I'm not sure if anyone has mentioned the South Korean city of Songdo yet, but it's a good example of a built-from-scratch "smart city". Last I heard, the Korean govt was having trouble getting people to move in. Here's an NPR story on it from 2015: http://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2015/10/01/444749534/a...
New Cities
511–520 of 710 posts
Re: New Cities
#512Earlier quoted context omitted.
Bikes may be great but cars are terrible for cities. They take a ton of space and require massive amounts of restrictions on non-car traffic. Space is the biggest premium in a city. If a fraction of the space that was devoted to car traffic was instead devoted to public transit, public transit would be far more efficient and robust than cars.
Maybe in denser cities or downtown but where I live and work if I wanted to take a bus my easy 9 mile 20 minute drive becomes 60 to 90 minutes with 3 bus changes. That's a lot of ground to make up.
...my easy 9 mile 20 minute drive becomes...
Such a drive is likely not stable. 9 mile 10 minute drives, in rural areas, are stable. But unless your economy is moribund, once that's up to 20 minutes, chances are good that ten years from now that same drive will be 45 minutes.
Re: New Cities
#513Something that I've always wondered in relation to city design is why it isn't standard for high-rise buildings to be 50% office space and 50% living space. It's one of those things where I assume there must be a good reason why it isn't done, but I've never been able to find one. It seems like such a huge waste of human resources to force people to commute for hours each day, spending money, wasting gas, lost produc…
A few core reasons (im an urban designer and deal with this sort of thing fairly regularly)
Residential and modern office typically have very different floorplate requirements. So often dont sit comforatably over each other.
Mixing residential and commercial tends to make building operation an issue - who pays or chooses what to spend on when there are building wide issues (leaks, structure, lifts, noise complaints, etc)? What happens when the office owner wants a complete refurb? Office owners traditionally have liked to retain ownership to allow demolition and reconstruction in after 40 years or so.
Many high grade offices tend to be picky and not like looking out the window at peoples laundry in the opposite building. Nor have the lobby of low cost apartment housing in the side of the same building.
Adding more levels isnt always an economic thing to do for developers since time in construction (and hence time the developer has borrowed money but not recieved payments) is a key issue.
At a strategic level often true 'office cores' can be constrained and need to be protected from erosion.
Re: New Cities
#514There is an example of a player of SimCity creating the optimal city which consisted of a reusable grid of components ensuring everyone had access to work and services within a reasonable distance from their homes [1]. There were a lot of assumptions that went into it - including perpetual access to water and a completely flat layout - but it at least seemed to validate the belief I have had that a city at heart simp…
What you describe about Rome seems to apply for many many European cities. Many of them seem to have "mini-downtowns" scattered about, as opposed to the downtown-in-center-and-suburbs-everywhere-else that is common in North America.
That's often because the grew by incorporating existing villages and small towns into the larger city.
Re: New Cities
#515Earlier quoted context omitted.
Markets are a great way of finding 'the best' solution to problems like this No, they're not. I've seen the markets in action, and one ends up with shopping malls surrounded by four-lane streets with no crosswalks. As the my sibling comment points out, markets are great for maximizing incoming for the stores leasing space in the malls. One prime example I'm thinking of was 25 years ago, let's go to Google's sat view…
> one ends up with shopping malls surrounded by four-lane streets with no crosswalks. You should look up the zoning codes in your city, as well as a zoning map. They are incredibly detailed, and extremely prescriptive. What we have in the US is very far from a market-based solution! And those rules and regulations absolutely have worsened with time. Look at cities from 100 years ago, how they had nice downtowns where…
And now let’s look at Europe.
This is an official map of the city where I live: http://i.imgur.com/N0X8HTh.png (Screenshot of http://ims.kiel.de/extern/kielmaps/?view=stpl&coords=3257435... with the layer for zoning enabled and the layers for PoIs disabled)
Purple are the areas for which any zoning restrictions at all exist – in the rest, no zoning regulations exist, as long as you follow normal building law, and get a normal permit, you can build what you want, skyscraper or single family home.
You can visit the specific plans for each area by going to , for example, http://ims.kiel.de/extern/bplaene/1008.pdf (this for the area marked as 1008 in above map).
Sometimes they look like this: http://ims.kiel.de/extern/bplaene/919a.pdf (Very restrictive new post-2005 development, only terraced housing, single family housing, and some small apartment buildings), or sometimes they look like http://ims.kiel.de/extern/bplaene/907.pdf (left half is "mixed use", right half is a shooting area), but sometimes they have no regulation at all except specifying "have around 40% mixed use, mkay?". Or even like this http://ims.kiel.de/extern/bplaene/919c-1.pdf where there are some dotted arrows with the label "foot paths", kinda showing where maybe someday foot paths will be made (IRL they were made completely differently, after demand has been evaluated based on where people walk the grass down)
This is probably a far better mix than the overly restrictive situation in the US – regulations are good when they help consumers, small businesses, or to keep the market balanced, but regulations to help developers make profit are often a bad idea.
