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A $10B Experimental City Nearly Got Built in Rural Minnesota (2018)
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- BariumBlue 6y agoI wonder if putting a semi transparent white dome or covering over a city could effectively cool it by reducing net sunlight. Kinda like permanent artificial clouds
- entropicdrifter 6y agoIt'd probably heat it up because of the greenhouse effect, just from the hot air coming from all the cars and people not being able to escape, let alone heat from sunlight not being cooled by breezes/convection
- sjg007 6y agoMaybe have a hole in the top like a giant chimney.
- gabrielsroka 6y agoMany geodesic domes were designed exactly this way. And with vents at the bottom to let in cool air. Eg http://www.eps2016-wiki4.dee.isep.ipp.pt/lib/exe/fetch.php?media=ventilationdome.png http://www.eps2016-wiki4.dee.isep.ipp.pt/lib/exe/fetch.php?m...
- cogman10 6y agoIt'd be interesting to see if there were some economies of scale for heating cooling. For example, I could imagine that a nuclear power plant in the center of the city could provide the whole city with both heat and power at a fairly low cost for both. On the flip side, you might be able to do city wide geothermal cooling. It'd be an interesting experiment to say the least.
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- zkms 6y agoThere definitely are economies of scale for heating and cooling, and doubly so when you're generating electrical power as well; this is known as "cogeneration" or "combined heat and power". Generating electrical power inherently generates waste heat as well, and a perfect use for this heat is generating steam and/or running an absorption chiller. The canonical example is the combined heat/power/chilled-water plants often found in university campuses. There's a gas turbine, usually running on natural gas, and its hot exhaust gas is used to make steam. The chilled water is usually generated by variable-speed centrifugal chillers, which are remarkably efficient machines compared to smaller-scale refrigeration systems. Nowadays, there's centrifugal chillers that don't even need oil in the refrigerant to lubricate the bearings because the bearings are active magnetic bearings (like in turbomolecular vacuum pumps and uranium enrichment centrifuges): the shaft with the turbine/motor is made to levitate and a computer actively controls its position to micrometer accuracy. Oil-free magnetic bearings not only eliminate a source of frictional loss but also allow for more efficient heat transfer in the heat exchangers (https://mnashrae.org/downloads/Presentations/magnetic_bearing_oil_free_technology_mn_ashrae.pdf https://mnashrae.org/downloads/Presentations/magnetic_bearin...) because there's no oil to provide unwanted insulation between the copper surface and the refrigerant inside. Since a single entity controls the buildings and the utility tunnels alike, there are steam and chilled water pipes going to every building. In each building the steam is passed through heat exchangers to heat potable/domestic hot water and also heat hot water that'll be used for heating air. (It's also possible to have a single-phase system where no steam is generated at the central plant -- just hot water; apparently there are efficiency gains from doing so). The chilled water is directly used for cooling air. Equipment that needs heating or cooling can be plumbed into the facility's heating hot water or chilled water systems, rather than requiring their own (smaller and less efficient) heating or vapor-compression refrigeration systems. The electricity generated on-site might be somewhat more expensive than grid rates since your utility's large-scale generation facilities are hopefully more efficient. In exchange, the waste heat from the generation process -- which would otherwise be discarded -- will keep your buildings and equipment warm for free (well, for the cost of moving steam / hot water around and maintaining the system). You can be clever and throttle your gas turbine based on the facility's instantaneous electrical / chilled-water / steam requirements (and even import power from the grid if it's economical); or run the chillers a bit more than necessary overnight (and store the chilled water in tanks) so during the day there's less load required on the system.
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- MR4D 6y agoIn Minnesota, you’d want to heat it up, not cool it. Winter in MN is extremely cold, especially in the northern half.
- HeyLaughingBoy 6y agoYeah, and summer is extremely hot, so...
- CyberDildonics 6y agoNormalizing it to the outside temperature would be a matter of airflow, unlike heating, which requires energy from somewhere. Running fans would not require much energy by comparison.
- HeyLaughingBoy 6y agoHuh? If it's 95F outside how does that help?
- CyberDildonics 6y agoIf you gain lots of heat during the winter and none during the summer, you would still save an enormous amount of money.
- Nasrudith 6y agoTechnically but there is a matter of expense and lack of crossbreezes for a solid dome and indoor air pollution issues. Active ventilation is a possibility but it seems like it would be of questionable worth unless the outside is far worse.
