40 ms·

New Cities

• deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
• ocdtrekkie 10y ago
  If you're going to have a dense, intercity area, I suppose I'd argue that the question isn't about "human-driven cars", which brings up the largely unrealistic consideration of self-driving cars on ordinary roads, but simply: Build the city center entirely around public transit. Rail is incredibly efficient, and in a system where you are designing the city first, I'd forgo roads entirely. Why bother with buses if you have free reign where to put your rails? And as a Chicagoan, I can say that nobody in their right mind drives a car into the intercity to begin with. Modern subway systems are automated with barrier walls and doors making it near impossible for a human to end up on the tracks. If built like this from the get-go, collisions between transit and pedestrian could be virtually zero. Plan your stations based on the distance needed to reach EVERYWHERE in a reasonable walking distance, make sure your system has the capacity to meet the daily working population, and you really don't need direct A-to-B transportation.
  • chimeracoder 10y ago
    > Light rail is incredibly efficient, and in a system where you are designing the city first, I'd forgo roads entirely. Heavy rail is even better, and if you're designing a city from scratch, the biggest challenges to building heavy rail aren't as much of a problem.
    • ocdtrekkie 10y ago
      That's fair. I'm just going to edit and say "Rail". :) The difference in terminology between the two isn't material to my point.
  • BorgHunter 10y ago
    > Light rail is incredibly efficient, and in a system where you are designing the city first, I'd forgo roads entirely. While I'm a firm believer that private cars (at least at a scale seen in the U.S.) and dense cities are fundamentally incompatible, I'm not quite onboard with getting rid of roads altogether. What about bicycles? Emergency vehicles? Construction equipment? Furniture deliveries? Deliveries of merchandise to stores? None of these things are going to be able to get around without a road network of some description, albeit hopefully one significantly reduced in scope from a typical American city.
    • Swizec 10y ago
      You can build things that can function as roads but aren't roads. Look at most European cities' inner pedestrian zones. There are roads of old, but closed to traffic and heavily modified. In case of emergency, fire engines can get in. Bicycles and pedestrians can comingle happily on a normal day. My hometown's (Ljubljana) pedestrian zone is more than a kilometer across. It's quite awesome.
      • BorgHunter 10y ago
        This is the exact kind of thing I'd love to see more of. I would still call it a road, though, if it can support limited vehicular traffic. "Pedestrian road", maybe. It's a good point, though, that you can support the use cases I mentioned without resorting to the more typical "road-for-cars, sidewalk-for-people" paradigm.
      • Shengbo 10y ago
        I agree. Pedestrian zones that are closed off to regular traffic are very common in Europe and they're awesome. They also boost the traffic the surrounding businesses get and make it easier for cafés and restaurants to add a terrace area. Well-executed pedestrian zones are one of the easiest and most effective ways of making a street more liveable in my opinion. Edit: Also, (preferably one-way)streets where the sidewalk-to-road ratio is a lot higher than usual. Case in point[1] [1]: https://www.google.com/maps/@47.5003418,19.0510879,3a,75y,176.35h,78.4t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sTtOYZqBhyHyQeZyRb3Cb7Q!2e0!7i13312!8i6656 https://www.google.com/maps/@47.5003418,19.0510879,3a,75y,17...
  • joshmlewis 10y ago
    This is a good idea when considering how people will get around in their daily routines, but I'd be interested in hearing your perspective on how goods, services, and infrastructure would operate with entirely no roads? Specifically getting food/goods/supplies to businesses, restaurants, hospitals, and other facilities that are required for such a city to exist. You could potentially utilize rail for this but then you face the last mile problem. Additionally considering things like emergency services, rail seems like it would be entirely inefficient for getting someone immediate medical attention.
    • ocdtrekkie 10y ago
      Sorry about the delay, I'm rate limited here on HN. As another commenter suggested, emergency vehicles especially could still use pedestrian walkways, which would still be needed to get from station to endpoint, and should be sufficiently wide to allow a lot of free movement. The so-called last mile. As a perk, pedestrians and bicycles are easier to move to part ways for emergency vehicles. I think that a lot of freight could be handled the same way. A limited number of licensed carriers could operate light mule vehicles to bring freight from the nearest station (assuming rail stations had decent cargo-unloading stops as well) and operate along pedestrian walks during low traffic hours. (Your mail and your deliveries should not be delivered during regular starts or ends of the work day, or mealtimes. I'd go so far as to say construction traffic should be in the dead of night.) Since they'd need to coexist with pedestrians, but only travel a very short distance, from the nearest station, I'd propose these would be slow as heck, and since they wouldn't be traversing rough terrain, they could have extremely low ground clearance as well. The key importance is that these pedestrian walkways be first and foremost, for pedestrians, and that personnel transportation vehicles be non-existent along them. The occasional off-peak freight cart isn't going to be a huge burden on transportation efficiency or pedestrian safety.
  • forrestthewoods 10y ago
    I think light rail is awful. Heavy rail even worse. I just spent a week in Paris. Do you know much faster it's transportation is than walking? It's about a 2x multiplier. That's it. I can take multiple subway connections and get there in 30 minutes or walk the streets in 60. Several hundred billion in subway is no faster than a moving sidewalk in an airport. We can do better. We must do better.
    • guard-of-terra 10y ago
      When you have a city as dense as Paris, you can access the whole city in 30 minutes using transportation. That's more people, offices, cafes, museums and parks that sprawling city will fit into two hours car commute radius.
  • kspaans 10y ago
    Coventry, UK is a good example of this. https://www.google.com/maps/place/Coventry+Cathedral/@52.4077545,-1.5197691,15z/data=!4m5!3m4!1s0x0:0x6dbdadba5a0f7d8e!8m2!3d52.4083097!4d-1.5071172 https://www.google.com/maps/place/Coventry+Cathedral/@52.407... The city centre is essentially car-free, with a ring-road highway around it. The centre is dense enough to have most things you'd want, but small enough that you can walk across it quickly.
  • JshWright 10y ago
    > I'd forgo roads entirely. Tough to get a firetruck somewhere without roads. We have come a long way in reducing the fire risk in new construction buildings, but 'stupid finds a way' is far from being a solved problem.
    • zephjc 10y ago
      See another of my posts about road vs street definitions. Note that a lot of suburban wide streets are built that way to meet fire codes written to accommodate overly-large trucks. A suburban town doesn't need giant trucks where smaller, cheaper, more maneuverable trucks can do the work. Combined with ubiquitous hydrants - which have disappeared from many US suburban subdivisions - they are more than enough fire safety for anything under 4 stories. Regulations to accommodate these huge trucks have helped ruin the human scale of streets in many places. Also note that existing old cities have become a lot more safe by using superior materials, installing sprinkler system, etc etc.
      • JshWright 10y ago
        Absolutely. There is currently a trend in the US towards smaller emergency vehicles, and I expect that to continue. US fire truck manufacturers are starting to look at their European brethren (companies like Metz out of Germany) for examples of how to accomplish the necessary tasks on much smaller platforms. I think we're still a long ways from being able to do away with fire trucks entirely though. Firefighting is a very dynamic activity, with a lot of contingencies that need to be covered, and the 'big toolbox on wheels' model works very well.
        • zephjc 10y ago
          Even something easy like articulated fire trucks would be an improvement: http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-a2g94xSRqSo/T7RXxkqARAI/AAAAAAAAJ1U/b98i3UNwqzU/s1600/DSC_2687.JPG http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-a2g94xSRqSo/T7RXxkqARAI/AAAAAAAAJ1... Maybe a bit narrower/shorter though. You still get the volume but don't have to punish the people who live in an area for the 0.001% of the time fire trucks need to be there.
• Finnucane 10y ago
  Why start from scratch? Just send 100,000 nerds and hipsters to Detroit or Buffalo with some VC funding and see what happens.
  • brett40324 10y ago
    I agree with this approach. Whos gonna pay for 100,000 outlandish salaries? If they all only earned 10 usd an hour....You do the math.
    • niels_olson 10y ago
      I think you're missing the point. No one dreams of paying developers $10/hr to live in Detroit. The salaries are high legitimately. But the quality of life per $ in SF is questionable. I have a friend who manages 500 engineers and can afford a 3rd story walk up loft next to an elevated freeway.
      • brett40324 10y ago
        Nope. I got the point just fine.
      • Finnucane 10y ago
        In San Francisco, your friend likely manages a sweatshop. The engineers on the floor are the high-tech equivalent of the immigrant women working the rows of sewing machines in a Chinatown clothing factory. The manager is the guy who sits in the little room on the side watching the floor to make sure no one takes too long of a pee break. Today's high-tech sweatshops are clean and have toys in them, but the essential economic relations are the same.
  • massysett 10y ago
    Detroit has the advantage of being in the middle of an enormous well-developed network of streets and highways. I see no need to start from scratch when we already have underutilized infrastructure.
  • niels_olson 10y ago
• brianbreslin 10y ago
  How much money is YC committing to this project?
  • sama 10y ago
    The research phase won't be that expensive. If we built one it would require $tens of billions of capital, but we have some interesting ideas about how you might finance it.
    • brianbreslin 10y ago
      Sam, I meant how much is YC funding on the research side? Shoot me an email, I know some people in Miami working on some related topics, happy to connect you.
• niels_olson 10y ago
  If you're serious about this, you need Geoffrey West, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/19/magazine/19Urban_West-t.html http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/19/magazine/19Urban_West-t.ht... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoffrey_West https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoffrey_West http://www.santafe.edu/about/people/directory/ http://www.santafe.edu/about/people/directory/ Alberto Hernando de Castro, and https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=S_ad8ycAAAAJ&hl=en https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=S_ad8ycAAAAJ&hl=en maybe Franz-Josef Ulm http://www.citymetric.com/%E2%80%9Curban-physicists%E2%80%9D-are-claiming-cities-are-molecules http://www.citymetric.com/%E2%80%9Curban-physicists%E2%80%9D... https://cee.mit.edu/ulm https://cee.mit.edu/ulm And I don't know who's been doing Chinese planning, but they've obviously had some experience building cities that never became populated.
  • astrange 10y ago
    Those "unpopulated Chinese ghost towns" are all populated now, a few years after they were built. The government just builds them a while before forcing the nearest subsistence farmers to move into them. It's like Spike Japan, the blog that visits towns on holidays and claims they've been abandoned for years, because all the residents are gone on holiday.
• gopher2 10y ago
  Public transit infrastructure and especially rail/subway seems like a huge common denominator for 21st century cities that people are really attracted to living in: See the Bay Area, Boston, NYC, DC So I think, "how do you build legitimate rail transit into an existing city without it currently" is an interesting question for people researching and thinking about this topic. Good luck!
• adamgravitis 10y ago
  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 population. Because of this, our generation is stuck on the wrong side of the supply/demand bit for property. Property in uninteresting cities is very cheap, because nobody wants to be there. Property in Silicon Valley or Toronto is on fire because it's the place to be. I think there's a critical mass kind of problem. In many ways, my quality of life in a smaller (or even very small) city could be several times higher than it currently is -- except for the people. And, for better or worse, it's the people that matter. I don't have any real desire to be the best educated, or most creative, or most entrepreneurial person in a city: I want to be surrounded by them and call them my friends. So perhaps there's some kind of Kickstarter-like critical mass sort of system that could be put into place to kickstart small cities whereby 50 or 100 mutually interesting people committed to moving to a more remote city iff their compatriots did as well. Of course, to make that work, there would be have to be some kind of "opportunity", which is why I'm happy to see yC-folks looking into the problem.
  • samvj 10y ago
    Basic income and the freedom to pursue things without having to worry about money, could be that opportunity.
    • enraged_camel 10y ago
      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?
    • adamgravitis 10y ago
      Basic income is absolutely one route, but I can think of a few others. A startup could thrive in a smaller city where their employees could achieve a high quality of life without extraordinary expense. You'd still have to solve the recruiting problem, however, and employees would be wary of lock-in effects.
• adamnemecek 10y ago
  To some extent I feel that if you go all in on education (and I don't mean schools by that) and access to information, the rest will follow.
  • deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
• BinaryIdiot 10y ago
  > 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" based on trends but we won't know for sure for probably another 10+ years what a brand new city will really need in this regards. Same with smart grids especially with solar power becoming more efficient they may almost be unnecessary in 10-20 years (unlikely maybe but it's theoretically possible). > There are many high-level questions we want to think through[...]And there are tactical questions we want to dig into So there is a bit of reason to why most cities come up sorta "organically". Like NYC there was planning, sure, but that planning came from trends or requirements from the populous which happened over time. Engineering a full city from the group up sounds good but the majority of the people using the city are, well, people. People change. Technology changes. Political opinion changes. Maybe you'll succeed in having a solid plan agreed upon by a majority but by the time the plan is taken and put into action and built a large amount of time will pass and I do not believe that original plan will still be as optimal or valid by the time it is completed. Then you'll have to do what every city does: improve, change laws, build stuff here and there that you originally thought you wouldn't do. Ultimately it seems like a very interesting exercise but I do not believe in its practicality. > - Adora Cheung, Sam Altman Wait, Adora is part of YC? I thought after all of the drama around HomeJoy and the people it may or may not have sold to she had just basically disappeared. I had no idea she was part of YC. Edit: just to clarify (because I'm not sure it came off correctly) I just didn't know Adora was part of YC and am curious as to her role, etc not to bring up any drama or other bs. I had just assumed she went on to found another company as that seems to be the norm for many founders.
  • whazor 10y ago
    We have autonomous vehicles once you forbid pedestrians on the road.
    • vkou 10y ago
      Don't just forbid pedestrians - you also need to forbid the existing hundred million or so non-autonomous vehicles.
• davidw 10y ago
  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_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_calculation_problem ) . Recommended reading: http://www.strongtowns.org/ http://www.strongtowns.org/ http://marketurbanism.com/ http://marketurbanism.com/ The Rent Is Too Damn High: What To Do About It, And Why It Matters More Than You Think: http://amzn.to/28W6et9 http://amzn.to/28W6et9 Edit - I'll add that I think it's great that YC is spending some money to look into this, as it's a huge issue for many desirable, productive cities these days. Huge as in billions of dollars: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-05-07/here-s-how-much-new-york-and-san-francisco-s-tight-housing-markets-are-hurting-the-economy http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-05-07/here-s-how...
  • antr 10y ago
    For anyone interested in this research subject should watch all the talks at the Architecture IO conference: http://www.architecture.io/ http://www.architecture.io/ Talks include subjects such as walkability, city design, urban data visualisation, crowd modelling, new transportation systems, etc.
  • ars 10y ago
    > built for people, rather than cars I wish people would stop with this drivel. There are PEOPLE in the cars. The cities are built for people. A car is a human amplifier - it takes human transportation and carrying ability and amplifies it. A lot of people find this amplification very very useful (parents with children, elderly, people who buy in bulk, etc, etc). Taking it away would be like removing computers because they are too fast so we should all do things by paper again.
