I have always really liked stuff from https://www.thevenusproject.com/ some of their ideas might seem crazyish but overall I think anybody thinking about designing new cities ought to at least take a look.
New Cities
21–30 of 710 posts
Re: New Cities
#22This has been tried before.
Re: New Cities
#23Recommended reading:
Jane Jacobs "The Death and Life of Great American Cities"
Ray Oldenburg "great good place"
Booker T Washington: Up from Slavery
I'd skip figuring out cities. Start with how to create neighborhoods that work? Where citizens can be educated, participate in their local government, and find work at the neighborhood level.
Re: New Cities
#24Cities 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…
Basic income and the freedom to pursue things without having to worry about money, could be that opportunity.
Re: New Cities
#25Look to how Tokyo does things. A few takeaways:
- mixed use zoning: reduce requirement for long trips by mixing many compatible types of commercial with residential, and remove single housing type developments. Also, allow many smaller apartment complexes mixed with single family houses, instead of segregating housing types.
- street design: No more hierarchical/dendritic street layouts. That is, no more dead-end streets, which lead to collectors, which lead to arterials - you're bottlenecking a huge population through a very small, fast, and unsafe road system. Instead, make the streets highly connected, and narrower to encourage slower but steadier car traffic, and blocks shorter. Porous streets networks can route around bottlenecks and can have many more concurrent cars than even crazy-huge Texas-style freeways.
- no big street setback requirements: encourage density by removing crazy suburban-style setbacks.
Edit: I wanted to make a plug for form-based zoning, which is zoning where the form (building type) is zoned, not its use. This doesn't necessarily refer to its style (Neoclassical, Modernist, etc) but how it interacts with the surrounding buildings on the street. E.g. buildings above a certain size might not be allowed in an area, and not be allowed to take more than N number of yards of street frontage. Setbacks of a certain size might be prohibited, or allowed. This allows of a reasonable number of mixed uses like restaurants, shops, and other day to day commercial uses to coexist with residential. This does not mean that heavy/noxious industry can be built up there. This was the error the Euclid v. Ambler decision made 100 years ago: they threw the baby out with the bathwater by restricting zoning by type; there is not a small amount of racism that came with Euclidean/exclusive zoning, e.g. removing a formerly viable way for immigrants to start a business with a house above (a la Bob's Burgers) and thereby increasing the barrier for success.
Re: New Cities
#26There 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 simply needs to fulfil a certain set of needs within a reasonable radius and the people can take it from there.
When I lived in Rome briefly I was astounded at how livable it was. Throw a dart at a map of Rome and as long as you don't hit a major park, ruin, government building or the Vatican, you can reasonably assume that within a walkable radius, you will find grocers, restaurants, convenience stores, bars, hairdressers, gelato shops (there is a LOT of gelato in Rome), and everything else you need in your daily life. The tiny twisted streets barely offer enough room for a single car at a time - and my hat is off to the brave individuals who choose to drive through them - but because everything is so dense, you really don't need a car. You barely need public transit either, unless your place of work is too far to walk most days. It is also worth noting the majority of buildings in Rome are within 3-6 stories high, much unlike the American expectation that city centers feature enormous skyscrapers that pack people like sardines. Ultra-dense Manhattanized city centers may be efficient, but they lack the ancient and livable simplicity of old European cities.
Exception: Australia manages brilliantly to merge dense city centers with far-flung suburbs with an excellent mix of trains, light rail, and busses, which allow residents of large cities to get around easily without needing a car at all.
[1] http://www.vice.com/read/the-totalitarian-buddhist-who-beat-...
Re: New Cities
#27> We now have major technologies such as smart grids, autonomous vehicles, etc Not really. Autonomous vehicles are still coming. We don't know what infrastructure we'll need to support them just yet. Will there be a standardized way of powering / recharging them? What non-autonomous needs will they have and how to we handle them (because there will be some e.g. mechanical repair, rescue, etc)? Sure we can "guess" bas…
We have autonomous vehicles once you forbid pedestrians on the road.
Re: New Cities
#28Cities 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…
Basic income and the freedom to pursue things without having to worry about money, could be that opportunity.
Beat me to it. Without some sort of income guarantee, most people would not move to remote cities.
edit: not sure why this is controversial. other than retired folks, who would move to the middle of nowhere as a result of this "kickstarter" if they aren't going to be guaranteed a job there?
Re: New Cities
#29Barcelona's block layout comes to mind: http://projectivecities.aaschool.ac.uk/portfolio/yuwei-wang-...
Re: New Cities
#30Hacker city ? Put me down for a summer home.
could you have a city that is a mix of private / public and be a public company listed on a stock exchange.
Would be interesting if one could buy stock in the nyc or San Francisco or even a Singapore of the future.