- shiftpgdn 6y agoThis is remarkably similar to Walt Disney's EPCOT plan: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPCOT_(concept) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPCOT_(concept) . I wonder what was in the water in the 60s since the Astrodome actually got built in 1965: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astrodome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astrodome
- Johnny555 6y agoI came here to make the same comment, I'm surprised they didn't mention EPCOT in the article. Many people don't know that Disney's vision was for EPCOT to be a real city (well, maybe "town" is more appropriate for 20,000 citizens), not a theme park.
- bagacrap 6y agodidn't he actually build a utopian community called Paradise?
- mark-r 6y ago$10 billion in 1967 dollars? No wonder it never got built!
- mc32 6y agoLooks like there was local resistance to the project. Here's a synopsis of the retrospective documentary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tkbArKOxg2w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tkbArKOxg2w
- azdle 6y agoIt's also available to buy DRM free: https://vimeo.com/ondemand/183222 https://vimeo.com/ondemand/183222 I found it rather disappointing though. It didn't really go into any detail about what it was supposed to be, just "dude had this idea, got other people to sponsor some research, locals didn't like the idea, also there were funding problems so it never happened".
- spankalee 6y agoI would love to see a city like this built today, but with a little less emphasis on experimental and more on starting with the best practices we know today, and designing for a large scale from the outset like China does. Things like being designed around pervasive rail-based mass transit, and that being cheaper to build when you don't have to put it in an existing city. Pedestrian optimized streets with much less parking than today's cities. Little-to-no single family zoning, replaced with missing-middle apartment and mixed used neighborhoods. Large parks. Plazas and outdoor dining. Buried utilities. Either rooftop solar, or green roofs everywhere. Modern underground trash collection. Cut-and-cover highway tunnels. There's a lot of space in Montana, Wyoming, the Dakaotas, and we'll need more space for population there as we have to migrate north.
- nip180 6y agoI just have to wonder —- how do you create such a city in a way that insures it’s actually populated and doesn’t become a ghost town.
- cogman10 6y agoCheap housing and low utility bills would be prime selling points. IDK how you keep such a city from dilapidating though.
- elihu 6y agoI think the main thing is having enough employers to provide jobs for the people. This could be done by coordinating the construction with some local large businesses or maybe a University that wants to open a new branch. Or just locate near enough to an existing town/city that has jobs.
- nip180 6y agoYeah but I wouldn’t move to a new city in rural montana until it has schools, hospitals, firefighters, police, trashmen, and maybe a dozen other services that require a local market or a local tax base to support.
- eof 6y agoSame thing here in Winooski, Vermont! I don't think it would be fair to say it "nearly" got built, but it was considered! https://www.nytimes.com/1979/11/18/archives/dome-may-shelter-a-whole-town.html https://www.nytimes.com/1979/11/18/archives/dome-may-shelter... https://unofficialnetworks.com/2013/02/02/entire-vermont-town-covered-giant-dome/ https://unofficialnetworks.com/2013/02/02/entire-vermont-tow...
- LargoLasskhyfv 6y agoLogan's Run!
- pengaru 6y agoR.Buckminster Fuller was an interesting character. I ran across this youtube video not long ago and it kind of blew my mind not having any knowledge of him beyond a vague link to the geodesic dome. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dsOvE-ReX2g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dsOvE-ReX2g
- ilaksh 6y agoI love coming up with ideas for future cities. I have previously even hired digital artists/CAD developers to help me illustrate my ideas. To me there are lots of obvious structural things that are outdated about cities. And it is fun to think of out-there concepts to radically change or maybe improve things. Recently I was in Gravity Sketch making a 3D model in VR of part of my idea. That 3d model looks terrible now and has only about 40% of the concepts included. Right now it is a series of connected enclosures, sort of like domes but sort of not like domes. Basically there will be like a grid of these enclosures that are connected by two or more levels of roadways for small autonomous cars (pods) -- most of which will be for single passengers. Each megastructure is a little bit like a tree inside of an egg. Spiraling along the internal edges will be roads for traversing the levels. There will be something like 7 or 8 vertical levels, each of which is maybe 4 or more stories tall. The branches of the tree are steel holding up platforms. Each main level has two sub-levels: one for infrastructure, and one for people and buildings. The infrastructure level contains the roadways for the autonomous pods, as well as things like water, electricity, sewer, networking, and basement/cargo reception. The main level contains multistory buildings, walking roads, and a significant amount of space set aside for a type of permacultural-landscaping. So there will be zoning requiring that space to be developed as for example food forest with aquaponics built in. This will be on all levels and platforms. So in the city charter or whatever is this requirement to dedicate a certain amount of space to this type of agriculture which is also landscape. The idea is not to realistically produce all of the food or even a great proportion of it, but to enable some fresh produce to be at hand and to ensure that people are connected with food