    • gervase 10y ago
      I think this is a valid point, in that it serves as the other side of the coin to the arguments of your parent poster. Other than transportation and carrying ability, cars also amplify things like consumption of energy, physical space, and so on. I think this is probably why the question in the original article, "What should a city optimize for?", is really the MOST important one to answer. If your goal is to keep housing costs low, for example, then presumably you'll want to optimize for space (based on the prevalence of suburbs, this seems to be the presumption reason for high housing costs). Since cars amplify use of space (parking, roads, gas stations, etc), then it follow that despite their other benefits, you would want to minimize vehicular traffic to mitigate this effect. In other words, I think when people say things like "people should make cities that are for people" what they might be trying to imply is "people should make cities that are not for cars, because there are other things that I think should take priority".
• gioele 10y ago
  I hope the winner of this call get all sent to live for 2 years in small (and not so small) unknown towns in Europe that have been growing organically for thousands of years and offer a great quality of life. Places where rich and poor, kids, young adults, adults and elderly all live happily together (modulo the usual father-and-son generational problems). Seriously, planners in "new" countries should be forced to spend some time in "old" countries, if not to learn the good things, at least to learn their mistakes. And another compulsory thing should be listening to James Howard Kunstler talking about Suburbia: https://www.ted.com/talks/james_howard_kunstler_dissects_suburbia https://www.ted.com/talks/james_howard_kunstler_dissects_sub...
  • rm_-rf_slash 10y ago
    Sometimes I wonder if Americans fucked themselves by creating cities with roads and cars in mind, thereby ruining the organic walkability of naturally sense cities which were historically limited by the distance one could reasonably walk in a given day for their regular necessities. The only old American city that I think stands a chance is Philadelphia, which has a great number of single-lane one-way streets, which allow emergency services to get to where they need quickly enough while providing a decent amount of walkability. But then again, the original plan for Philadelphia is a hilarious testament to the utter failures of centralized city planning. " Penn planned a city on the Delaware River to serve as a port and place for government. Hoping that Philadelphia would become more like an English rural town instead of a city, Penn laid out roads on a grid plan to keep houses and businesses spread far apart, with areas for gardens and orchards. The city's inhabitants did not follow Penn's plans, as they crowded by the Delaware River, the port, and subdivided and resold their lots" -https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philadelphia https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philadelphia
    • jsprogrammer 10y ago
      If you have single lane streets, what does an emergency vehicle do when the lane is blocked by vehicles, people, or debris? Wouldn't wider streets be better in every case?
• Bromskloss 10y ago
  I want an old-fashioned city, with cobblestone and stuff, thank you. I'm sure it's not the most efficient according to one measure or another, but it's for living in, not for being a machine in. Actually, it might be the most efficient at making me happy.
  • trgn 10y ago
    Yes please! I feel like the perfect cities already exist, they're just older cities or neighborhoods from before the car existed. That's the key. The icing on the cake is that the buildings and streets in those times were build using natural materials, with delightful human touches in ornamentation and design. Just looks good. It's the horrible car sprawl of the US, and the dominance of the machine aesthetic that makes most new cities and neighborhoods totally suck. Now, people's crotches start to tingle when they smell freshly poured asphalt, but that is the triumph of modernism, a perversion of our human impulses, the result of a sick fetish for utility, while appreciation for durability and beauty is completely stunted. Now, cobblestones, cobblestones are much more tactile, sensual if you will (I'm only halfway kidding). Plus, they last forever, needs to be leveled every half century or so, that's nothing. I too want the cobblestones and stuff thank you.
• hydandata 10y ago
  I have always really liked stuff from https://www.thevenusproject.com/ 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.
  • rrrichter 10y ago
    agreed. I went there on a tour one time, it was amazing.
  • deepvibrations 10y ago
    Agree- Jacque Fresco's vision is really inspiring and I think a lot of great ideas can be drawn from the Venus Project.
  • PCMcGee 10y ago
    Fresco was unique in that all of his designs were based on testable, quantifiable evidence based assessments of reality. His designs for cities ended up looking like "utopias" because he started at the evidence based engineering level and built up from there, not because he imagined a utopia and worked backwards from his "vision". Most of the issues facing engineers when designing a city are issues with the way in which monetary economics works against efficient design, implementation of best practices, and sharing of resources. As cities and neighborhoods with attractive qualities of socialabilty become scarcer, gentrification leads to their destruction through over-valuation from increased market demand. It is nigh impossible to build a "shining city on the hill", where there is opportunity and abundance and happiness, and expect that the rest of the world will sit idly by in their squalor and applaud the achievement.
• bagels 10y ago
  This has been tried before. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_City,_California https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_City,_California
  • soVeryTired 10y ago
    Also here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden_city_movement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden_city_movement
    • handelaar 10y ago
      (Anyone who's seen The World's End with Simon Pegg et al has seen what the UK 'Garden Cities' look like -- the big rectangular drag with all the pubs on it is Welwyn Garden City's town centre)
  • loceng 10y ago
    Different times, and maybe that'll be a good place to start - with lots of land available.
  • oinksoft 10y ago
    Also here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reston,_Virginia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reston,_Virginia
  • VLM 10y ago
    Also see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celebration,_Florida https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celebration,_Florida Or more generally: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planned_community#United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planned_community#United_State...
  • HillaryBriss 10y ago
    Interesting. I believe I've seen it off in the distance from Highway 395. Always wondered what it was. Geographically, it's the third largest city in the state. At 200 square miles, it's four times as big as San Francisco. I bet most people in California don't even know it exists. Here's a different attempt at building a community in the California desert, from decades earlier: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Llano_del_Rio https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Llano_del_Rio
• rubidium 10y ago
  Recommended 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.
• zephjc 10y ago
  Look 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.
  • TulliusCicero 10y ago
    > - 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. Alternatively, you COULD use dead-end streets...that are only dead ends to cars, but have pass-throughs for walking and biking. For an extreme example, see Houten, NL: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Houten,+Netherlands/@52.0334659,5.154189,16z/data=!4m5!3m4!1s0x47c666e7c006f4bb:0x87d8ebe7bead1a3d!8m2!3d52.0278426!4d5.1630019 https://www.google.com/maps/place/Houten,+Netherlands/@52.03... http://www.citylab.com/cityfixer/2015/06/a-case-study-in-bike-friendly-suburban-planning/396107/ http://www.citylab.com/cityfixer/2015/06/a-case-study-in-bik...
• rm_-rf_slash 10y ago
  There 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-sim-city http://www.vice.com/read/the-totalitarian-buddhist-who-beat-...
  • elsurudo 10y ago
    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.
    • arethuza 10y ago
      That's often because the grew by incorporating existing villages and small towns into the larger city.
• treeform 10y ago
  Barcelona's block layout comes to mind: http://projectivecities.aaschool.ac.uk/portfolio/yuwei-wang-barcelona-block-city/ http://projectivecities.aaschool.ac.uk/portfolio/yuwei-wang-...
• naveen99 10y ago
  Hacker 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.
  • naveen99 10y ago
    There is disney's reedy creek district in Florida. http://articles.sun-sentinel.com/1987-02-23/business/8701120154_1_reedy-creek-disney-property-disney-spokesman http://articles.sun-sentinel.com/1987-02-23/business/8701120...
• kylec 10y ago
  What about rethinking to what extent large cities are and will still be necessary? Thanks to the internet, lots of jobs that required going into an office every day can now be done remotely. As collaboration tools get better, I'm hoping that companies will become more receptive to allowing this. The company I work at in SV does not allow remote work, but I've heard from a few of my teammates that if it did, they would seriously consider moving away from the area to someplace with a much lower cost of living. I would too.
  • rm_-rf_slash 10y ago
    When cars and planes drive themselves and 3D printers are as good as Star Trek replicators, then maybe cities will be unnecessary. Until then, you will always need to live near the things you want - including friends.
    • kylec 10y ago
      I don't really see what self-driving cars and plans and 3D printers have to do with it. You can have friends and be near everything you need in a small town of 20,000 people. They have grocery stores and hospitals and pretty much anything else you'd need. Amazon will still deliver in 2 days with Prime shipping. What I'd like to avoid are the large financial costs associated with living in a large city. I'd also like to avoid other issues caused by large population density, like the fact that traffic is always backed up getting to the ocean on the weekends here. Also, people like me leaving cities would mean that there would be less demand for housing, less traffic, etc for the people that want to stay. Everyone wins.
      • rm_-rf_slash 10y ago
        If that's what you want and you don't mind shit weather, move to Ithaca, NY. I saw what the Valley had to offer when I worked at Apple and came away with the same grumblings you mention. Upstate New York in general is a great place for the kind of living you describe. For not much money you could buy - or even better build - a home in the middle of nowhere with a 30 minute drive into town with very light traffic most times of the day. Like you say, everything you need is relatively close, and Amazon Prime still delivers in 2 days. You just have to put up with the weather.
• fudged71 10y ago
  Every time I travel to silicon valley I'm amazed how difficult it can be to find electricity. It may seem like a small thing, but I think accessible electrical outlets should be as important as public water fountains. Similarly, water fountains and bathrooms should be accessible! I'm really fascinated by the way that Dubai is designed in terms of industry-specific districts, it gives you scalability but also network effects and serendipity. They also have overground driverless trains. Masdar city nearby has an underground driverless car system and sustainable architecture, a very attractive model.
• jakozaur 10y ago
  It is surprise to me, that though a lot of technologies seem to make location less important (internet, video conferences, online stores, better transportation), ppl ten to cluster around few hub cities. Importance of network effect is increasing faster than advantage of tech allowing distributed work. I wonder if this trend will be permanent or will shift at some point.
  • humanrebar 10y ago
    > Importance of network effect is increasing faster than advantage of tech allowing distributed work. Or wealth is consolidating, and the network effects are about money and wealth, not about communication and cooperation per se.
• bllguo 10y ago
  Something I've always thought about is smart traffic. If nobody else is at the intersection I shouldn't have to wait at the red light. On a large scale the economic benefits would be amazing - faster transport, higher car mileages across the board (fewer hard stops for cars), increased efficiency, happier people.
• ghobs91 10y ago
  I've extensively researched the concepts of hub and spoke models for cities and town centers for suburbs. I think a very effective way to design cities is to have the following: 1. A densely developed urban core that sets quotas on what % of apartments must fall within whatever's considered middle class pricing, as well as a quota for a minimum % of apartments that must be for purchase rather than rent. The former prevents cities from being turned into ghost town banks for the wealthy to park their money, and the latter gives citizens an opportunity to build equity if they desire/have the means to. Also, there should only he height restrictions on buildings if there's a structural reason for it, not because "it'll ruin the character of the area" or "my views of Central Park will be blocked". 2. Suburbs should be a healthy middle ground between densely developed and suburban sprawl. Living in houses the size of a box isn't appealing, but neither are mcmansions that are 15-20 minutes to the nearest retail center. The concept of strip malls and office parks should be completely scrapped in favor of walkable town centers with multi level parking garages on the perimeters. These town centers should be mixed use, so that people have plenty of options to work, shop, entertain themselves, dine, etc within a reasonable distance from their homes. The town center layout promotes a sense of community and socializing. Suburban towns should have a size limit, and each town should have a light rail station that runs alongside the main road/highway so citizens can easily commute between towns and to the city center without traffic congestion. When a town becomes fully developed, rather than progressively building smaller and smaller houses to increase density, a new town should be built at the adjacent free land with its own town center. This results in the hub and spoke model of suburb towns that are mini cities surrounding the main urban core, rather than sprawled bedroom communities that have no economy of their own. 3. Between each city should be a low cost and high speed transit option like a maglev or Hyperloop, so that citizens have the option to live in neighboring cities and commute to work in a reasonable amount of time. 4. Zoning should be designed to quickly and easily adapt to growing cities, so that what is zoned as suburban can change to urban as a city grows, and the perimeter of suburbs would grow to account for that. This would occur to a certain limit, and when a city reaches a max size where sprawl is a problem, a new planned city must be built in an optimal place in the state to start the cycle all over again. In addition to underground subway systems for urban cores and light rail for suburbs, there should be uber style shared car/bus services to fill in the gaps. As for energy, there should be a heavy emphasis on wind, solar, and nuclear. The role of regulations should be quality of life protection, not special interests. That means a reasonable minimum square footage for apartments and houses depending on the number of bedrooms, but not a limit on tower heights.
• ph0rque 10y ago
  The trend has been people moving to cities. However, I wonder if that will be reversing any time soon, with people moving out of (large) cities and into smaller towns?
  • ghaff 10y ago
    The supposed "millennials are moving to cities" trend isn't the universal trend it's often made out to be. The actual trend seems to be more along the lines of college-educated 25-34 year-olds are moving to a small number of mostly coastal urban locations. http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-millennials-are-less-urban-than-you-think/ http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-millennials-are-less...
• kafkaesq 10y ago
  The biggest gap in this discussion, thus far -- the elephant in the room, as it were: there's almost no room left on the planet for building "new" cities of any significant scale (meaning of course not just the meticulously designed city core; but the whole meta-city that will grow around it -- with suburbs, transportation links, etc). Sure, there might be a few -- a very small few -- bona-fide brown zones here and there that are virtually depopulated and where one can more or less from scratch. But by and large, and realistically speaking, the real question is how to redesign and rethinking existing cities. Which conceptually speaking is a much harder question. The other elephant in the room is the inevitability of massive forced dislocations of existing populations in these "failed" urban areas (or so they will be declared) -- perhaps on a scale never seen before (that is, outside of modern China or the early decades of the Soviet Union). And BTW, there's no getting around the term "forced" here -- no matter how you try to incentivize it, some people just aren't gonna want to uproot themselves (and destroy the organic connections they have made with others in their "failed" or "poorly optimized" communities) for the sake your grand vision, slide decks and TED talks. It's either that -- or build out in the jungle somewhere. But of course (with the earnest suport of a certain very famous YC board member) we've been down that route already: Honduras Shrugged http://www.economist.com/node/21541391
  • massysett 10y ago
    New cities aren't going to happen, but it's not a space issue. There's plenty of space in the middle of Kansas.
    • rocky1138 10y ago
      New cities are happening, just not in North America. Consider Astana (Kazakhstan), Ordos (China), Shenzhen (China). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astana https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astana https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordos_City https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordos_City
      • kafkaesq 10y ago
        Which is precisely my point -- you might want to look at how the regimes like those in charge of Kazakhstan and China operate. In particular, as to how they "leverage" their populations complying with these grand futuristic visions. Not to mention the... ironic outcomes of some of these spectacular initiatives: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-18646243 http://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-18646243
• CuriouslyC 10y ago
  It is a mistake to assume that because cities were the most efficient way to organize people in the past, they will continue to be so in the future. Given the trend towards remote work, socialization and shopping, there is a lot less of a need for density. Instead of asking "how can we make the city of the future" we should instead be asking "how can we create a habitats for humans that promote happiness, health, harmony, and do so in a way that is economically and ecologically sustainable." I believe that people are happier when they have a sense of connection and belonging in their community. Cities discourage this. I believe people are happier in environments that feel more natural and alive. Cities discourage this too. I believe people are happier when they have a sense of personal space and privacy. Another mark against cities. Cities make efficient use of space, density lets you produce buildings cheaply in terms of living units/dollar, and they are more efficient in terms of distributing goods and services. I believe that alternative building techniques can mitigate much of the cost of reduced density. I also believe that by integrating permaculture based agriculture into the landscape design you can mitigate some of the efficiency losses in terms of distributing the most important good - food. You could further reduce the distributional inefficiency using a system of neighborhood based co-ops - I'm sure people would adapt to quite easily to the reduced selection of snacks and processed food.
