trip down. Once a week/month you may go to a larger store.

Being forced to live in a high rise apartment is very undesirable. Most people would choose to live in a single family house with a yard.

Re: New Cities

#454

Post by pdonis »

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.

> I view money locked up in real estate as money in a very suboptimal place.

I don't think this is a good view to take as a fully general statement. People invest capital in real estate because they get benefits from it. If the benefits they get are worth more to them than the benefits they would get from any alternative uses of the same capital, then putting that capital into real estate is optimal for them.

> it'd be far better to try to make housing/office space cheap and have people invest the extra money in productive assets.

If spending more money on real estate increases its value to the people who use it, then it is a productive asset. I think you are taking too narrow a view of what "productive" means. Instead of seeing it as "make housing/office space cheap", I think you should be thinking of it as "make housing/office space give more value for a given investment". In other words, don't make it cheap; make something people want. Making it as cheap as possible might not always be the best way to do that.

Re: New Cities

#455

Post by brett40324 »

baybal2 wrote: post #364
markplindsay wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know what item #2 means (armature prefabrication?) but Singapore is an ideal Asian city. Especially #6—Singapore is so proud of their public housing that they included an image of an HDB building on their $10 bill.

When the armature for the building is being prefabricated with a milimetre level precision by a CNC metalworking machine, and than assembled on site like lego. This is to minimize the amount of on-site metalwork

Note: a mm or .040 quality tolerance for large pieces of a building is not good enough.

Re: New Cities

#456

Post by qznc »

adamgravitis wrote: post #10

Cities are largely about people, and people are largely about the difficult-to-describe sense of 'opportunity'. Cities reflect networks effects as strongly as anything, which is why the same cities that were important 100 years ago are, by-and-large, the same cities that are important today: there has been no doubling of exciting, the-place-to-be kind of cities in at least North America despite huge increases in popu…

> the same cities that were important 100 years ago are, by-and-large, the same cities that are important today

Silicon Valley was not a "place to be" 100 years ago. Maybe 200 years ago during gold rush.

New Orleans was more of a "place to be" before Hurricane Katrina.

In general, I agree that North America was remarkably stable in the last 100 years. Europe and Asia were much more affected by the world wars. Afghanistan and Iraq were much more places to be 20 years ago.

Re: New Cities

#457

Post by mangodrunk »

mason240 wrote: post #443
curryst wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Changing the way cars function inside the city is only part of what would need to change. Near me things just aren't laid out well for pedestrians. It would take me about an hour to walk to the nearest grocery store (not counting corner stores, because all they sell is junk food). Biking should be much shorter, though I can't say I've ever tried. We would need to stop the trend of having a small number of large store…

> We would need to stop the trend of having a small number of large stores and move back towards having a large number of smaller stores. This would be highly inefficient and result in higher costs of goods and reduced options for consumers.

Not necessarily, and there could be potential for there to be more options. When you have those really large warehouses to buy groceries, they tend to limit the number of brands for a particular item. Also, at what cost does it come at when you have these large stores? Maybe the price might be slightly lower, but in the end is it making our lives better? Having many options isn't always a good thing.

Re: New Cities

#458

Post by Androider »

pasbesoin wrote: post #184

Soundproofing. It's a small fraction of building cost, but one that is most often omitted because short term profit is disconnected from long-term utility and benefit. I've experienced several absolutely miserably loud neighbors. Talk about destroying my potential. I moved to a house -- way more space than I need -- to get away from it. To end up with neighbors who blasted their car stereos -- think SUB-woofers -- al…

New development in for example NYC has very strict requirements on how much noise can pass through walls, ceilings and floors. I live in a tower that was just finished in 2015, the floor-to-ceiling windows are double-pane glass (no air gap, looks very thin), rubber mounted rim all around. It's absolutely, completely, silent. I have never heard a single noise from a neighbor either. Open a window, the traffic noise from the street is intense (and messes up the climate control, so no need to do that).

So, it's definitely possible to build densely with great soundproofing, and is now often required by the building code in bigger cities. Of course old stock won't be magically converted, but will also improve with time as they get renovated.

Re: New Cities

#459

Post by thaumasiotes »

mixmastamyk wrote: post #437
thaumasiotes wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, you can't take a grocery cart on a bus.

Not true, in Los Angeles at least, outside of rush hour. You moved the goal post also. In the thread above we are talking about a 10-minute walk.

No, we're not talking about a 10-minute walk. You responded to my comment 'It solves the "the store is far away" problem, but it does nothing for the "I need more food than I can personally carry" problem.'

A cart is not actually responsive to that, because it reintroduces the other problem.

Re: New Cities

#460

Post by BHSPitMonkey »

nickff wrote: post #131
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 am of the opposite view; if the people do not know and understand the rules, then then they cannot be expected to abide by them. There are so many criminal, civil, and regulatory laws that the people could not possibly be expected to know, that the system is unfair. Lawyers will often say that ignorance of the law is no excuse, but that is a manifestly unreasonable doctrine when even the regulators, legislators, an…

The law recognizes brandishing as a type of offense.
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