8 ms·

The developed world really needs to start building new cities. People shouldn't be deprived of the opportunity to live in an downtown area just because the peop

The developed world really needs to start building new cities. People shouldn't be deprived of the opportunity to live in an downtown area just because the people already there feel entitled to their way of life. But, people can lose everything if you economically force them from their homes. That's not desirable either. My proposal for new cities involves strictly limiting the foot print to enable it to be completely walkable. That would mean you don't have any cars, which is good for many reasons. A lot of what local governments do is complicated by having to service so many different residences over a wide area (think sewage and water, mail, policing/fire protection, road maintenance, etc). If you mostly just build up, then that all becomes much easier, which means government can be much smaller and cheaper. And I think the city becomes much more livable, as a large area around the city is green space, and the streets can be taken over by open air restaurants/cafes/bars on weekends.

hashmal 9y ago
Depends where you live, in many areas around europe you just don't have enough lands for new cities.
- baron816 9y ago
  I'm envisioning these new "microcities" would be about a mile and a half to two miles in diameter. You should be able to walk from one end to another in ~30 minutes. But they'd still be able to hold +100-500K people. The footprint would be small enough that you should be able to fit it anywhere. Even small European countries have a bit of farmland that could squeeze one of these cities in it.
  - rocqua 9y ago
    Here in the Netherlands, we have a huge population density. About 50 years ago, we created a shit-ton of land (Flevoland) and plopped down some cities. Those cities kind of worked out, but there is very little life there. They mostly function as suburbs, where people live but don't work. More recently, in the north we tried placing new cities, turns out that people don't go and live somewhere if there isn't work, and there isn't much work in the north. Those cities are now failures. Heck, the big established cities in the north are being drained by people moving towards the cities in the middle. Cities grow organically because people want to live in that city.
    - esolyt 9y ago
      > Cities grow organically because people want to live in that city. That doesn't mean you can't stimulate that growth. You can take the initial steps to make an area a little more desirable and then let the rest happen organically. Nobody will randomly desire to live in an empty rural area. It's a bootstrapping problem. Sometimes a single employer can make an area desirable, but that single employer may never move there because it's not a desirable area.
    - baron816 9y ago
      That could very well be the case. I don't know if my idea will work out at all. Plenty of planned cities have been built and failed. I've been thinking that you would need a lot of remote workers to be the first settlers or get some sort of large anchor employer (Amazon?).
jimmaswell 9y ago
In a lot of cases, just "building up" more would probably lead to the population density getting too high, and I think the point is often missed that not everywhere has ground suitable for the foundations taller buildings need. Really, cities seem like a "necessary evil" to me and I hope they become less important and somewhat phased out as employers realize they can replace a lot of expensive city office space with telecommuting. I dread the thought I might have to move into one for a job soon until I have enough experience on paper to get steady remote jobs - I've been to a lot of cities for conventions or just passing through and I don't understand what possible appeal they have. I'm half inclined to believe a lot of the people waxing romantic about cities have never been to one. You get harassed for money all the time and every time I go to a convention I hear stories of people getting assaulted for refusing, they don't look nice unless you're looking on from miles away at a few skylines like NYC's with the new WTC, you have to be a lot more on guard and pay more attention to your surroundings, everything is more expensive, and all the stores/restaurants are overcrowded a lot of the time. It's a mystery to me why there's such an attitude against suburbs on HN. Sure, suburban town development is technically less resource-efficient than packing everything together like you're designing a circuit board to be mass-produced, but I don't think it's worth the cost.
- baron816 9y ago
  Then don't build everywhere. Only build in places that have ground suitable for the foundations taller buildings need. If we're building new cities, we can make some wise decisions on where to do that beforehand. Not everyone has to live in one of my cities. If you don't like population density, then you can live somewhere else. But the problem we have now is that there are a lot of people who want to live in densely populated places, but can't because the cost of living is too high.
  - jimmaswell 9y ago
    Are you sure people "want to live in densely populated places" and don't just want to live somewhere with jobs in their field, and wouldn't live somewhere else if the jobs were there?
3pt14159 9y ago
I want to kickstarter a city in Canada. Something along the major fiber lines somewhere nice and fun and pretty. Probably either between Toronto and Ottawa or somewhere out in BC. Pre-plan things like fiber to every home, smart measures to promote walking / biking, and promote reasonable density (3 to 5 storeys as the default height). Have cool things like a free regular bus to natural areas where people can swim or hike (cheaper than building olympic size pools, no?). Very strict building standards for things like building materials and sustainability. No suburbia or aboveground highways.
- gruez 9y ago
  >Have cool things like a free regular bus to natural areas where people can swim or hike (cheaper than building olympic size pools, no?). If this is in Canada, wouldn't the water be cold for most of the year? An indoor Olympic pool works year round.
  - 3pt14159 9y ago
    Sure, but in the winter the bus could go to a ski resort or hiking trails. We still have outdoor olympic pools.
pjc50 9y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_towns_movement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_towns_movement The trouble with "designed" rather than "evolved" cities is that they tend to be a bit soulless, and inevitably the design reflects whatever the prejudices of the builders were at the time. Hence the famous roundabouts of Milton Keynes, one of the very few cities of the UK that really accommodates car culture. Personally I think it would be simpler to try to distribute jobs across the existing cities a bit. The UK is over-focused on London and France over-focused on Paris. The US is larger so the effect is spread over the top 5 cities, but we still see that in order to start a tech business people think they "must" move to SF.
- stevenwoo 9y ago
  I'm kind of hoping Amazon's new HQ goes some place not on the coast just to jump start jobs inland somewhere.
- ajdlinux 9y ago
  I live in Canberra, a planned city that in many ways is amazing and wonderful - but it too suffers from the assumption of the time that cars were the way of the future, as well as assumptions about population growth that didn't quite pan out. We've ended up with a city of 400,000 that's 40km from north to south and 15km east to west. Public transport is, as a result, highly problematic, and pushes by government to increase housing density (which I think is quite a sensible idea) meet with some resistance. Planned cities aren't necessarily bad on the whole though - I will quite happily take "soulless" over "gridlocked" and "clean" over "gritty" any day. Canberra may be a bit "soulless", but the more organic cities around us have a very different set of problems with their own negative impacts on livability.
makomk 9y ago
Building new cities doesn't do much good so long as all the jobs keep becoming more and more concentrated in a handful of existing major cities. There are already existing cities that are more affordable, but so long as the jobs aren't there...
dirtbox 9y ago
This is an incredibly US-centric way of looking at it, the rest of the world really doesn't have the same problems as the US in any of these areas. I lived in Berlin for a time and many places in the UK and around Europe and really none of this applies. People live where the work is, commutes are generally under 30 minutes. The US owes it's "walkability" or lack of due to Blockbusting by property developers in the 50s that used racism to drive the middle classes out of the cities into the newly built suburbs. No such thing happened anywhere else. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockbusting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockbusting
- closeparen 9y ago
  Maybe so, but there seems to be a consensus that moving back to the neighborhood your grandparents fled is immoral (gentrification).
  - noobermin 9y ago
    That is a severe misstatement of the other side of the argument. They have nothing wrong with just the act of moving, it's the act of displacing others and changing the community in such neighborhoods.
    - closeparen 9y ago
      Moving somewhere always changes the community, and necessarily either involves displacement (move into someone's old apartment) or change in neighborhood character (add net new housing supply). This is a distinction without a difference.
    - afarrell 9y ago
      Lots of people moving in always does one of the latter. Either they bid up the price of rent, or someone builds denser housing and thus changes the character of the neighborhood. So it is a misrepresentation of what the other side thinks they are saying, but a correct representation of what their argument actually turns out to mean.
- 9y ago
llukas 9y ago
You just described medieval city. Most of EU cities have such part in city center.
raverbashing 9y ago
There are plenty of cities with diminishing population who could use a renovation But of course they never heard of avocado toasts so big companies avoid moving there