  • TillE 10y ago
    > environments I live about three minutes away from a large park near the center of a large city. It's a great place to walk around. When I lived in American suburbia, it was nothing but houses unless you drove a few miles down a main road.
    • zardo 10y ago
      This commentor is definitely not proposing traditional suburbs. Integrated permaculture would mean living in an edible garden for one. I agree that we need more local control of food, the American diet is killing and sickening more people than tobacco ever did. The incentive is to hack our brains with foods that activate reward centers, rather than helping people to live healthy lives through nutritious food.
  • 10y ago
• sgentle 10y ago
  Understandably, I'm sure there will be a lot of focus on physical and transport infrastructure. I think it would be worth also looking into ways to transform the social infrastructure of a city. I'm sure most people would agree that cities tend to bring a certain degree of isolation. Once upon a time people would know everyone in their town, but in a large city today it's pretty rare to even know your neighbours. Of course, in the year 20x6 we have lots of social infrastructure, but mostly it starts with an assumption that you want to choose who you interact with. But what if you shouldn't always choose? In the wake of the Brexit some commentators have rightly asked "how didn't I know anybody voting leave?" For better or worse, we are stuck in proximity to a certain number of people, maybe people quite different to us. In cities, we tend to ignore that as much as we can, and our social tools follow suit. Could we build new ones that instead embrace this restriction and turn it into a good thing? Could we bring a sense of local community back to our cities? Could we build slightly-out-of-your-comfort-zone-as-a-service and pierce the filter bubble at least a little? I'm not sure, but I think it's worth finding out!
  • rm_-rf_slash 10y ago
    I'm rather dismal on the ability for city planning to positively affect communities - or to even work as planned in the first place. Look at the original grid plan for Philadelphia to see what I mean. I think the "know your neighbors" problem is a lot bigger than city planning. It has a lot to do with our society itself. For example, it is assumed in America that one must eventually own their own home to achieve the "American Dream." The implication is that if one just has a house, a car, and a job that pays well, that person doesn't even need other people. They can get all their entertainment from the Internet and all of their food and other goods delivered. It is an efficient system, but it lacks heart. A change in city design will only scratch the surface of the isolating world we live in.
    • brett40324 10y ago
      Yes, thank you. I moved from Chicagoish midwest to central Kentucky two years ago, and everyday I still experience cultural shock at the overall compassion and friendliness of most people here. True community-based values and socioeconomic success start with human goodness toward one another, not statistical or engineering research.
• devinhelton 10y ago
  The list of high-level questions is missing the most important question: how do you bootstrap the economy? There are plenty of awesome locations in the United States that have cheap land with great geography, but that have no jobs. The reason people flock to cities with such insane real estate prices is because that is where the jobs are. This is where Y Combinator could play an interesting role though. Could you imagine two or three San Francisco tech companies all uprooting at once to a brand new city, where costs might be half the cost in San Francisco? And at the same time, maybe you could convince a couple other big tech companies to open satellite offices in the new city. To get more economic diversity, perhaps the startup-city could also buy up established, small-scale manufactures and move them to the city. Still -- these kind of moves would be very, very hard, as it would be very difficult and risky to try to uproot enough employees to actually make the move successful. Any other ideas for how the economy could be bootstrapped?
  • sama 10y ago
    It would be better to move a few hundred startups. Startups sometimes grow up to be big tech companies, and it's much easier to move tiny companies. We could, uh, help with that.
    • devinhelton 10y ago
      Problem with moving startups is that they are more fragile, and need every edge to beat out their peers. So if two startups are competing, and startup A is in the middle of nowhere, and startup B is connected to a pool of talent, advice, potential early customers, early adopters, and investors, then startup B has a huge advantage. That was PG's main reasoning for why YC startups should all move to the valley, right? That said -- perhaps you guys have the brand and connections now where you could nurture the talent/advice/investment ecosystem in an entirely new location. If so, that could be a really great thing.
    • kapitza 10y ago
      I thought this wasn't a "libertarian utopia for techies?" When you look at how ordinary people choose a city to live in, the most important variable is who else gets to live there. Everything else is a rounding error. Boulder, Colorado is a beautiful little city. Its population is roughly the same as that of West Point, Liberia. Compare a city with the legislation and architecture of West Point, but the population of Boulder, to a city with the legislation and architecture of Boulder, and the population of West Point. Which would you rather live in? When you treat human beings as generic, interchangeable parts, you're missing the first lesson of Christopher Alexander's approach: design real solutions for real people. You probably wouldn't fund a YC company that assumed the world consisted of 6 billion interchangeable customers.
• 20years 10y ago
  Have 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.
  • HillaryBriss 10y ago
    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-hsiehs-350-million-gamble-on-las-vegas/#318463146184 http://www.forbes.com/sites/freeenterprise/2015/08/03/tony-h...
• rjett 10y ago
  With many people having the ability now to work remotely, I've seen a big influx into small to mid-sized cities in the last decade. Anecdotally, I moved to Charleston, SC five years ago and since I've been here, I've seen a huge influx of people moving here for quality of life reasons. Charleston is one of the fastest growing cities in the US for this reason. There are opportunities here as well, with larger companies like Boeing shifting a lot of their operations here as well, but more than anything, I think people want to be here because it's a place that offers an incredible food and beverage scene, access to beaches, and a city bathed in history and architectural significance. It's bikeable, walkable, and practically every address could be copied onto a postcard. Most importantly, in my opinion, the influx of people here are younger, optimistic, entrepreneurial types and it's so easy to get to know others in town and to feed off that energy. Roll in cheap, fast direct flights ($100-200 round trip) to almost any northern city (DC, NYC, Boston) and that really adds to accessibility from other cities. I've been doorstep to doorstep from Charleston to my friend's apartment in Brooklyn Heights in under 3 hours. </advertisement> That said, I've lived in quite a few cities and the most important aspect of anywhere I've lived is the type of people I'm comfortable surrounding myself with. I think that's fairly true for anyone who has job mobility. After that everyone places different weight on a host of other factors (access to fast/efficient transport, culture, outdoors activities, sustainable utility supplies, weather, food, demographics, proximity to family, local school quality, etc, etc).
  • convoisofftopic 10y ago
    "I've been doorstep to doorstep from Charleston to my friend's apartment in Brooklyn Heights in under 3 hours" How? Flight is 1 hour 50 minutes (according to Google), and a cab from JFK to BK heights is still 30 minutes if you hit zero traffic. Plus there is a security line to get through at the Charleston end of things. Even if the universe aligns in your favor I'd be surprised if you hit under 3 hours door to door.
• mjmahone17 10y ago
  Some options for doing this: 1. Bootstrap an existing "small town" with access to lots of resources. This has advantages, such as potentially existing highway connections, water infrastructure, sewage, school districts, etc. The downside here is that the existing community would have to buy-in, and agree to be part of your experiment. This is not a small feat. Additionally, you need to convince a large group of people to move there. 2. Build from scratch. Here, the biggest problem will likely be building out the infrastructure (such as roads, water treatment, schools, etc.), convincing people to move to the "middle of nowhere", and finding an affordable area that has access to enough clean water, that isn't already somewhat built up. I'm from Arizona, and have driven through much of the state: even as a large Western state with lots of available land, I have a pretty hard time thinking of potential areas that aren't already semi-developed, unless you want to constantly fight surrounding municipalities for water rights. 3. "City within a City". Basically, find an under-developed suburb or area of a major city. In Phoenix, this might be the town of Queen Creek, or if you were OK displacing a multi-generation, poor community in the heart of the metro, Guadalupe. Here, you get all the advantages of the small-town takeover, with the added bonus that your community is still close to a central hub of employment and existing options. The disadvantage is that you now have to deal with regional politics, and face backlash (potentially) for displacing existing residents. You also don't get to define your main roads and police system much (due to county-level planning). But, depending on what you mean by "city", you might be able to grab 2-4 square-mile-blocks that are not yet incorporated into a large city, and start developing almost immediately (as there's already water/electricity access nearby, and there is likely latent local demand for the kind of development you want to build).
• nekopa 10y ago
  Three words: Christoper Woflgang Alexander.
  • carapace 10y ago
    Yes, thank you! I came to post exactly this. ;-) "Pattern Language" anyone? -and- "Wherever you are in the world, if you are intent on planning and building a thriving neighborhood, this website is for you." ~ http://www.livingneighborhoods.org/ht-0/bln-exp.htm http://www.livingneighborhoods.org/ht-0/bln-exp.htm Please PLEASE integrate this stuff into what you're doing.
• koolba 10y ago
  From the footnotes: > [1] Two out of three people will live in cities by 2050 - an influx of 2.5 billion new urbanites. How much of that is by choice? I know quite a few people that wouldn't give up their rural lives willingly.
  • robohamburger 10y ago
    Reluctantly moved away from the city to a rural college town while my wife is going to vet school and I have come to appreciate the benefits from living in a smaller town and teleworking. It does seem like a lot of thinking about cities is very one sided. People clearly have an axe to grind with car culture, suburbs and endless commutes which I don't blame them for. I think to fix how live we have to think beyond cities.
  • tlrobinson 10y ago
    Also where does this prediction even come from? I don't think you can make extrapolations for 1/3 of the world's population.
• tmaly 10y ago
  For 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 systems. I think a cities climate is always important to consider. If you want to have bike paths, but you get a ton of snow in the winter, how do you deal with that? At my university up in Rochester NY we had tunnels under ground connecting the buildings. This helped a lot with the brutal winters.
  • 8note 10y ago
    bikes in summer, cross country skis in winter
    • tmaly 10y ago
      what do you do with the young kids in the winter?
      • hx87 10y ago
        Tow them on a sled?
      • jessaustin 10y ago
        Catapults and trapeze nets. Actually that would be pretty sweet in the summer too.
  • elsurudo 10y ago
    IMO Toronto's system is not so great, especially for a city its size. A city that size (especially one with as much congestion!) should have a comprehensive subway system (see Barcelona for a great example), not a measly 2.5 lines. Sure, downtown the transit is pretty good, but move outside of that, and things aren't all there.
    • 10y ago
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• zw123456 10y ago
  This is a fantastic idea, I would expect no less from YC. A couple of thoughts I have off the top of my head: 1. Design with hyper-loop in mind from day one. 2. Easy access right of way for utilities, most cities bury everything which is silly, there should be an easily accessed common right of way so that fiber, water sewer etc. can be easily accessed for upgrades or repair without having to dig up the streets. 3. Consider driverless cars only, and electric only. Include bicycle or non-car personal vehicle pass ways that are safe. 4. Plan for green spaces with point source food production in mind. 5. Design in space for point source energy production, solar etc. Most of these are pretty obvious. The other thing that I have thought about is the parallels to networks, if you had a high speed low energy use hyper-loop that could function like a ring topology with small low rise communities around the ring. For quality of life a lot of people enjoy the small community feel (think palo alto) I live in Seattle in a small sub-community (Kirkland) that has that walk around the neighborhood to all services feel to it and I feel that it adds a lot to my quality of life.
  • dragonwriter 10y ago
    > Easy access right of way for utilities, most cities bury everything which is silly, there should be an easily accessed common right of way so that fiber, water sewer etc. can be easily accessed for upgrades or repair without having to dig up the streets. For cable/fiber/telephone/power, overhead was common, though burying is replacing it. But what's the alternative to burying for water and sewer? I suppose in principle you could go overhead with that, too, but that seems...unappealing in a wide number of reasons.
    • zw123456 10y ago
      Some municipalities have put in sidewalks that have removable slabs at each corner or more often.
      • dragonwriter 10y ago
        That's a way of making buying more convenient, it's still burying.
• rwhitman 10y ago
  One thing that really needs to be addressed is how to retrofit the glut of car-centric developments designed in the late 20th century, to better conform with the growing sense of value we have in walkable communities today. Navigating the minefield of local zoning politics to try and convert car-centric stripmall mcmansion suburbs into tighter village-like communities will be an enduring puzzle in America at least. There's also an interesting question in what happens when we cluster too many people into one city based around talent markets for knowledge work. The Brexit vote in England may well be partially the result of the fact that the younger workforce in the UK was all stuffed into London due to the high concentration of knowledge work employers there, preventing newer ideas and values from being evenly applied across more of the country. You see the same thing happening in the USA, with near total dominance of one political ideology in the larger coastal cities and dominance of the other in places further afield. We're seeing a reversion to city-states in this regard, and with the distributed nature of knowledge work, you'd expect to see the opposite happening...
  • zanny 10y ago
    With distributed knowledge work and freedom of movement people want to be around their peers and like minded than the opposite. Thus they flood liberal cities.
• riprowan 10y ago
  Most cities succeed or fail based on their governance. Great ideas are awesome - I love them - but governance is where the rubber meets the road. Solve governance, solve everything.
• baybal2 10y ago
  Things that The West can learn from The East: Russia/Eastern Europe: 1. Free-for-all, mixed zoning. You own the land, build whatever you want as long as it's not a munitions factory (Most of Russia, Kazakhstan) 2. Market driven, privatized public transit (Most of Eastern Europe) 3. Small city blocks that let throught traffic. 4. Market controlled access to distric heating/cooling (Yakutsk an extreme example of privatized district level utilities) 5. Higher standards for building's energy efficiency (adopted across the former Soviet block) 6. Learn how to build decent "serially produced" housing for cheap (Ekaterinburg) 7. More traffic light controlled "turn right on red" signals - an easy way to increase traffic thoughtput by double digits (former Soviet block countries) Asia: 1. learn how to build cities that are dense, but still livable (Hongkong, Singapore, Macau, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Tokyo) 2. Better construction technology and materials. MgO board, light/cellular concretes, thermal stops in slabs, automated, computerized armature prefabrication, etc (Most of People Republic if China, South Korea, Russian Far East) 3. Bus rapid transit, and how to make cheap public transport really work (Guangzhou) 4. Traffic laws that are two-wheeler friendly (Taipei, whole of Japan) 5. Public daycare and early primary education (Tokyo) 6. "Public housing for regular people" (Hongkong, Singapore) 7. Incentivize people to buy smaller cars, or use transit (Tokyo) 8. Double deck, or multi leve streets (Shenzhen, Guangzhou, Chicago)
  • yyyuuu 10y ago
    Some specific names of the cities you had in mind would be really helpful.
    • markplindsay 10y ago
      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.