sources. The idea is that by making agriculture a more integral part of the city, there may be more attention placed on agriculture by ordinary people and there may be more attention placed on making it more sustainable or something. Also it seems wasteful to just use landscaping for decoration. Another aspect is that I would like alternating bands of facade on the egg. So there will be strips of something like glass but which will permit UV B (required for Vitamin D production) in a double layer. And then strips of a thick insulated layer with an energy-harvesting sheathing that incorporates solar panels and ducted wind turbines sort of embedded in tunnels in the solar-cell-covered undulating surface. It seems that you would need strategies for passive and active heating and cooling. Such as automated shading, opening and closing ventilation, and heat recovery ventilators. Etc. It would be nice if some type of glass could be used largely for central walkways in order to increase the penetration of light. Anyway I have a bit more that I wrote up before. Multi-Level City Concept In a high-density urban core, many skyscrapers exist in a relatively small area. This makes it possible to house many people and support many businesses in that small footprint. However, in these areas, while most buildings may have 50 or more floors, there is only a single level containing public infrastructure: the ground level, which contains all of the vehicle transportation, water, sewer, electricity, and communication. In this scenario, there is actually more private infrastructure in the buildings themselves than infrastructure in the public level. This is because each structure is a self-contained, privately designed and privately maintained entity. So transportation (elevators), electricity, communication, water, sewer must all be facilitated by each private structure. In addition, each of these is connected to the public infrastructure on only one level. This presents multiple problems. Problems with Single-Level Infrastructure in Many-Level dense Urban Cores Since vehicle traffic can only move on one level, congestion can be extreme. Multi-Level Public Inter-Building Public Infrastructure for Dense Urban Cores Supporting Autonomous Passenger and Cargo Delivery Suppose that there was a way to build a type of multi-level skeleton for a city. So instead of a single roadway at only ground level, there were several different roadways at different floors of a superstructure. This superstructure would be designed to support the installation of modular construction. With this system, delivery of goods by small autonomous vehicles could, for example, proceed directly from the back cargo door of a restaurant on level 8, to your front door on level 2 a few blocks away, strictly over the public roadways which connect not only different buildings but also at different levels. Vehicles could traverse levels over graded roadways or perhaps some type of small vehicle elevator system. --------------------------------------------- Another _totally different_ idea that I had quite awhile ago was http://runvnc.github.io/tinyvillage/ http://runvnc.github.io/tinyvillage/
- Merrill 6y agoA more modest, but no less idealistic, example is Arcosanti north of Phoenix. I visited it in the late '80s when it was just getting started. There was not a lot then, but at least work continues. Paolo Soleri's visions were much more ambitious. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arcosanti https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arcosanti https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paolo_Soleri https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paolo_Soleri
- bulletsvshumans 6y agoArcosanti was discussed recently on Hacker News here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24066193 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24066193
- Merrill 6y agoThanks. That's a good thread. I was there only part of a day. Had a day off in Phoenix, and a colleague and I drove to Flagstaff via Arcosanti and Sedona. Discussion on that thread gives a lot of information about what has happened since. The book I bought in their store had a lot of ideas about huge cities built as monolithic structures, unlike what is on the ground now.
- Proven 6y agoSince when does $10B gets any attention? $3,000B was given away this year, with nothing to show for. Talk about doomed republic.
- renewiltord 6y agoHaha, when the sci-fi writers of the past imagined our Cities of the Future™ they never stopped to wonder about zoning. We're never going to have spires and shit. It would never get approved.
- GNOMES 6y agoSurprised they would built it up North near Duluth and Park Rapids, and not further South. Imagine a city this large between the Twin Cities and Des Moines. I am curious if the taconite mines would have blocked or endorsed this. One one hand it's more labor in the area, on the other it's potentially unminable land if surrounding area prospers.
- tintor 6y agoWhat was the reason for the dome over the city?
- tomcam 6y agoFrom the comments: > Apparently they had pretty good weed in Minnesota, even back then. Thankfully this never was tried, or poor people of Aitkin Co. would be stuck with a huge, crumbling ghetto, at best, or an EPA superfund site. Utopianism has (and will) never worked because people will never follow like sheep. One will figure out a way to get more, then others will follow, Some groups will rise, others will fail, Then, voilà, right back where we started. Except now there's a crumbling ghetto in Aitkin County. Oh well, at least it's not where the libs can see it. > Fortunately the rural citizens of Minnesota were smart enough to see this, They could tell that the folks who were pushing this sure as hell didn't want it anywhere close they lived. "Lets foist this planning joke on some poor folk that can't do anything about it."