> will be built from scratch on a desert [...] with lush landscapes Will be interesting to see how sustainable that is.
Maybe they're working on terraforming technology.
Plans for a new city in the American desert
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Re: Plans for a new city in the American desert
#92> will be built from scratch on a desert [...] with lush landscapes Will be interesting to see how sustainable that is.
Same concerns with THE LINE [1] in Saudi Arabia.
I'm guessing that the energy harvesting from the geography and leveraging the locale's low humidity for evaporative cooling, along with the generally ultra-low cost of acquiring the dirt, are pretty attractive for moonshot projects like these. I've yet to see any of these types of projects start with fundamentals like better-than-PassivHaus insulation standards, or NetZero standards, or make form follow function by performing and designing around an energy flow analysis, or learn from the lessons that Strong Towns extracted from the population density factors, and so on, so these projects are likely run into many of the same foundational challenges that many nations and cities struggle with today. I think coming up with a framework that allows organic evolution towards integrating these many different factors continuously over the long-term is all we can really hope to accomplish for practical success; we likely simply don't have the sufficient analytical tools to design-up-front except in the most basic, infrastructural ways.
Re: Plans for a new city in the American desert
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
One idea is an expansion of a law already on the books in many cities. When you create a new building / housing complex (which will be 100% in a new city), you require X% of units to be "affordable housing". I could see the city just increasing the required % and then giving tax credits to developers to offset the lost revenue to them. Given that this city would be built in stages, it will give them time to hone in o…
The problem is "affordable housing" isnt actually affordable for many. I qualify for it in the city I live in, and despite working full time for significantly above minimum wage, the rent on a 1bd apartment through this program would be about 75% of my take-home income.
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Re: Plans for a new city in the American desert
#94You would think that anywhere that is not an extreme would be a better choice to build a project from scratch that is supposed to be 'the most' sustainable but also attractive.
Perhaps this is a side-effect due to the state or country chosen, where there are no realistic alternatives? Even going to a more moderate location slightly farther away from the equator doesn't seem all that difficult vs. really sticking with a desert.
Re: Plans for a new city in the American desert
#95Given how zoning and urban design tend to have been done in US cities -- that is, very badly -- I'm not opposed to this. It even sounds intriguing, but I have a hard time personally finding a city in a desert to be attractive, even if the urban design is great.
Deserts can be great for living in once you manage the heat through shading and wind management. Desert sand is very amenable to conversion into rich loamy soil through taking in lots of organic matter in surprisingly few years. Living in such a climate can be made attractive. The challenge is clean, potable water, which is really embodied energy. The evaporation of such water happens at a ferocious rate out in the open. There are also daunting challenges around long-term high-density human impacts upon the desert ecosystem, which serve important functions that are still not well-understood [1].
Re: Plans for a new city in the American desert
#96Re: Plans for a new city in the American desert
#97It's reminiscent of Arcosanti in it's aim of transforming a harsh environment into somewhere livable, instead of just picking somewhere livable in the first place. Maybe it's just pragmatic since arid land is the cheapest land, but it has a nice principal to it, of taking land and improving it instead of draining and farming everything out of it.
I think Arcosanti has a second design advantage tho, it started with a small but livable urban core, so even with 50 residents the city is functional (given enough tourists) but the plans include expansions for 500 and then 5,000 residents. To grow the city as people show up seems like a better move then spending billions of dollars before you open the gates.
Re: Plans for a new city in the American desert
#98Re: Plans for a new city in the American desert
#99"The cleanliness of Tokyo, the diversity of New York and the social services of Stockholm: Billionaire Marc Lore has outlined his vision for a 5-million-person "new city in America" and appointed a world-famous architect to design it" "The mission of Telosa is to create a more equitable and sustainable future. That's our North Star." I admire their ambition, but they are underestimating people's preference for inequi…
As someone living in small town on world scale. I wonder if even trying to aim at 5 million is doing things wrong... Might it be that real sweet spot is somewhere lower than that?
Re: Plans for a new city in the American desert
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm curious to hear why you think it doesn't work. I'm not necessarily disagreeing, just would like to know more.
The point is that no matter how much housing you reserve to be "affordable housing", it will still be scarce and thus unaffordable to most. And this kind of well-intentioned red tape often ends up shrinking the supply of housing as a whole, which only makes it even less affordable.
But where is the line? Rampant development can completely alter the feel and culture of a neighborhood and city. It can take away from those things the existing residents enjoy. Sure more supply can accommodate more humans but they won’t necessarily be the same humans if current residents leave, and it won’t necessarily be the same place afterwards. Desirability (demand) creates scarcity but scarcity can also be desirable in itself for some things. At some threshold, the answer isn’t build more but locate people elsewhere and build a more distributed economy rather than a few concentrated powerful cities or states.