      • baybal2 10y ago
        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
• aestetix 10y ago
  I'm going to get downvoted for this, but here is a sentence by sentence response for as far as I could take it: Leave it to engineers who are detached from emotion and any sense of duty towards other people to act with a guilt complex to try to remake society in a way so they don’t feel so bad about fucking over everyone who is not a tech worker. “We want to study building new, better cities.” How about a profile of existing cities, criticisms of them, and specific ways they can be improved? Robert Caro, Jane Jacobs, Maria Montessori, and the authors of Suburban Nation all have things they might offer… I’m also a big fan of Frank Lloyd Wright, but his wife might not agree :) “The world is full of people who aren’t realizing their potential in large part because their cities don’t provide the opportunities and living conditions necessary for success. A high leverage way to improve our world is to unleash this massive potential by making better cities.” The two key words from this paragraph are “potential” and “success.” Let’s set aside the booklong discussion on who is the arbiter of these things, and focus on what qualifies as “success.” Given that this comes from one of the Sand Hill Road Gordon Gecko wannabes, it’s pretty clear what they actually mean is “maximize your return.” “The need for new supply continues to increase significantly [1].” Is that why they are encouraging automating non-tech workers jobs out of existings, and use a bastardized interpretation of Milton Friedman’s basic income as a crutch to explain it all away? “Many constraints related to where cities should be located (e.g. near rivers for trade) have changed. We now have major technologies such as smart grids, autonomous vehicles, etc.” In other words, the technologies that are destroying non-tech worker jobs are making life way easier for the rich and powerful. “The internet itself allows for participation never before possible.” Substitute “participation” for “exploitation” and you get the same idea. See internet.org. “Also, housing prices in many cities have become untenable and we need more housing in places people want to live.” Yes, and why has this happened? The same people who are praising all the technologies that remove our need for dependence on geography are also demanding you relocate your entire life to a central location, driving out the people who were living there before, and destroying any semblance of culture. “Some existing cities will get bigger and there’s important work being done by smart people to improve them.” Empty statement detected. More input required. Also, how will population get larger when the non-tech worker class is driven into poverty and/or basic income, and it does not make economy sense for everyone else to have families? “We also think it’s possible to do amazing things given a blank slate. Our goal is to design the best possible city given the constraints of existing laws.” Is there such a thing as a “blank slate”? There are a list of historical events I can give you which have the same assumption, but the end result was less than desirable. I have to stop there. The rest of this piece is unreadable, and loaded with unchecked arrogance. It seems like another step in YC’s realization that they are slowly but surely helping to completely fuck the economy, and are trying to dig their way out of it, and hopefully get a few good social graces along the way.
• ilaksh 10y ago
  See http://tinyvillages.org http://tinyvillages.org. Also, new cities' rules should be automated and software driven. See iot, decentralization technologies, etc.
• massysett 10y ago
  "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 pretty short. However, if you want to have a predictable body of law administered fairly, it's going to take a lot more than 100 pages. Even the Ten Commandments aren't that simple when it's time for practical application. You can simply decide on a case-by-case basis and not write down what you do, and then it will fit in 100 pages. But if you give notice to others about what your decisions are, and you are bound by previous decisions...well, that sounds a lot like a common-law system. Decisions in such a system are going to exceed 100 pages. These things aren't as simple as it seems...there are good reasons why the Supreme Court once considered what it meant to "use" a firearm.
  • toomuchtodo 10y ago
    I disagree. If you site the city in the US, you can use the existing governance models. Most of the what YC wants to do can be done with local zoning ordinances (tied together with restricted deeds or community lands trusts/co-ops), with the populace (hypothetically made up of citizens who are conducive to this experiment) voting at the local city government level. This is not new territory. They're building a master planned community (with what you might consider an HOA on steroids), and based on their requirements, I think they going to do an incredible job compared to your average real estate developer.
    • massysett 10y ago
      Local zoning ordinances don't fit in 100 pages. The huge body of real estate law that is necessary to give force to restricted deeds doesn't fit in 100 pages. Maybe they mean their 100 pages looks something like "The Law of the City of Newcity is identical to the Law of Dallas, with the following changes:"? Well, the law of Dallas does not fit in 100 pages. Law is complicated because we have built a complicated society. This cannot be willed away by talking about 100 pages.
• tedmiston 10y ago
  Is this completely independent of the Basic Income project?
• jballanc 10y ago
  Assuming that you can avoid the problems of "old" cities by simply starting out with the right "new" city is like assuming that you can avoid scaling a web application by starting from the very beginning building micro-services. The "new" city that plans for being big will never attract enough people to grow much like businesses that start with micro-services will never be agile enough to find market fit and grow to actually need micro-services. Money and effort would be better spent looking at and solving the plight of cities that have seen hockey-stick growth. Then you could take those lessons and watch for the next city at the start of a population boom and ensure that it grows in the "right" way.
  • elsurudo 10y ago
    Good thoughts. Riffing off of this, you can view successful-but-dysfnuctional cities as having what is an analogue of technical debt.
• dirtae 10y ago
  I hope that as part of this, some investigation will be done into pluralistic representation and better voting systems (e.g., Condorcet method[1]). If there is a minority viewpoint that can get, say 20% of the vote, but cannot get a majority in any given district, it would be nice if that minority viewpoint could still get some representation on city council, etc., as opposed to "winner take all" type of elections. (I'd like to see this at the state and national levels too, but that's a big task, so starting at the city level seems best.) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condorcet_method https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condorcet_method
• tedmiston 10y ago
  Public transit in Portland is incredible. I hope that's included in part of the study.
• Dwolb 10y ago
  Oh man this is such a hard problem. There are many 'smart cities' built in EMEA region e.g. [1] that just haven't lived up to their hype. It's tough because we don't yet know what to solve for. We don't understand the nature of city creation, what attracts people, how culture gets formed, how businesses and leisure activities pop-up. We don't know if things we perceive as problems are constraints that make the city thrive in unknown ways. We don't know if there's a significant amount of path dependency and sequencing that's appropriate. To me, cities feel man-made because they're made of concrete, steel, and other metals. But they're a lot like an organism, competing against other cities and only keeping features which make them continue to thrive. Super cool topic though and great on YC for opening research on the topic rather than proposing solutions. Best of luck to the team. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Songdo_International_Business_District https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Songdo_International_Busines...
• spectrum1234 10y ago
  Reminds me of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hy4QjmKzF1c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hy4QjmKzF1c
• nxzero 10y ago
  Cities of the future will be built for machines, not people.
• wangchow 10y ago
  Instead of paying taxes people should be forced to do mandatory community service. That will help close the wealth-gap and force wealthy people to intermix with the working class.
  • googletazer 10y ago
    Sounds a lot like sending engineers to potato fields to collect potatoes and get to know the country side. I don't know a single instance of where compulsory "mixing" of wealthy and less wealthy yielded a decrease in the wealth gap.
    • Turing_Machine 10y ago
      Yep. Both Mao and Pol Pot thought sending the intellectual class out to do forced manual labor was a wonderful idea. It didn't end well.
  • rtkwe 10y ago
    That's really unworkable. There are some services you could replace with 'volunteer' community services but you still need money for roads, water/sewer/ police, fire services, and most of what a city generally provides that can't just be staffed with people working their community service stints.
• caublestone 10y ago
  We asked this question as a case study in interviews. It's interesting to see what people believe is most important to citizens and how they optimize around it. We found it takes a quality full stack systems engineer who can communicate people's needs and a rational large scale solution in 30 minutes.
• Erwin 10y ago
  The Monocle is a cosmopolitan magazine with short features on just this sort of thing. Their journalists constantly travel around the world and evaluate schools, public services, transportation etc., publish a yearly top lists of cities etc. They've collected some of their features in books: here's their latest, "How to make a nation": https://monocle.com/film/affairs/monocle-preview-how-to-make-a-nation/ https://monocle.com/film/affairs/monocle-preview-how-to-make...
• inglondon 10y ago
  These are some of the things that come to mind: - Prioritise streets for walking / light autonomous electric vehicle use - Build underground streets or lanes that are designed for an autonomous delivery network. Getting rid of trucks and other large vehicles from the ground level road network will greatly easy congestion - Zone for indoor / vertical farms for delivery to local stores - Mix residential and commercial zones to allow for short commute times for residents - Metro to speed up longer trips within the city Utopian, yes. Impossible, no. [Edited for formatting]
• narrator 10y ago
  I think the main thing that a city needs to be special is to have strong opinions on city related things, like the design of public spaces and what the cultural identity of the place is. Otherwise, things end up as a generic strip mall sprawl. When a city takes an interest in art and design and a community focuses on expressing the cultural identity of its inhabitants, it can gain an identity and become more than just a collection of people who just happen to live there for economic reasons.
• jacobn 10y ago
  Current planning has a "star-topology": urban office core with rings of gradually less dense, gradually more residential development. This creates a natural transportation bottleneck at the center, and creates areas that are "alive" during only one part of the day, which makes it hard for local merchants to thrive (standard Jane Jacobs). We can define a "balanced area" as having roughly balanced proportions of residential, office, retail, schools, hospitals, (light) industry, etc. The effect of an area being balanced is that the net flow of people across the areas boundary at any given time of day should be roughly zero - if you live there but work elsewhere, then you need to commute out, but someone else needs to commute in to fill the job in the area that you're not occupying. Same for other uses. "Area" could be anything from neighborhood, to part of city, to city, to region, to state - the analysis is roughly the same regardless of geographical zoom level. Hypothesis: you can create a scalable city by constructing it around balanced areas. Scalable = can expand indefinitely-ish. While not precisely true, it's probably a lot more true than for the current star topology. So what about public transit? The reason we have the star is after all (in part) to make it possible to use public transit. Answer: increase density and switch from star to grid. The star is hopelessly plagued by having everyone going in the same direction at the same time. This means that we're using roughly half (60%?) of our transportation capacity at any given time. If we build our cities as dense, balanced cells (= 0.25-0.5-1 mile by 0.25-5-1 mile chunks, depending on density and other design criteria), with grid-oriented mass transit (buses, light rail, subways, whichever, all of the above), then we will naturally double our transit capacity (people going in both directions at all times), and shorten the distance people need to travel to get where they're going. The relevant metric isn't so much "miles per hour" as [density of people]*[linear distance per unit time]. Depending on the level of density you're willing to go to, different tiers of public transit will unlock: at lower densities, you can only really rationalize buses. Medium density = light rail, high density = subway. Some additional points: - Zero surface parking, but plenty of drop off / pick up spots. - Organize the balanced cells around center squares, which are pedestrian only. Squares are focused around restaurants / retail / commerce; they're not parks, though they would likely have some trees. Make it the primary public space. Regulate building heights such that there's limited shading of the square. - Smaller, pedestrian-friendly blocks around the center squares: stop signs for cars, no thoroughfares to other cells. - Variable height zoning: stop making neighborhoods uniform. Allow vastly different heights within short distances of each other. This will create both views and natural variation in land and housing value = naturally more inclusive, and much more interesting. - Turn the towers: don't build two 700' towers across the street from each other. Instead, space them out more, and rotate them so the tower doesn't face the street, to create longer corridors of views from the tower windows, and an "airiness" in the city. - Between cells: focus more on surface traffic, limit pedestrian use. Yes, this will create "islands between traffic corridors". That's ok - zone light industry, gas/recharge stations, parking structures and office towers on these corridors and zero residential. - If you're willing to up-zone and build as of right, you can start lower density (= buses), then as the city grows, you can up-zone and graduate to light rail, and then if you go truly dense, retrofit a subway. If it's in the city charter from the start you might be able to fight off the inevitable nimbyism. - A pragmatic sister project to the study of cities would be the study of how to make public transit projects not cost so much. Taboo subject, and perhaps "boring", but super-important. If it cost half as much, would we have four times as much of it?
• pasbesoin 10y ago
  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 -- all day long. In an unincorporated community where there was no noise ordinance and the county sheriff left it up to the individuals to sort things out. Another necessary component: All you "libertarian", laissez faire people need to decide whether you are really, fully behind that idea. In which case, I would have no problem going across the street and putting a slug in each of their heads. If I'm going to solve a problem, then once and for all. Otherwise, come up with some effective noise control ordinances -- AND EFFECTIVE, PRO-ACTIVE ENFORCEMENT AND PENALTIES. So... if you want "new cities" including "denser" living, fix your fucking noise problems.
  • gre 10y ago
    Light pollution is big for me too. I want to be able to see the stars and the Milky Way at night, why not? It's tangential to noise pollution.
    • zephjc 10y ago
      I think the trick to that is to get rid of sprawl. You have a lot of people thinly spread out but still emitting light pollution. Move people in closer to city/town/village centers, out of meandering suburbs, you move the light pollution to centralized locations, and are able to leave more surrounding land for rural uses with little to no light pollution.
  • zephjc 10y ago
    > Soundproofing US houses and apartments seem notoriously poorly insulated when it comes to sound. As you say, its a small extra cost, and it can allow for more people in an area (even having connected townhouses or apartments) without having to deal with neighbor noises. If you can fit 3x the number of houses into a lot and they have good sound insulation, you're producing a lot more revenue from the house sales as well as generating potentially much tax revenue for that area of land (depending on how property taxing is done there)
• probably_wrong 10y ago
  I would take two main points from Berlin as a case study: * Low car ownership: I know exactly one person who owns a car. And everyone I know (including this person) uses the train/subway/bus system. If you really need a car for a couple days, it is cheap to rent one. * Rent control: while not perfect, the fight to keep berliners in the city center is an interesting example of which policies are put in use to fight rising rent and gentrification. (Short answer due to browser crash. Firefox developers, your android browser sucks)
• baron816 10y ago
  Holy crap, I'm so glad YC is thinking about this topic. I have often tried to start a thread here on this topic. I'd love to be part of this in any way possible. Triumph of the City by Edward Glaeser should definitely be at the top of the reading list for all those involved. Anyway, the last major city to be founded in North America was Las Vegas in 1911. I think it's about time we think about starting a new one. College campuses are pretty good prototypes of what a modern city should look like, in my opinion. You should have lots of public space and minimal private transportation. The only difference would be much more density and vertical construction.
• internaut 10y ago
  May I say: My intuition is that starting totally from the absolute beginning won't work. Relatively recently (in city building terms) a black community that tried to do that, I remember listening to 99% Invisible about it, and it didn't work out. http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/soul-city/ http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/soul-city/ It is better to be an adjunct to an existing city near a river or a seaport. Look at China and how they have Special Economic Zones, they are connected to existing cities, right? I know China builds cities from the start but with their scale they're probably a special case and besides it's thought to be more organic the way they do it (e.g. they don't build some infrastructure like footpaths until they see evidence of how real people use the existing environment). That's a special case though, nobody else apart from India has that kind of scale.