hashmal 9y ago

Depends where you live, in many areas around europe you just don't have enough lands for new cities.

baron816 9y ago
I'm envisioning these new "microcities" would be about a mile and a half to two miles in diameter. You should be able to walk from one end to another in ~30 minutes. But they'd still be able to hold +100-500K people. The footprint would be small enough that you should be able to fit it anywhere. Even small European countries have a bit of farmland that could squeeze one of these cities in it.
- rocqua 9y ago
  Here in the Netherlands, we have a huge population density. About 50 years ago, we created a shit-ton of land (Flevoland) and plopped down some cities. Those cities kind of worked out, but there is very little life there. They mostly function as suburbs, where people live but don't work. More recently, in the north we tried placing new cities, turns out that people don't go and live somewhere if there isn't work, and there isn't much work in the north. Those cities are now failures. Heck, the big established cities in the north are being drained by people moving towards the cities in the middle. Cities grow organically because people want to live in that city.
  - esolyt 9y ago
    > Cities grow organically because people want to live in that city. That doesn't mean you can't stimulate that growth. You can take the initial steps to make an area a little more desirable and then let the rest happen organically. Nobody will randomly desire to live in an empty rural area. It's a bootstrapping problem. Sometimes a single employer can make an area desirable, but that single employer may never move there because it's not a desirable area.
  - baron816 9y ago
    That could very well be the case. I don't know if my idea will work out at all. Plenty of planned cities have been built and failed. I've been thinking that you would need a lot of remote workers to be the first settlers or get some sort of large anchor employer (Amazon?).