Re: New Cities
#516Make internet a basic utility, paid through taxes, that requires no activation. I've never had to explicitly pay for water or have it turned on/off when I switch apartments, it would be amazing for internet to be the same. See Pattern Language/Christopher Alexander for ideas on how to design the physical spaces to work for the people who will be using them, including random passersby. Put cars lowest on the priority…
Interesting that you mentioned pattern language. My brother is an architecht, I'm into tech. I remember asking him about Alexander / pattern language after reading GoF, et. al. and he hadn't heard of him. He looked into it and was kind of like shrug . Seems Alexander isnt't super mainstream in the architecture community, and his ideas weren't that revolutionary. My read is that he's better know to software engineers…
Part of the point of A Pattern Language is that it wasn't revolutionary. The premise is that people have been building buildings for thousands of years, and certain common patterns appear without anyone calling them out specifically. So, Alexander set out to compile a list of all those patterns, and hypothesize about the problems they solve and why that particular solution is preferable to the alternatives.
To someone who is trying to make an artistic statement with their buildings, A Pattern Language might be uninteresting, since his advice is essentially the architectural equivalent of composing music in a major key according to traditional rules of harmony. If that's what you want to do, that's great, but if you want to make something deliberately dissonant or challenge traditional notions, it's not so helpful.
It's also worth noting that Alexander has some very strong opinions about things, and (just like any other area of human endeavor) there are architects who disagree with him.
Re: New Cities
#517Cities 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…
I don't think opportunity is actually that difficult to describe, it seems to mostly be a product of labor markets. Either there's an untapped well of excess labor (like the post-war boom in Phoenix, AZ) or there are jobs in a high unemployment environment (like what's fueling growth in the bay area now).
In the case of Phoenix, they went from 99th in the US to 9th in about 30 years in large part due to the government building air force fields and pilot training camps. When everyone went back there after the war and realized they needed jobs, industry was happy to fill the gap because there was high competition among labor.
Similarly the bay has developed obviously because of tech, but for most of that early tech, the US government was the primary customer. Not just transistors, but before that, radio and telegraph research and operator training was done for/on behalf of the Navy.
That is all to say that the next step probably won't be fueled by some small-batch kickstarting program. People won't relocate en masse if they don't have long-term motivation. I think the best bet for inciting development of New Cities is mass investment by the government training people to do things like build and operate solar farms in the great plains, understand and combat coastline destruction in the gulf, etc.
If the government commits to buying clean energy and prioritizes investing in it's development, it can have a big say in where that happens and I think that's a great opportunity to rebuild dying old cities or start from scratch since so many people have abandoned those places already.
Re: New Cities
#518Earlier quoted context omitted.
The issue is that you broke HN's civility rules blatantly. Please don't do that again.
So if I were to reformulate everything into a more... pallatable form, you'd be willing to respond?
If you want a further response I need evidence that you recognize how badly you broke the civility rules here.
Re: New Cities
#519Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yea it's also a pretty common sci-fi / cyberpunk fantasy city design dating back to Fritz Lang's Metropolis , influenced by the Art Deco "city of the future" ideas like this floating around at the time. In NYC at least the lower levels are already present. But the only part where we got the pedestrian level correct so far is the High Line... which has been hugely successful. There's really no reason these types of pa…
Except that in most cities including New York it's going to be difficult to build something like that in the absence of an existing structure and right of way. The High Line is also in effectively a post-industrial area which is now highly gentrified but wasn't previously exactly prime real estate. And it's still not really located for day to day pedestrian movement as opposed to recreation.
Totally agree, it would be a political and engineering mess to try and implement on an existing busy street. The conditions were very ripe to experiment with the high line.
Not an easy thing to develop certainly, but relative to the cost and level of engineering effort needed to build new subway tunnels, I'm surprised that adding transportation improvements at street-grade and then bumping the street up one level, isn't something that ever gets considered. We could run effective BRT through Manhattan, or surface light rail to solve the crosstown transportation problem.
Imagine how much easier getting from Queens and Brooklyn to the Lincoln and Holland tunnels would be by car or bus if say 39th St, Canal St moved the pedestrians to an elevated walkway. What if Times Square's tourist bottleneck could be eliminated by raising Times Square?
Anyhow, unlikely to happen probably ever, but fun thought excercise
Re: New Cities
#520What about the Venus project