• eslaught 10y ago
  Perhaps this is just me, but I just don't like cities. I agree that the things listed in this article need fixing, but I also feel like they're missing the point. I grew up in a small college town (in a house), but have spent most of my adult life living in cities (in appartments). Somehow, those cities have never felt like home to me. I've always felt like I was missing something. Privacy is not quite the right word. Perhaps solitude. Growing up, I could easily find space to be alone (and I mean, truly alone) . In my current city, there is literally no way to do that. My appartment is cramped, and low sound isolation means I can hear the neighbors. If I go outside to the park, there is approximately a person per couple thousand square meters (and the noise carries further). If I go to a coffee shop or other public place, it's even more crowded. I can go to the mountains, but it's about an hour by car to get there, and even then there are people around. (Unsurprisingly, the further I have to go, the less likely I am to do it on a regular basis.) This inability to have space has lead to a sort of mild chronic anxiety. Suffice it to say, I don't like cities, but I'm stuck where I am for other reasons. So I can't exactly say I'm eager for even more population density. Some of the problems above could possibly be mitigated (e.g. better sound isolation), but the broader issues of how much personal space is really necessary just seems like it's not on people's radars. Is this just not an issue for other people? Am I crazy? I hope that any discussion of better cities includes this as a component.
  • collyw 10y ago
    I can see the good and bad in both. I grew up in suburbia, as a result I hate commuting as its just such a waste of time. I love the mountains and spent a few year living in fairly small towns. But there are no jobs there (for a techie, and remote working is hard to find), and night life is limited. Now in a dense city and I have tons of options for going out, but like you say no space, and a hassle to do any outdoor sports in comparison.
  • hx87 10y ago
    Think about it this way: in an area with a given population, raising the population density of a subset of that area lowers it somewhere else, and you can live in that somewhere else. That being said, better sound insulation in walls, windows, ceilings and floors is absolutely necessary in most cities, and that is where regulations should focus on (with limited or no grandfathering), not setbacks and heights.
• peterwwillis 10y ago
  It's frightening how completely disconnected from the real world this is. The world is full of people who aren’t realizing their potential in large part because their cities don't provide the opportunities and living conditions necessary for success. No, the world is full of people not realizing their potential largely because most people just don't. Whether it's just that someone is not motivated to do more than is necessary, or the real social problems that affect people all around the world, in both cities and suburban communities. • The guy serving you your hamburger isn't realizing his full potential because he grew up in a lower-middle class family who didn't encourage him to do well in school or go to college, he grew content with his boring life hanging out with his friends and working paycheck to paycheck, and he honestly has no good reason to try to achieve more. • The single mother with the two kids and a heroin addiction isn't realizing her potential because when her high-school sweetheart husband left her she had trouble getting a job, so generations of misogyny & patriarchy convinced her she can only turn to stripping to pay the bills, got hooked on drugs and alcohol, and is now locked into a slow circling of the drain. • The young black man in prison isn't realizing his potential because generations ago the systemic racism of our country pushed his family into a tightly impoverished community with no businesses, no access to transportation, almost no education, no access to family planning, and rampant drug and alcohol abuse, which the country then took advantage of by creating for-profit prisons and mandatory minimum sentences to convert most of the people in his community into a series of bad choices which only result in debt, incarceration, teen pregnancy, drug addiction, and crime as a survival tactic. -- A high leverage way to improve our world is to unleash this massive potential by making better cities. I've lived in cities most of my life. Their problems are not engineering problems, they are social problems. You can't "unleash potential" without first convincing the people who live there to vote for it, work hard for the change, and of course pay more tax money for it. • Why do we have too much traffic congestion and not enough parking? ○ Because the city - and its residents and taxpayers - refuse to pay for better public transportation. • Why do cities not have better transportation? ○ Because politicians [and voters] fight over how to spend what little tax revenue they collect. • Why don't the residents pay more tax money to fix the problems in their city? ○ Because a combination of high unemployment and low wages due to a concentration of wealth and corporate power refusing to raise wages while profits have skyrocketed have left citizens with very little left over money. Food and housing comes before transportation taxes. • Why do cities not have affordable housing? ○ Because rich white people don't want to live next to poor black people. • Why isn't there a diverse range of people living and working in cities? ○ Because first you have to create economic and social equality for a diverse range of people and grow an actual population thereof, rather than pockets of socioeconomically disadvantaged minority groups. • Why aren't cities constantly evolving? ○ Because some are able to successfully resist housing price inflation and gentrification, while others have a stagnant economy, and others are simply consistent in their status quo. -- If you need to make a better city to realize your potential (which is stupid, since we were still realizing our potential before we had "great" cities), you first need to solve your social and economic problems before the city can be better. But this is a boring, depressing, non-"startupy" answer, so never mind me.
• sauceweak 10y ago
  Since the parent felt the need to use an affiliate link, here's a direct link to The Rent Is Too Damn High - https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0078XGJXO/ https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0078XGJXO/ An amazon affiliate link to a 2.5 star book doesn't really establish confidence in someone's recommended reading list.
  • jacobolus 10y ago
    It’s a $3.99 kindle book written by a career political blogger. Imagine the amazon reviews as the comments on a newspaper site.
    • sauceweak 10y ago
      Since people frequently buy off of Amazon, the parent is not banking on people buying the kindle book, he's banking on them clicking his affiliate link and buying a bigger ticket item some time today which will net him more commission. The affiliate link to the $3.99 ebook is just to get them in the door and his affiliate cookie planted. So regardless of the review content, the fact that the parent felt the need to add an affiliate link to a $3.99 kindle book leads me to believe his choice was not based on the merit of the book, but because he wants to skim a few bucks off the HN crowd.
      • googletazer 10y ago
        I really don't see a problem with with him "skimming" a few bucks off me. Its a tiny reward (4%? 8%?) for information, and it doesn't increase the price for me either.
  • davidw 10y ago
    I earn the equivalent of a few beers a month from affiliate links, but hey, if you feel that it's better to give that money to Jeff Bezos, that's your prerogative. I'm always happy to buy a beer or two (the entire proceeds of my ill-gotten gains!) at 10 Barrel or Crux or someplace for anyone who happens to visit Bend. Mostly though, since your account is new, we're ok with capitalism and making a bit of money here on HN, as long as someone isn't an obvious spammer. I think you can verify that I'm not via my comment history. As to why the book has 2.5 stars: https://www.amazon.com/review/R32HZILGX1BRRX/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm?ie=UTF8&ASIN=B0078XGJXO https://www.amazon.com/review/R32HZILGX1BRRX/ref=cm_cr_rdp_p... It's a pretty succinct and high level account of what's wrong with cities in the US.
• jkaunisv1 10y ago
  Make 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 list. To me it feels like you should only need a car to travel between neighborhoods, though there would need to be a solution for elderly/less mobile folks. Build the city near some beautiful nature, and then put a free public transit line that gets people from the city center to there, fast. I live about a 10 minute drive/30 minute bike ride from a beautiful national park, but I rarely go there because it's not fast and easy to get there. Subsidize a good amount of small office/storefront space for new businesses. Let people try out ideas for shops and businesses without going into crazy debt just to sign a lease. Make efficiency/sustainability requirements for building WAY higher than the norm. In many climates, AC/heating isn't actually needed if you invest a bit more in building materials upfront and build intelligently.
  • mmalone 10y ago
    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 than actual architects?
    • jkaunisv1 10y ago
      I've heard of his books being required reading in some architecture courses, and I've heard many architects don't care as you said. Whether or not his ideas were revolutionary, just going on the way new developments in my city are built, they could really stand to take a page out of his book. Everything is just a big rectangular box plopped down on a rectangular grid with ugly materials. I assume it's all optimized for cost. So right now I don't have much respect for the architecture community.
    • 10y ago
• galfarragem 10y ago
  Architect here. New cities normally don't work as expected: cities are like a living organism, they need time to mature. Lots of research was already made on these subjects (most people are not aware of it) and even if some ideas are really good, status quo makes any change very difficult. By the other hand the knowledge fronteer is still near on building cities in different environments/planets, so IMO, YC should go on that direction instead.
• convoisofftopic 10y ago
  "What should a city optimize for?" I think a city needs to optimize for random interactions between diverse groups of people, which often is where that feeling of serendipity or je ne sais quoi feeling in a city comes from. There's no magic to it, you really just need to lay out your infrastructure to help allow for it. In NYC we have it because of our public transit, mixed use/zoned buildings/neighborhoods, high density, small public parks spread out around the city, walkability, and a diversity of industries. We're losing some of that with the creation of bland spaces in the city [1], but I don't fear that NYC will lose itself anytime soon. "How should we measure the effectiveness of a city" It depends on the goal of the city. Are we attempting to make it a cultural capital of the world, like NYC and LA are, or a business capital like NYC and SF/SV are, or both? Or do we just care about providing a great place for people to live and work without much care for the city's perception in the world? Can it be just a nice second tier city like Boston or Seattle? Personally, I'd aim for an NYC because there really is nothing like it in the states. The effectiveness measures would also include some vague things, like influence of the exports of its cultural creations (art, music, fashion, tech). International desire to live or visit the city would be another metric. Then of course regular things like employment rates, educational standings, health of citizens, robustness of public transit, retention of citizens, racial/cultural/age diversity, surveyed happiness of citizens, etc. Start with the art though. If your city doesn't produce a great diversity of culture it'll just stay a second or third tier city. "How should citizens guide and participate in government?" If you're building this city from the ground up you have an opportunity to immediately do away with the majority of the bureaucracy that holds most governments back. That'd encourage citizens to actually want to work with or for the government. I'd avoid having armies of contractors and subcontractors. Create city organizations and workplaces that talented people want to work at, not stifling bureaucracies. Don't pay a consulting firm $600 million to build a payroll system that could be built by a small internal team of talented engineers, designers, and product managers. You probably will still need to pay an outside firm to, say, bore sewers and subway tunnels, but make sure the organization designing and overseeing it is staffed by talented people. That'd mean paying wages that match industry. [1] https://aeon.co/essays/why-boring-streets-make-pedestrians-stressed-and-unhappy https://aeon.co/essays/why-boring-streets-make-pedestrians-s...
• camikazeg 10y ago
  I've spent too many hours day dreaming about building a city from scratch in the middle of the country. An ideal spot would be around Wilson Lake in Kansas. It is almost equidistant from Denver, Oklahoma City (with a straight shot to Dallas) and Kansas City right in that sweet spot where high speed rail is more attractive than air travel. Bonus: there isn't an existing city there with existing governance. I've always thought that if you are building a city from scratch, founding a University would be a great way to start. If you found it with strong programs in any or all of "architecture, ecology, economics, politics, technology, urban planning" then you get a major draw in that people studying these areas would be able to be instrumental in implementing them in a real way. When people are going to University is also one of the major pivot points in people's lives when they are willing to relocate.
  • jessaustin 10y ago
    Kansas State University isn't far from Wilson Lake, and it hasn't happened there. I'm hoping that rail technology will keep improving until the Great Plains as they actually exist will be in the "sweet spot". It wouldn't have to be as fast as air travel, but if travelling from KC to Denver were 3 hours rather than over 8, we'd live in a different country. I'm not suggesting that TSA should just get worse and worse until air travel takes as long as train travel.
• sandworm101 10y ago
  Every time I see someone planning for a greater/better city they always forgot to include room for poor, or at least the not-wealthy people. There is never enough room, resulting in the majority of the population having to live outside the planing bubble and commute in (brasilia). Housing is like chopping firewood in winter: Make however much you think you need, then do that again... twice.
• baron816 10y ago
  I have long had a vision for building a new city-state in a relatively unpopulated part of the world and just allowing millions of immigrants to move there (the tough part would obviously be getting the government that owns that territory to go along with it). Hopefully in 15-20 years, when energy (from solar?) is abundant and cheap, making stuff like water desalination and vertical farming cheap, a place like Western Australia would be inhabitable. That way, you could open the floodgates for ten or hundreds of millions of immigrants to escape oppressive and corrupt regimes and start anew within a liberal democracy. All that cheap labor would make it easy to build out extensive subway lines and high rises.
  • rtkwe 10y ago
    The biggest problem is making the place sustainable AFTER it's constructed and preventing the sheer emptiness that's plagued China's planned and constructed cities.
  • HillaryBriss 10y ago
    What are some incentives that could be offered to the people who currently inhabit Australia? How could they be persuaded to believe in such a plan and help carry it out?
• cyphunk 10y ago
  How about this one: should we have cars at all? Is the tech-topia of self driving cars going to actually cut down the parking lot landscape of US cities or increase it?
• anjneymidha 10y ago
  One of the only places in my recent experience that has managed to capture the opportunity of SF with the quality of life of Singapore, is Shenzhen.
• niftich 10y ago
  This is low-tech, but have we considered surveying a large number of people with these two questions: - Why are you living in this city/metropolitan area, as opposed to some other city? - Why are you living in this particular dwelling, as opposed to a different dwelling in the same city? I hypothesize that most people will perceive objectively positive outcomes as a result of their choice, while objectively negative outcomes as a result of necessity ie. factors external to their free choice. This would imply that the most negatively affected population anywhere is also the least mobile to relocate, for factors that are often, but not solely economical. Many of the non-economic ideas behind "New Cities" won't help these people, albeit some of the infrastructure and public transit proposals would enable them to better participate in the local economy.
• kome 10y ago
  I like how Y Combinator takes classical sociological questions, and they pretend to look for the solution. They seem to have a "final boss" approach to social science... Aren't urbanists, sociologists and architects working exactly on the same questions since forever? The idea that a new study can find a new “disruptive” solution is naive at best, or dangerous at worst. But, of course, I welcome more money to social science. Those questions are well worth study...
  • dwaltrip 10y ago
    Yeah, I would think that the first step would be to do a survey of existing literature. Might take a while. It's a worthwhile endeavor, but definitely a difficult one.
• BenoitEssiambre 10y ago
  This is a great idea and has potential to help with the problem of overcrowded urban centers. It is impossible to keep adding people to the same space while giving everybody much room for their money. Trying to cram a generation of millennials into the same area as a wealthy cohort of boomers and rich immigrants predictably makes home prices go up. All the ways of lowering property prices usually imply killing the economy and putting people out of work. Home prices usually end up going down only because people are made not to be able to afford them. This is incredibly destructive and it only allows more people to live in the same space when they are forced to move in with their parents. Increasing supply or nudging the new generation to go in areas with more potential for spacial growth not only allows the new community to be built to the image of its own people but building and growing the infrastructure of a new neighborhood or revitalizing a dying town creates jobs for the people that go there. These jobs would be filled by people who can actually afford to live where they work and potentially profit from property value growth with less chance of a bubble pop because prices would not be starting from so high The best thing governments could do to help with this situation would be to encourage some of the institutions and jobs relevant to new generations to move out of overpriced, overcrowded centers. They could foster jobs creation in centers with more low cost space and less chance of spacial overload. They could maybe move some public jobs there to help jump start the migration. This would also put some downward pressure on the prices in overcrowded places until we reach some kind of equilibrium. I say stop trying to cram everyone in the same volume. Let the older rich generation keep the expensive quarters they've spent their life building and allow new generations to create our own communities, in our own space, from choices guided guided our own tastes. Any solution that doesn't help spread jobs out to cheaper less overcrowded regions are going to hit the volumetric limits of the laws of physics eventually.
• Turing_Machine 10y ago
  Christopher Alexander's A City is Not a Tree is worth reading, for anyone who hasn't. https://isites.harvard.edu/fs/docs/icb.topic1050153.files/A%20City%20is%20not%20a%20Tree.pdf https://isites.harvard.edu/fs/docs/icb.topic1050153.files/A%...
