Parag Khanna: global connectivity and urban meccas: http://www.paragkhanna.com/
New Cities
591–600 of 710 posts
Re: New Cities
#592Have you considered revitalizing depressed cities rather than building new ones? There are a lot of once thriving cities that became depressed due to lost industries/jobs. Building out a tech hub and bringing in tech jobs/workers into these cities could bring new life to them.
It's a good idea.
Maybe YC should talk with the founder of Zappos, Tony Hsieh. (They probably have already for all I know.)
He's investing millions into the old Downtown area of Las Vegas in an effort to transform that part of the city's economy. Not sure how it's turning out. Maybe YC should just add themselves to that effort.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/freeenterprise/2015/08/03/tony-h...
Re: New Cities
#593I'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...
Thanks for that. I'd heard of it a while back but that's a nice update.
I love the final lines of that article:
Brent Ryan, who teaches urban design at MIT, says Songdo proves a universal principle. "There have been a lot of utopian cities in history. And the reason we don't know about a lot of them is that a lot of them have vanished entirely."
Re: New Cities
#594New?
The best cities are pretty old, and mostly in Europe.
They figured it out 100's of years ago.
'Affordability' has nothing to do with cities - it has do to with regional economics. The Valley is a singularity.
Other cities with bubbles like Vancouver and London has to do with unrestricted purchases by foreigners.
Otherwise it's not hard.
Lost in any West Coast discussion of 'cities' will invariably be the most important thing: culture. Cities revolve around people, activities, and things that are hard to measure.
The best 'urban planners' fail because they are focused on wide roads, less traffic etc. - when in reality, cities that form naturally, around people and their communities, with individuals who act responsibly ... are the best.
There are 1000 100K+ cities in Europe that are pretty spectacular: clean, interesting, walkable, cultured, local, great for families, low crime, affordable. Surely there are many in Asia as well, though with differing kinds of economics given political instability lately.
Re: New Cities
#595For me cities with great public transportation are key. New York still has a lot of cars, but the subway system is quite extensive. Portland, OR has one of the best bus systems I have seen. I wish they had more light rails than they do. When I was last there they were just completing the second one. Paris has a great subway system that is very clean, and their roads are very walk able. Montreal and Toronto have great…
I hope we can do better than NYC and Paris for public transportation. Paris's are smelly. NYC haven't been updated in forever.
I'm not trying to be negative, only pointing out there's better. On my short list I'd pick Tokyo, Kyoto, Osaka, Singapore, HK (maybe), even London's is pretty nice compared to Paris. It's clean (at least in my limited experience) and at least for convenience Berlin's is pretty amazing.
Re: New Cities
#596Earlier quoted context omitted.
> This is how a lot of regulation gets started, because someone is trying to prevent something from happening to their backyard. There are legitimate complaints, I think - no one wants a pig offal disposal site next door in their residential neighborhood. But we've gone way overboard in letting zoning dictate what can go where. > They are not a typical case. But they absolutely are on YC's radar, because San Fran and…
You could always have Japanese style zoning. To simplify a lot, you can build houses in residential zones, you can build stores or houses in commercial zones, and you can build factories, stores, or houses in industrial zones. So people who want peace and quite have a place for it and nobody is allowed to surprise you with a pig offal disposal site next door. But if people really want to build houses in an industrial…
People will definitely still complain about that factory. People move into houses directly under the approach path for an airport then try to get the airport shut down because of the noise. People will move in next to a sewage treatment plant and then complain about the smell.
Re: New Cities
#597I'm sure people have different opinions on this but one thing I like is variety and grunge. I don't really know how to explain it. I want more SF's Valencia between 16th and 18th and less Westfield foodcourt's. I want more Golden Gai in Tokyo and less Roppongi Hills.
I used to want the Jetson's or Disney's Epcot. Now I want 150 tiny bars and restaurants each one holding no more than 20-30 people at best (generally). Less big box stores and less chains (not zero just less) and more boutiques / specialty shops and restaurants
Of course arguably the general public doesn't want that though. If they did the USA wouldn't be 95% big box shopping centers and 95% giant chain restaurants.
I've wondered how to build for that. Tokyo, where I spent most of my time, is having lots of older interesting neighborhoods torn down and replaced by tall glass buildings with at best a generic shopping center at the bottom. The architecture might be ok but the feel is gone and ends up feeling cold and sterile. I get the old places are often fire traps or earthquake hazards but I just wonder if there's a way to design the new places to some how capture the essence of what it was before the change.
Re: New Cities
#598Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Cars are on a pedestal not only because of convenience and speed, but because they're the lowest common denominator. The lowest common denominator? I don't own a car, and I'm sure many other people in my city don't either, so no: it's not the lowest common denominator for us: walking is. Cars are themselves very expensive and require a massive amount of infrastructure to function. Look around a city and think of al…
>They've replaced everything else because their massively profitable to produce. That's the most ridiculous justification I've heard for anything. A thousand dollar piece of toilet paper is also massively profitable to produce, but nobody would buy it. People buy cars because they are useful. If you think most people don't enjoy the freedom they get from owning a car, you are living in a bubble. I work with people th…
Cars were very successfully marketed as status symbols and expressions of personal identity. Having a nice car in the suburbs meant your family was safe from the evils of the city.
The entire government apparatus spent decades and untold fortunes making the car the fast and flexible option. We now have the benefit of hindsight that tells us it was a massively inefficient use of public funds.
Re: New Cities
#599I 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…
Old cities suck. Their layout is literally derived from concentric walls to keep invaders out. I love the history and architecture, but from a usability perspective they're far from ideal.
If by usability you mean ease of commuting then many old cities have been able to address this by building new infrastructure while preserving their character.
Amsterdam is an old, concentric, beautiful and imo quite user friendly city (as long as you don't drive a car). Commuting is very easy either by bike, tram, metro, or train.
For me the ideal city is both aesthetically pleasing and easy to get around (among many other things I'm omitting here). Make it beautiful and make it efficient. That's a challenge - but feasible.
Re: New Cities
#600Are you intentionally talking past urban planners? They are literally the expert on this topic.
And yet, there's virtually nothing within reasonable walking distance from my house, and there is no commercially-zoned land nearby that would allow someone to open up a coffee shop/corner store/restaurant/pub/whatever. Literally no community-oriented locations anywhere nearby. In the summer, it's possible to bike to Safeway, but summer doesn't last all that long and then there's a pile of snow on the ground again. I…
Urban planners learn this stuff during the first semester. It's political and short-term economic forces that prevent implementation.