jimmaswell 9y ago

In a lot of cases, just "building up" more would probably lead to the population density getting too high, and I think the point is often missed that not everywhere has ground suitable for the foundations taller buildings need. Really, cities seem like a "necessary evil" to me and I hope they become less important and somewhat phased out as employers realize they can replace a lot of expensive city office space with telecommuting. I dread the thought I might have to move into one for a job soon until I have enough experience on paper to get steady remote jobs - I've been to a lot of cities for conventions or just passing through and I don't understand what possible appeal they have. I'm half inclined to believe a lot of the people waxing romantic about cities have never been to one. You get harassed for money all the time and every time I go to a convention I hear stories of people getting assaulted for refusing, they don't look nice unless you're looking on from miles away at a few skylines like NYC's with the new WTC, you have to be a lot more on guard and pay more attention to your surroundings, everything is more expensive, and all the stores/restaurants are overcrowded a lot of the time. It's a mystery to me why there's such an attitude against suburbs on HN. Sure, suburban town development is technically less resource-efficient than packing everything together like you're designing a circuit board to be mass-produced, but I don't think it's worth the cost.

baron816 9y ago
Then don't build everywhere. Only build in places that have ground suitable for the foundations taller buildings need. If we're building new cities, we can make some wise decisions on where to do that beforehand. Not everyone has to live in one of my cities. If you don't like population density, then you can live somewhere else. But the problem we have now is that there are a lot of people who want to live in densely populated places, but can't because the cost of living is too high.
- jimmaswell 9y ago
  Are you sure people "want to live in densely populated places" and don't just want to live somewhere with jobs in their field, and wouldn't live somewhere else if the jobs were there?

3pt14159 9y ago

I want to kickstarter a city in Canada. Something along the major fiber lines somewhere nice and fun and pretty. Probably either between Toronto and Ottawa or somewhere out in BC. Pre-plan things like fiber to every home, smart measures to promote walking / biking, and promote reasonable density (3 to 5 storeys as the default height). Have cool things like a free regular bus to natural areas where people can swim or hike (cheaper than building olympic size pools, no?). Very strict building standards for things like building materials and sustainability. No suburbia or aboveground highways.

gruez 9y ago
>Have cool things like a free regular bus to natural areas where people can swim or hike (cheaper than building olympic size pools, no?). If this is in Canada, wouldn't the water be cold for most of the year? An indoor Olympic pool works year round.
- 3pt14159 9y ago
  Sure, but in the winter the bus could go to a ski resort or hiking trails. We still have outdoor olympic pools.

pjc50 9y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_towns_movement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_towns_movement The trouble with "designed" rather than "evolved" cities is that they tend to be a bit soulless, and inevitably the design reflects whatever the prejudices of the builders were at the time. Hence the famous roundabouts of Milton Keynes, one of the very few cities of the UK that really accommodates car culture. Personally I think it would be simpler to try to distribute jobs across the existing cities a bit. The UK is over-focused on London and France over-focused on Paris. The US is larger so the effect is spread over the top 5 cities, but we still see that in order to start a tech business people think they "must" move to SF.

stevenwoo 9y ago
I'm kind of hoping Amazon's new HQ goes some place not on the coast just to jump start jobs inland somewhere.
ajdlinux 9y ago
I live in Canberra, a planned city that in many ways is amazing and wonderful - but it too suffers from the assumption of the time that cars were the way of the future, as well as assumptions about population growth that didn't quite pan out. We've ended up with a city of 400,000 that's 40km from north to south and 15km east to west. Public transport is, as a result, highly problematic, and pushes by government to increase housing density (which I think is quite a sensible idea) meet with some resistance. Planned cities aren't necessarily bad on the whole though - I will quite happily take "soulless" over "gridlocked" and "clean" over "gritty" any day. Canberra may be a bit "soulless", but the more organic cities around us have a very different set of problems with their own negative impacts on livability.

makomk 9y ago

Building new cities doesn't do much good so long as all the jobs keep becoming more and more concentrated in a handful of existing major cities. There are already existing cities that are more affordable, but so long as the jobs aren't there...

dirtbox 9y ago

This is an incredibly US-centric way of looking at it, the rest of the world really doesn't have the same problems as the US in any of these areas. I lived in Berlin for a time and many places in the UK and around Europe and really none of this applies. People live where the work is, commutes are generally under 30 minutes. The US owes it's "walkability" or lack of due to Blockbusting by property developers in the 50s that used racism to drive the middle classes out of the cities into the newly built suburbs. No such thing happened anywhere else. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockbusting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockbusting

closeparen 9y ago
Maybe so, but there seems to be a consensus that moving back to the neighborhood your grandparents fled is immoral (gentrification).
- noobermin 9y ago
  That is a severe misstatement of the other side of the argument. They have nothing wrong with just the act of moving, it's the act of displacing others and changing the community in such neighborhoods.
  - closeparen 9y ago
    Moving somewhere always changes the community, and necessarily either involves displacement (move into someone's old apartment) or change in neighborhood character (add net new housing supply). This is a distinction without a difference.
  - afarrell 9y ago
    Lots of people moving in always does one of the latter. Either they bid up the price of rent, or someone builds denser housing and thus changes the character of the neighborhood. So it is a misrepresentation of what the other side thinks they are saying, but a correct representation of what their argument actually turns out to mean.
9y ago

llukas 9y ago

You just described medieval city. Most of EU cities have such part in city center.

raverbashing 9y ago

There are plenty of cities with diminishing population who could use a renovation But of course they never heard of avocado toasts so big companies avoid moving there