• cardigan 10y ago
  Largely automated delivery infrastructure - pipes between places, or entry hatches in roofs to inside offices/homes (drone delivery) and hatches within buildings to some storage area within the building are required the way other infrastructure is required, so things can move between people within the city very quickly. Maybe this is also used for garbage management city wide.
• robertelder 10y ago
  Something 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 productivity etc. Zoning regulations that separated hazardous or noisy manufacturing from housing make sense, but for office work, I can't see why there is a need to keep it separate.
  • snuxoll 10y ago
    Some of this could be alleviated by just eliminating offices where possible. The entire team of software developers I work with is 100% remote, in fact, the vast majority of our production workers (billers and medical coders) is also remote. It's a huge benefit to both the employees and the company, no more commute and the ability to spend time with your family on your breaks, and the company doesn't waste money on office space that isn't even being used 50% of the day. I understand there are still times where an office is necessary, and in fact we are looking at getting one here in Boise where the majority of our team is located, but it's more of a small space for meetings, holding our lab gear, etc.
  • twelvechairs 10y ago
    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.
• tmaly 10y ago
  Something else I have thought about on this subject. Look at some of these post apocalyptic movies where you have scattered people living in these former cities of glory. Which cities do the best? Those will access to natural resources and access to water both fresh and salt. We are always going to need fresh water to drink, and boats have been the best low tech mode of travel for thousands of years.
• balls187 10y ago
  I'm skeptical. I want to believe in this, but I can't help feeling cynical--likening the results with that of privatization of prisons in the US. Red-Light Cameras that infest my city were sold to public by claiming they would increase public safety, but instead are just another way for the city to generate revenue, much of which likely goes back to the camera builders. It's hard to imagine a very for-profit entity like YC having an impact on city planning without ultimately driving towards a monetary return on investment.
• jlynn 10y ago
  Carfree Cities is a book (and website) that I've really enjoyed and explores the concept of how to design car free cities http://carfree.com http://carfree.com. It approaches the problem from several levels. From how you lay out a city to accommodate mass transit, to street layouts that make living more enjoyable.
• davidiach 10y ago
  One of the things that I'd love to see you studying would be how to build cities that can scale to large numbers of people without causing some of the problems that come with growth. NY had the Grid system which allowed it to grow to its current size. But how can we build a city that could grow to 100 million people? Can we build such a city while avoiding congestion, a city where you can travel fast and easy from one end of the city to another? How dense should such a city be? How can you make it livable? And so on.
• dba7dba 10y ago
  Few years ago I visited someone in a suburb of Seoul. He lived in a new, massive apartment complex with dozens of 25-story high rise buildings. What really struck me was the parking situation. The entire complex does not allow any cars on the surface within the complex. All cars are kept in underground parking lot. This allow more efficient use of land, keeps noise away from residents and real useable green space for residents. I did not feel like I was in stuck in a concrete jungle at all.
• sytse 10y ago
  This is so exciting! I love that YC is researching this. Personally I hope that this research would help to design better charter cities that are open to all https://www.ted.com/talks/paul_romer https://www.ted.com/talks/paul_romer
• justsaysmthng 10y ago
  > The world is full of people who aren’t realizing their potential in large part because their cities don't provide the opportunities and living conditions necessary for success. > A high leverage way to improve our world is to unleash this massive potential by making better cities. I don't think cities make it even into the top 10 reasons why people don't realize their full potential. Here's a small list, out the top of my head: Depending on were you live, corruption is probably in the top 3 reasons why "people don't realize their potential". Most people don't have the "guts" (or low moral standards) to participate in the corruption games that are required to climb the social ladder. Then there's the thing called "competition". Once a person realizes his full potential (s)he will want to stay at the top as much as possible and that includes fighting others who try to challenge their dominant position. Racism, xenophobia and other types of discrimination. Maybe not as evident in the "western" world, but still a very powerful reason in many parts of the world. Other reasons include things like politics, poor laws and stupid fiscal policies. In general, these go hand in hand with corruption and everything else. In my view we don't need more large cities, rather I think the solution is de-centralization and de-urbanization. Many small high-tech independent "village-sized" cities, self contained and self-sufficient, interconnected with high-speed transport services is the way to go.
• deadowl 10y ago
  This is a shoot-yourself-in-the-foot idea. First of all, it legitimizes the kind of BS Mormon Utopia plan that [the NewVistas project is trying to accomplish in VT and Provo, UT](http://vtdigger.org/2016/06/19/residents/ http://vtdigger.org/2016/06/19/residents/). It also involves massive reappropriation of the existing value populations have invested in the land. There's also no good metric for land service value other than feedback from existing stakeholders, which can be volatile in changing circumstances. I won't support a project that will have victims. People have competing value systems. Communities grow around those value systems as they are constantly negotiated and re-negotiated over time. Asserting that one system of values is better than another is nothing short of authoritarianism. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8-EEgmEWJw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8-EEgmEWJw
• tehabe 10y ago
  > What should a city optimize for? People. People will have to live and work their, so people should be the focus.
• czzarr 10y ago
  Check up on what Haussmann did in Paris. He got many things right.
• 11thEarlOfMar 10y ago
  I see two endeavors that may be completely discrete: 1. Building from-scratch cities that are optimized for quality of life. 2. Evolving current cities into more nearly optimal. Which direction will this effort go? Is there a risk of from- scratch cities being built so fast that and being so desirable that they cause historic cities to empty out? And... what if the optimal solution is not cities at all, but, say, small towns?
• bluthru 10y ago
  Are you intentionally talking past urban planners? They are literally the expert on this topic.
  • tonyarkles 10y ago
    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. If they want a seat at the table, they've got to get better at what they do.
    • rtkwe 10y ago
      It's disingenuous to lay that fully at the feet of urban planners though there's only so much they can do via the tools that local governments provide budget and political support are both limited in a lot of cases. Also just because there's the space provided for commercial spaces to open doesn't guarantee you'd have the coffee shop/corner store/restaurant/pub/whatever you're asking for.
    • 0xffff2 10y ago
      That's a political problem, not an urban planning problem. There is a massive gulf between what academics who study cities say should be done and what can actually be done withing the constraints imposed by politics.
    • bluthru 10y ago
      Urban planners learn this stuff during the first semester. It's political and short-term economic forces that prevent implementation.
• catwell 10y ago
  I am not sure we can make cities that are great to live in beyond a certain size. I don't know about the US, but in Europe smaller cities (less than one million citizen) do not have the systemic problems than larger cities have. However, economic activity draws people and companies in, which generates more activity. We end up with over-populated cities like Paris, and the issues that come with them: ever-increasing housing prices, large suburbs, long commutes. So I wonder if the main issue is really cities, or how to find a way to go from large monolithic cities to several reasonably-sized cities that cooperate. The technologies involved being transportation, remote work tools, etc. Also, when I think about cities I like in Europe, an interesting point is that they are often built on the seashore (Lisbon, Copenhagen, Stockholm, Nice...).
• Tiktaalik 10y ago
  I think a lot of these questions posed have already been answered comprehensively by urban planners. Urban planners understand how to make well crafted urban spaces that work well and make people happy. The larger issue is that many of these known solutions aren't being implemented due to established NIMBY interests that create an intractable political situation that prevents anything but the status quo. For example I'd point to how NYC has been transformed for the better by the shift of road space usage from exclusive car use to being more inclusive of cyclists and pedestrians. This was incredibly difficult to implement due to extreme push back from just about everyone. Eventually once people realized it was working for the better opposition started to melt away. Even with this positive example to cite, for many cities basic safety improvements such as separated bike lanes remain incredibly hard to implement due to local and business opposition. Additionally there are funding issues. This isn't the same country by country, but in Canada at least municipalities don't have a lot of tools to raise revenue and are very poor. Metro Vancouver had a 10 year plan to dramatically expand rapid transit but it didn't have the money to implement it. The vaguely transit-hostile provincial government wasn't about to help out. The province forced Metro Vancouver into a referendum on a new 0.5 cent sales tax to raise revenue but it was defeated. Here we have an example where the region's planners completely understand that they need to expand rapid transit to the region to better move people around the region and increase housing affordability, but there aren't the funds available to execute on the idea due to political ideology.
• yyyuuu 10y ago
  A large part of today's population already resides in big cities around the world. Would it be more plausible to research on how we can improve the situation in the current cities, instead of starting from scratch. It's like Software, where you come up with a large code base that is ridden with problems, but somehow works most of the times. You can either dive into that and improve it or you start writing your own system from scratch. I am sure YC would have thought about this. Just want to know why they choose starting from scratch.
  • rtkwe 10y ago
    To change an existing city you have a lot of baggage in the form of existing structures and landowners who you have to either convince that the change is beneficial to them or force the changes and fight the inevitable legal battles. That's just assuming that your plan can be implemented with the existing structures, if not it's going to require purchasing the existing structures and rebuilding/tearing them down. That's not to stay starting over is easy. Trying to create a city out of whole cloth with sufficient jobs and infrastructure to attract and retain people isn't an easy problem in the slightest. It does avoid the NIMBY fight of trying to change an existing city though.
• powera 10y ago
  This is literally Burning Man. Burning Man creates a 70000 person city in the middle of the desert from scratch every year. It's exactly what you want to prototype any number of urban design theories.
  • Tossrock 10y ago
    It's interesting to note that Burning Man started out as a much more freewheeling, libertarian kind of place (shooting guns, driving around wherever you wanted, etc), and that as it grew, it encountered the natural outcomes that require restriction of individual rights for the common good. For example, after a couple in a tent were run over by a car driving around at night, they had to remove the general right to drive around freely. Now you have to go through an extensive process to be licensed, strictly follow the 5 MPH rules, etc.
• Animats 10y ago
  Britain tried this after WWII, building about 20 "new towns".[1] China is doing it in a big way right now. Building isn't the hard part. The usual problem is a lack of jobs. Check out the US census population projection for the next 50 years.[2] Population is leveling off, and if immigration is restricted, it will decline. Most of the EU countries, and Japan, are already in population decline. Also see Fig. 6, "Dependency ratios". The US is headed for a situation where 75% of the population is either too old or too young to work. Retirees increase from 23% now to 43% in 2060. We will need more retirement communities to warehouse old people until they die. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_towns_in_the_United_Kingdom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_towns_in_the_United_Kingdo... [2] https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publications/2015/demo/p25-1143.pdf https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publicatio...
  • camikazeg 10y ago
    I think that you inadvertently pointed to a piece of the puzzle that is pretty important, but retirement communities are a problem, not a solution. The ideal city is habitable to people of all ages. I don't know if you can make it happen with a top down approach, because I think that it is cultural, but in some cultures the old people are involved in the lives of the young. They are active, they assist with childcare, they pass down old recipes, they bring multi-generational families together, etc. Ushering the old off to separate communities to die sounds pretty miserable. Disclaimer: I'm (hopefully) going to be old some day.
  • huherto 10y ago
    This whole thread has been awesome. One of the things I learned is that Massachusetts just changed its laws to allow grandparents houses to be built within your lot. So grand parents get to live with their family, enjoy the grand kids ,etc. A byproduct is that they may free a lot of houses to be used for younger families.
• gwbas1c 10y ago
  Optimize for pedestrian traffic or mass transit for most daily activities; but remember this: People love cars! So make sure that something like a zipcar is present when someone feels like taking a drive to the mountains on the weekend. Or, make sure that rental vans are available when someone needs to move something too big to carry on the bus.
• HillaryBriss 10y ago
  People who give startup founders advice sometimes say things like "Don't limit yourself. Think big. Try to solve a really hard problem that no one has tackled before." That advice is relevant here. Don't think about how to create new cities. That problem has been solved many times already. Instead, think about how to create new planets. If you do a good job, the cities will take care of themselves.
• gjkood 10y ago
  Speaking of new cities; A shoutout to a new video series from WIRED on Shenzhen. Episode 1 : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hp6F_ApUq-c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hp6F_ApUq-c Episode 2 : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C3r4kdHxdcE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C3r4kdHxdcE Episode 3 : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e4wbFdePb-k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e4wbFdePb-k I came upon these videos through Andrew "Bunnie" Huang's blog. http://www.bunniestudios.com http://www.bunniestudios.com Enjoy.
• anon4711 10y ago
  Since they make it so clear that they're '[..] not interested in building “crazy libertarian utopias for techies.”', I wonder: Who is? And where can I sign up for that?
  • pythia__ 10y ago
    Good question. Quite a few people seem to be, actually. Mark Lutter is one at http://freecitiesinitiative.com/ http://freecitiesinitiative.com/. Patri Friedman, perhaps the most famous supporter of idea, attempted to start a charter city in Honduras but the Honduran government changed its mind (https://athousandnations.com/2012/10/31/future-cities-development-ceasing-operations/ https://athousandnations.com/2012/10/31/future-cities-develo...). The Seasteading Institute, cofounded by Friedman, was once backed by Peter Thiel.
• cangencer 10y ago
  I can recommended Danish architect Jan Gehl's book - Cities for People (https://www.amazon.com/Cities-People-Jan-Gehl/dp/159726573X https://www.amazon.com/Cities-People-Jan-Gehl/dp/159726573X) for inspiration.
• gwbas1c 10y ago
  I think the thing to realize is that there are certain advantages to suburban living: The modern suburban home is what many people consider a mansion in other contexts. A lot of people take a lot of pride in their home's interior and exterior work. Thus, perhaps the city of the future needs to figure out how to give people space and personality in their dwellings. Living in a shoebox apartment where all one gets to do is pick the wall coverings does not appeal to everyone. Instead, perhaps it might be better to think about how someone can buy property in 3D? Large empty 3D grid-like structures where someone can build and have a high degree of control over their interior and exterior? Perhaps even elevated walkways and trains, so people can get around without needing to venture down? Might sound like something out of sci-fi, but cities really need broader appeal. A lot of people just don't want to move into a building where someone chose everything else for them.
• j2kun 10y ago
  Can this city please use version control for its laws? I want to be able to git blame and git diff my laws.
• Kinnard 10y ago
  Brings Paul Graham's fantastic essay strongly to mind: http://paulgraham.com/cities.html http://paulgraham.com/cities.html
• stcredzero 10y ago
  Cities need to be optimized for serendipitous social, intellectual, and cultural encounters between people. Maximize these, and you will have the best of cities. This means public squares and pedestrian-friendly landscapes, as everyone well knows. This also means housing the homeless. The smell of urine and the general feeling of squalor comprises the bulk of the burden of negative feeling for me in SF.
• rhapsodic 10y ago
  This is hubris, writ large. A small group of people think they can compile the knowledge and wisdom necessary to build a utopian city that will be all things to all of its inhabitants. Traffic congestion is bad, so let's outlaw cars! Unless they're self-driving! Public transit is awesome! Yay, public transit! Yay, bike paths! Didn't they try something like this in China already?
• dasil003 10y ago
  I don't want to be too negative since it's an admirable goal, but I can't help but feel like Gall's Law applies here. I suspect it's not really possible to design a great city. Consider Brasília for instance, it was designed from the top down, and it certainly some interesting properties. Being able to walk in a mostly straight line from arbitrary point A to point B is something I enjoyed about living there. And the traffic flow control is pretty interesting and worked pretty well for a long time. However today the congestion is bad, and the design of the major landmarks is pedestrian hostile. Obviously we can improve on all the shortcomings of a city designed 60 years ago, but in designing a city today I suspect we would just create an entirely new rash of problems that were difficult to solve. Also consider that Brasília had a raison d'etre that can't be matched without political buy-in at the highest level. Again, I don't mean to entirely dismiss the idea, but I suspect that solving problems of existing cities will probably lead to better long-term results than trying to go off to a literal green field.
  • dcosson 10y ago
    > but I suspect that solving problems of existing cities will probably lead to better long-term results Isn't this what local governments are all perpetually trying to do in every city? The cool thing about this YC initiative is that it is considering such a drastic green-field approach. It may turn out not to work, but it seems worth trying when you look at how poorly the alternative often works (e.g. the gridlock in SF over housing).
• mc32 10y ago
  First, let's not go the Brasilia route and construct without human scale in mind. Second, learn from the Chinese megacity projects. My unproven and likely bad idea would be to promote medium sized cities of medium density which are interconnected but have enough wilderness/farmland to feel separate (in many countries the city and country have abrupt demarcations). Within each satellite you'd have self sustaining public transit to connect all areas within and a great majority of the built up area is within half mile as the crow flies from a metro station. Encourage mixed use, with the exception of heavy industry which should be segregated. Build with a pedestrian first, assisted mobility second and automobiles last --not that cars would be penalized, just make it easy for walking and transit to be people's first consideration. Build high speed links between the satellites (rail and car). Don't build these things in flood zones or desert areas which require more costs.
• sktrdie 10y ago
  What's important in a generation where technology is everywhere, is to find the ingredient that actually makes humans intellectually satisfied, happy and productive. The economy and politics of this "system" is secondary to building it in such a way that it nurtures humans' actual well being. I'd like to see out-of-the-box thinking when it comes to building a system for optimal well being. For instance, are we sure that our common model for a city, where people own housing, and are almost always surrounded by strangers apart from their small group of family/friends, is actually an ingredient for optimal quality of life? Why not experiment with humans living in structures resembling tribes, which is really what our human intellect evolved into for thousands of years? Again, in a world where we don't have to worry about issues that we had to worry about in the past (food, shelter, security) and instead we're looking for ways of being intellectually stimulated, I envision group sized sections where people actually live together. The model of european hostels really resonates with me, where strangers actually get to live with one another. Of course current cities have hostels and have ways for us to live in structures resembling tribes, but the important bit is that we make it part of the culture so that newborns consider this way of living the normality - rather than the normality being to own a house just for you and your family.
  • VLM 10y ago
    > "Why not experiment with humans living in structures resembling tribes, which is really what our human intellect evolved into for thousands of years?" Most of my waking hours are spent at work, my department is the size of a small tribe, full of small tribe politics. Also the middle managers force the tribes to fight each other gladiator style. This does nothing for the customers or investors, but obviously the leaders get a high out of it because practically all middle managers across the country act that way. My kids live most of the time in a separate tribe called school. That is one screwed up tribe where they're all the same age and ability and demographic, mostly. Unlike every other tribe they'll ever be a member of. There they are instructed in the fine art of being interchangeable cog laborers on the assembly lines that closed back in my grandpas generation, in other words its pretty much useless other than as extremely expensive babysitting. So yeah Prussian style public school is pretty much designed to maximally suck. But its their legally required tribal membership until they're 18. The question isn't why can't we LARP artificial pretend clubs and fraternal organizations, but why did they decline in the first place and if the root cause hasn't been fixed why would LARPing bootstrap anything? If the root impediment is eliminated shouldn't those social organizations grow organically, in fact at unpreventable rates?
• ForHackernews 10y ago
  Does anyone else think Y Combinator projects have been getting rather grandiose of late?
• dandare 10y ago
  Ycombinator is the real Plus Ultra society from Tomorrowland
• mikerichards 10y ago
  I think its pretty telling that Y-combinator wants to become central planners. I'd back off these political positions you guys keep on taking.
• naveen99 10y ago
  If you can get a few hundred people to move with you, there are a bunch of towns with very, very small populations. Can see a list here: http://www.city-data.com/smallTowns.html http://www.city-data.com/smallTowns.html not sure how easy it is for outsiders to buy any land in these tiny population cities. I am not sure why they don't list towns with fewer than 200 people. Anybody know where to get that data ? There are even some small counties: http://www.davickservices.com/america's_100_lonliest_counties.htm http://www.davickservices.com/america's_100_lonliest_countie...
• VLM 10y ago
  How does one size fits all fit cultural diversity? So the parents want schools easily reachable on safe side street sidewalks, the recent grads want those sidewalk accessible zones to be bars and all night dance clubs. Some people go out every night to drink (probably a bad idea) and want the local bar. Other people want an enormous plot of parkland to drop the country fair and other activities on the weekends only for their "going out". Some regions have a tradition of scarcely larger than one room churches, others have a tradition of megachurches. Others have mosques or temples, how do you make the Buddhists, the tiny church Baptists, and the megachurch prosperity gospel people all happy? How about history? People who lived in high crime area will prefer a police station to a public library. People who lived in the country will prefer a park over a shopping area. People who recreationally shop will want shops for the sake of shops even in a time of Amazon and UPS delivery. Or worse, they'll demand the little shops, then not shop there. Some cultures don't see education and learning as very important or worth funding... just put a small dumpy school in the giant park reserved for it? Everyone has to say they love the arts, as a rounding error nobody goes, so do you build a concert hall for the symphony that no one listens to, or not? How about hobbies and social clubs. Do you zone the freemasons temple and the model railroad club like a church? Or force that stuff into the basement of commercial areas so the sidewalks aren't rolled up and put away at 5:30pm every night? How do you handle social signalling vs real life? Like you need XYZ to be socially acceptable, but real world requires ABC instead. Do you build for XYZ to get funding but no one lives there, or build ABC and be hated but people fight to move in? Hardly the first time in the history of humanity where what people say and what they want diverge. The midwest has an interesting zoning solution to loud and obnoxious industry of which we have a lot (although more automation and fewer employees every year) and lack of parking, and thats taking advantage of border zones and raised highways. My retired mom lives a block from the border of a shopping mall, sounds awful according to "I hate cars" people, but its actually incredibly walkable, calm, quiet almost all the time, perfect for both pedestrians and car owners. You can even run into psychological issues. Do you ban introverts by banning residential border fences to force people to interact even when they just want to chill? You could zone mandatory front porch onto residential to encourage porch culture in summer evenings. Or if the locals are the type you don't want associating, maybe ban porches and decks if they're just going to cause trouble and crime and noise and get arrested.
• Practicality 10y ago
  Well, if we're going pie-in-the-sky, my perfect city: 1. Scales traffic by distance from downtown, IE: a. Autobahn type speeds outside of city limits (90+mph) b. Expressway speeds connecting major sections of the city with dedicated public transport (45-80mph) c. Bicycle/small car speeds connecting (15-30mph) local districts d. Walking to specific destinations within an area 2. Automated solutions for each speed (examples) a. Dedicated city to city rail. Hyperloop. b. Express vehicles stopping at major sections running on a loop. Subway, Monorail, Taxi Service. c. Small, single-person vehicles. d. Walking or people-mover type vehicles All moving of people/products would be a matter of scaling up and down within your range. Each range would only allow that class of transport (so, no cars/taxis in a walking area, no walking in an expressway area) I could probably spend days listing the problems this would solve, but some examples: 1. Practically eliminate pedestrain->traffic interactions that lead to accidents and annoyances 2. Eliminate parking problems 3. Improve general health (walking in local areas) and much less (if any) road-rage type issues 4. Improve product delivery times (assuming we could get distribution networks to work together) 5. Improve the appearance of the city (no roads in/by your parks) 6. Improve the appearance of homes (only sidewalks go to homes!) 7. Improve the mobility/freedom of individuals (no need to buy a car/get a license, simply find the right public transport) 8. Instant tourist attraction as everyone will want to come see/experience this new type of living Again, I could go on. It seems to me that designing transportation is the primary issue, branching out into all others.
  • rtpg 10y ago
    Sounds like banning cars in the city center would get most of what you want
• btbuildem 10y ago
  Dear YC, all the conceptual work has already been done: https://www.google.ca/search?q=christopher+alexander+books https://www.google.ca/search?q=christopher+alexander+books
• gorkemyurt 10y ago
  Location suggestions anyone? my 3 priorities would be; - close to Silicon Valley and California High Speed Rail - no one should really be living there (no status quo) - has to be close to a body of water (better climate) I think I found the perfect location! Link to Google Maps: http://tinyurl.com/gnzquv3 http://tinyurl.com/gnzquv3 The exact point where the couple is drinking wine in the picture can be the Dolares park of the new city :)
  • elihu 10y ago
    Your spot looks really good, but according to Google it's a "Wildlife area", so politically it's not likely to be easy to get approval to turn into a city. For me, proximity to Silicon Valley is not a priority. My suggestion is to use land in NW Oregon in the coast range. Most of it is very rugged, but there's some sort-of-flat land in the general vicinity of Saddle Mountain that's currently used to grow lumber. It's close to the beach but far enough not to be in the tsunami zone, and close to highway 26. Water is unlikely to be an issue, and it's close enough to Portland that it's not totally isolated, yet far enough away not be be a suburb. I think one of the downsides of trying to establish a tech-hub city in the middle of nowhere is that tech hubs tend to have a symbiotic relationship with universities, and the latter are hard to create artificially.
    • gorkemyurt 10y ago
      Another good option! I've always wondered why NW Pacific US coast is very underutilized. How is the climate like there? Pretty much the same as Portland? I agree with you that there needs to be a University to create a tech hub, but I think that's the easiest to take care of if YC and big tech companies are behind this plan.. You can easily convince big name universities to start satellite campuses or even better you can start your own! UCSF Medical Center at Mission Bay is a perfect example that you can build a world class research center if you pump enough money to it.
      • elihu 10y ago
        Weather is similar to Portland, but as you get closer to the coast you get less temperature extremes. The coastal mountains do get snow in the winter, though, due to elevation. There's probably more rain. I think in general people don't build there because it's harder/more expensive to build on hilly terrain, there aren't many jobs in the area, roads are relatively sparse, and though the landscape is beautiful in general, the way it's logged means there's little species diversity and the land always looks like it has a bad haircut. I'm sure there are hundreds of other plausible sites we could find by spending a little time with Google Maps. Most of them will have something wrong with them, otherwise cities would have been built there already. However, some of the problems may be features in the right context. For instance, hilly terrain might deter real-estate developers from trying to build 100-houses-at-a-time developments and encourage the kind of people who are willing to make the effort to use the geography to their advantage.
• deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
• roymurdock 10y ago
  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-south-korean-city-designed-for-the-future-takes-on-a-life-of-its-own http://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2015/10/01/444749534/a...
  • HillaryBriss 10y ago
    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."
• zkhalique 10y ago
  What about the Venus project
• brett40324 10y ago
  This research is a waste of resources unless most basic needs of citizens becomes free as in freedom and price. For that to happen, global retail franchises, as well as the major players in countless other service industries are going to have to be rejected by our newly realized cities. They should be rejected unless they are willing to donate extremely large proceeds and services to the city. If they comply, they still arent allowed to come to our city, but we as citizens will purchase from them online. We will purchase the things we want from them and have them delivered. We wont have to purchase basic needs. They will be provided to us by the corporations who want us as customers. One of endless examples: Im definitely ordering my mega awesome television from walmart, best buy, costco, etc. because they pay for our electricity and daycare. This is what they should provide us in order to do business with our city: Energy, water, trash, recycling, food centers, construction materials, police, fire, EDUCATION, housing, healthcare, EDUCATION, farm and agriculture equipment, construction equipment, manufacturing equipment, internet and basic mobile phone service, and housing for newer citizens who dont yet own their residence. Note: everyone should own their place, tax free without the lifelong cruft of mortgage and property value flux. Im serious. If you want us to buy from you, you buy from us, or you give to us. The people will own and run such a new city. Not the corporations that are ruining human values, health, and economies for cities all over this earth. The people will have to have the best hand, and the buy-in to our game is extremely high. In addition to this concept, we wouldnt have a mayor, chief of police, or other forms of a single person running any one show. Even schools shouldnt have a single Principal, but more like 3 to 5 awesome 'lead educators'. Totally aside, how do you keep out the drug cartels? How do you instill an attitude of giving a shit about your neighbor? How do you create resources that eliminate the need for acts of crime and violence for less privelaged to 'make it'?
  • ativzzz 10y ago
    > This research is a waste of resources unless... Your vision of anti corporatism will be hard to realize in today's developed world, but this is the exact kind of use of resources that humanity needs. Would you rather YC reinvest their profits into making more money like most business do? Or invest their profits into answering questions about humanity and its potential future that are unanswered? Also, would you really want our education to be sponsored and paid for by Coca Cola? If we take into account science fiction, humans could establish a colony on another planet. This would be considered a city and the research could answer some interesting questions. Flying out a bunch of humans in a spaceship that takes multiple generations to reach its destination would be considered a traveling space city. This research could answer some interesting questions.
• DorintheFlora 10y ago
  The world would be better served if you studied how to tweak existing cities to make them more pedestrian-friendly and people focused. They are too car focused. You should start by reading "How buildings learn." Old buildings that work extremely well typically did not start off as superior. They typically gained value over time as residents added improvements that worked well because they lived there and understood the problem space.
• pjmorris 10y ago
  It might be instructive to look at past examples of planned cities that haven't worked out. I'm thinking of the original intent of what became the EPCOT theme park [1], and of the less-than-hoped-for success of Alexander's pattern langauge(s) represented by The Oregon Experiment [2] and its long-term lack of impact on Eugene, OR and architecture in general. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPCOT_%28concept%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPCOT_%28concept%29 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Oregon_Experiment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Oregon_Experiment
• skybrian 10y ago
  Why start with cities? How about towns that have growth potential? It seems like more the startup way to do it.
• dahart 10y ago
  I'd like to live in a city where people assume their neighbors are smart, where it is assumed that everyone has something legitimate and constructive to add, where people give each other the benefit of the doubt, where people are generous with their interpretation of what they say to each other, and where people always try understand each other rather than try to prove each other wrong.
• legel 10y ago
  The most profound thing I know about cities + public policy: Google hosted a talk in 2014 by MIT Professor Sandy Pentland called "Social Physics: How Good Ideas Spread". His research concludes that our connectivity - free and fast flow of data on networks, people on roads, goods and services, etc. - is our greatest economic and social virtue. His models show - "like a law" - that the more connected we are, the wealthier we are as a society. Check it out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMBl0ttu-Ow https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMBl0ttu-Ow And good luck to everyone behind this.
• greggman 10y ago
  I have a feeling these ideas won't be popular but ... On top of wanting an exciting city with affordable housing and good public transportation. I want to live in a city where I feel safe. Safe from physical harm, safe from theft, safe from bad police, safe from being spied on, safe to participate in "quirky" things. Tokyo is partly that city. I can go to strange fetish clubs, burlesque, punk rock, cosplay, etc and no one bats an eye. But I'm unlikely to get stabbed, unlikely to be pick pocketed, if I drop my wallet I'm likely to get it back with all my money. If I go to a cafe/coffee-shop I can leave my wallet/computer on a table for 10-15 minutes and expect to to be there when I get back. Why does it feel like every other city outside Japan except maybe Singapore I can't do that? I'm in Berlin right now and I love the variety of things going on but I hate that a high percentage of people destroy the commons. Street Art Yay! Tagging Boo! Broken glass everywhere where people threw their beer bottles. Pick pockets all over. People trying to steal your bags right out from under you. In LA/SF/NYC and Berlin almost all public restrooms for men are some level of destroyed. How do you get people to care about the commons and stop destroying things just to be dicks? Please figure out how to design that kind of city.
  • xkcd-sucks 10y ago
    On the other hand, Japan and Singapore are not good places to be if you want to be "safe from bad police."
    • greggman 10y ago
      Compared to which countries?
  • kctess5 10y ago
    I understand that Tokyo is like that in large part because of very strict laws against actions like what you describe. Turns out very strict punishment is a good deterrence, but some might argue that the ends do not justify the means. There's no free lunch.
    • greggman 10y ago
• panic 10y ago
  How should we measure the effectiveness of a city (what are its KPIs)? Why is measuring a city using "KPIs" a goal of this study? The effectiveness of an entire city cannot be captured by a few numbers. Chasing metrics can easily leave you blind to reality.
• theideasmith 10y ago
  Parag Khanna: global connectivity and urban meccas: http://www.paragkhanna.com/ http://www.paragkhanna.com/
• jomamaxx 10y ago
  New? 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.
• greggman 10y ago
  I'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.
  • Ericson2314 10y ago
    > grunge > Valencia Classic --------------------------- In all seriousness, both density, various older styles of architecture, and grime/decay/gunge/whatever make for more salient visually-surroundings. Why have upper-class europians flocked to Venice for hundreds of years[1]? [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Tour https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Tour
  • prawn 10y ago
    YC for novel bars and eateries...
• artur_makly 10y ago
  make sure it's 'human-scale' ala http://www.andrewalexanderprice.com/blog20130330.php http://www.andrewalexanderprice.com/blog20130330.php
• dmvaldman 10y ago
  alternate title: mars pre-alpha
• jmboling 10y ago
  pour all of your money into Mississippi. make it work there. it needs it - and if you make it work then it will work for real.
• scottrogowski 10y ago
  This sounds like an interesting project for YC research. Many of these questions are very open-ended and it will be exciting to see what comes out of it. However, one question in particular upset me as a Bay Area resident: How can we make and keep housing affordable? This question is frustrating not only because the problem is particularly acute but also because it is completely self-inflicted and solvable using what we already know. Take a look at the 7 American cities with the highest rent: SF, NYC, Jersey City, DC, Boston, San Jose, LA https://www.apartmentlist.com/rentonomics/national-rent-data/ https://www.apartmentlist.com/rentonomics/national-rent-data... Then look at the 7 largest American cities that still practice rent control: NYC, LA, San Diego, San Jose, SF, DC, Oakland, Jersey City http://www.landlord.com/rent_control_laws_by_state.htm http://www.landlord.com/rent_control_laws_by_state.htm Why? It's not a coincidence and it is causal. Rent control: A. Disincentivizes new construction. Simply put, over time, long-term tenants might not be paying enough to make a keep a building profitable. B. Causes owners to take recently-vacated, perfectly-habitable units off the market to avoid these same long-term un-evictable tenants (30,000 units are empty in SF alone. That’s 8.3% of the housing stock! http://blog.sfgate.com/ontheblock/2011/03/30/why-so-many-vacant-homes-in-san-francisco/ http://blog.sfgate.com/ontheblock/2011/03/30/why-so-many-vac...) These both result in less housing in total. A smaller supply coupled with the same demand will cause prices to rise as the few apartments that are available go to the highest bidder. In a 1992 study, 93% of surveyed economists agreed with the statement "a ceiling on rents reduces the quantity and quality of housing available." http://www.factcheck.org/2009/02/when-economists-agree/ http://www.factcheck.org/2009/02/when-economists-agree/ For comparison, the consensus that global warming is anthropogenic among climate scientists is 97% - just 4% higher. We rightfully ridicule our elected officials for being skeptical of global warming. Why don’t we also ridicule elected officials who support rent control? If the problem is keeping housing affordable, the solution is simple. We need to phase out rent control laws and remove regulations around the development of new housing. For now, in the Bay, rent control is not realistically going to be touched for a few years. For the latter, there is evidence that Sacramento is starting to understand that we actually need to build housing to bring down prices http://www.latimes.com/opinion/editorials/la-ed-brown-affordable-housing-20160527-snap-story.html http://www.latimes.com/opinion/editorials/la-ed-brown-afford.... If we are lucky, they might take this new insight and apply it to existing housing for a complete solution to this man-made problem. A good article on the subject in general: http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/RentControl.html http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/RentControl.html
• sheriff 10y ago
  I think one of the big problems with cities is how static their layouts can be. Many years from now, I like to imagine that cities will be made of movable parts that can be rearranged throughout the day to take match the changing needs of the people. For instance -- there's no need for me to sleep in an expensive part of town, but there's also no need for me to be awake while my bedroom is shifted out into the outskirts. This would be something like Bruce Willis' character's apartment in The Fifth Element, but I don't think we have to wait until we're building cities in space to start working on this. Similarly, if there's a diner that closes after 3PM, why should I ever have to walk past its empty storefront later in the day? The popularity of food trucks is evidence that there is value in being able to move supply around to find the demand and that we can reorganize our cities on a short time-scale. We don't even need to wait for the parts to be self-driving, as nice as that would be.
• apatters 10y ago
  Why the cheap shot at libertarianism at the end? As if fewer regulations and more personal freedoms are only interesting to "crazy techies?" This throwaway line really damaged the credibility of the post for me because it got me wondering what kind of creepy social engineering project this person may be aspiring towards. Why did she think that the main criticism she had to get ahead of was that they would make a city where people were too free, as opposed to making an Orwellian surveillance state, or a company town or something?
• eru 10y ago
  Oh, my pet peeve is coming up. I guess I have no excuse not to apply..
• deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
• woodmaniac 10y ago
  "Most of the founders in each startup we fund (and always the CEO) are expected to move to the Bay Area for the duration of the three month cycle." ~from about y combinator. Isn't the reason cities are full the same reason they require this kind of thing? Why not solve this first. If I can live anywhere and apply, maybe everyone else doesn't have to live in the valley as well.
• tomjacobs 10y ago
  That's what we're doing at HomeShare! https://blog.thehomeshare.com/were-on-a-mission-to-make-cities-livable-again-by-providing-attractive-housing-for-everyone-4254a994b8b9#.v9bv3mnxg https://blog.thehomeshare.com/were-on-a-mission-to-make-citi...
• Houshalter 10y ago
  I've been thinking about the transportation issue. Self driving cars may or may not be widely available by the time they are finished. But they could bypass it all just by building sensors into the roads, or just tracks. You could then have a system of self driving busses that people could order with a smartphone, and then find the most efficient route to get everyone where they want to go. And then you have minimally congested streets that are very pedestrian friendly. In fact you don't need self driving vehicles to accomplish this even. A human pilot following instructions from a computer that calculates the optimal route. The point is you can get public transportation without the downside of fixed routes. Anyway, along other recommendations people have given, look at this site. I've always been fascinated with it: http://www.newworldeconomics.com/ http://www.newworldeconomics.com/ Especially this article on Toledo, Ohio vs Toledo, Spain: http://www.newworldeconomics.com/archives/2010/022110.html http://www.newworldeconomics.com/archives/2010/022110.html
• landmark3 10y ago
  Starship had solved this ages ago building them on rock and rooooool
• nathan_f77 10y ago
  Sign me up! (Not the research, but I'll probably want to live in one of these new cities.) I think this research could solve some real problems, and it might even be a good way to experiment with socialism, or basic income.
• H0n3sty 10y ago
  > What should a city optimize for? The health and longevity of its citizens. > How should we measure the effectiveness of a city (what are its KPIs)? Minimizing disease, mortality, poverty, and crime. > What values should (or should not) be embedded in a city's culture? Active lifestyle, minimalism… courtesy, respect, appreciation of fellow citizens. Volunteerism. > How can cities help more of their residents be happy and reach their potential? People get jealous of each other very easily. Cultures that don’t promote the flaunting of wealth tend to be happier. The two most conspicuous examples of excessive consumption are large homes and expensive cars. As advanced primates we’re most comfortable in moderately forested land with ample water. Above all this, people require a safe place to live so effective means of crime deterrent are critical. Once the base of Maslow’s hierarchy is met, people will actualize on their own. > How can we encourage a diverse range of people to live and work in the city? If you build it they will come. It’s really that simple. There’s no magic formula, a diverse range of people is required to run a city. > How should citizens guide and participate in government? Citizens should enumerate the authorities of their leadership rather than allowing leadership all authorities not specifically excluded. > How can we make sure a city is constantly evolving and always open to change? It’s psychologically easier to move away from a rental than an owned unit. I know there is dogma about the financial security around home ownership, but leasing a residential unit is really not all that different from renting the money to buy a unit. So I think severely restricting or eliminating traditional home “ownership” might keep the population ready for quick changes. > How can we make and keep housing affordable? This is critical to us; the cost of housing affects everything else in a city. By restricting/eliminating outright ownership and zoning out excessively large units or charging progressively more per square foot for larger constructions (on a per occupant basis). > How can we lay out the public and private spaces (and roads) to make a great place to live? Can we figure out better zoning laws? Priority should be given first to the natural spaces, followed by living spaces, then the sidewalks, and bikeways/waterways. The automobile roads should be relegated to the outskirts of the city in an exterior loop with limited access to the interior for critical functions. Zoning out excessively large homes is critical. > What is the right role for vehicles in a city? Should we have human-driven cars at all? Probably shouldn’t have many human-driven cars in the city aside from possibly emergency responders. The vehicles should be utilized to serve human needs rather than display status of the owners. > How can we have affordable high-speed transit to and from other cities? The hyperloop sounds most promising right now. Musk is a modern day Midas. > 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? Arbitration agreements and waivers for all residents. Not sure about the rules. I suspect that most cities are already subject to enough state/federal rules to require little in the way of local ordinances. We might look for the shortest examples on municode.com for inspiration. > What effects will the new city have on the surrounding community? People who are able to relocate are more likely to be young and depending on the success of the city it may attract the most talented. Prosperous cities have a way of draining the brains of surrounding communities. On positive note, former residents tend to benefit the previous communities when they return/visit.
• pattle 10y ago
  This sounds like a interesting project. I've often thought that cities and towns have struggled to keep pace with lifestyle changes over the years but that mainly because they are inherently hard things to change. So designing a city that will work well both for the present and hundreds of years into the future is a problem that needs solving. One of the key things you want to achieve is to keep house prices low but this seems like something which will be very hard to achieve. For example if the first of these "new cities" does meet all of the objectives (e.g creating a happy place for people to achieve their potential) won't that raise house prices as people will want to move there?
• prawn 10y ago
  I think we could see YC or a branch of YC start some sort of enclave with living and working opportunities for member businesses and eventually supporting businesses. Could well see a town spring up around it, depending on how it was done.
• dkural 10y ago
  The biggest failure point of economic productivity in the second half of 21st century will be the production of new people - i.e. babies. Cities are the biggest contributors to this, where people have extremely low fertility rates. Many young families move out of the city, because they find it to be inhospitable (too expensive to have all the resources one needs). The United States is less aware of this issue due to high rates of migration, and higher birthrates in certain subpopulations. The nuclear family is a brand new social experiment of the 20th century, and one of the primary causes in the decline of the production of people. Without traditional support networks, women have to choose between 24/7 baby-care and not having children. Daycare is extremely expensive, and in fact not the ideal environment for a 3-month-old. The traditional notions of a trust-based larger family unit (siblings, grandparents, aunts) and community-unit are non-existent in the modern urban environment. Even without the issue of children, most people struggle for connection and meaning in their lives more-so than before. They enjoy fewer intimate relationships, and spend less time with people they love or trust. So if you are designing a new city, design it around fostering genuine communities, and is inclusive to all ages and educational backgrounds. My ideal city would be composed of mini-villages, each mini-village centered around communities of a few dozen families, sharing a courtyard "public" to the community+associates. It would be an environment where I wouldn't have a bitcoin-based smart contract to 'enforce' something that my neighbor would do anyways. In general, the city would aim to minimize total commute / on-the-road time for as many people as possible. It would be a city where work is co-located with child-care for young mothers, who can take 30 minute breaks, walk-over, and breast-feed. This means completely different things for zoning. This would mean work would also not happen in a context completely isolated from rest of life: Perhaps the "work day" would last 10 hours, but with 3 hours of interruption for family, food-preparation, etc. This doesn't mean people would "work at home", or the "workplace would be full of kids", there are innovative ways to combine the two -- which was the natural state of things only a century ago. Perhaps each person would make less money, but we'd need to spend less as well, giving each other the things one is now forced to buy in a city. It would be an environment where one could have 4-day workweek, perhaps taking two afternoons off, so men would be more present in their families.
• threecleartones 10y ago
  I'd have loved to see Paolo Soleri's "Arcology" idea take off better than it has - Arcosanti is a cool place to visit, but you wouldn't want to live there :-) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arcology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arcology
• famerr 10y ago
  From: http://timurtatarshaov.me/it-city.html http://timurtatarshaov.me/it-city.html Some period of my life I’ve been traveling many times between two cities in Russia and was entertaining myself guessing what city my next seat train travelers are from. And 9 out of 10 I was right. Explanation is simple if in one city, let’s say fountains are on the every corner and in another they are not, you would be able to spot the difference between those two persons from the different cities even though you don’t know the exact reason(fountains, rocks, rivers, etc.). So every city does have an energy. Another thing about the nature is a rivers. Water passing through has a huge impact on the people living nearby. Water takes and refreshes the energy. I’ve been living for some time in the city with two small rivers and could spot the difference compared to the city with the wider river. Water refreshes the people taking the entry and in ‘small rivers’ city people were more mean keeping negatives for longer. Recently I had a conversation with one girl working in the european conferences organization company and she named several cities where events are more common. The reason for that was transportation hub, including air transport connection mostly and roads as well. So contemporary cities even though they are not tied to goods transportation along the river are connected to the air lines hubs a lot. So I would state 3 things: nature, transport, history. There is one good example of the city made by the power of will of one man, city is St. Petersburg, it is a really good example for research. Such thing as a soil was imported to make it possible. I’m not saying it’s not possible, but saying you should mind milling of things and the only possible way to have it is to have perfect internal sense.