6 ms·

This is not a master-planned community. Rather, it is a series of organic responses to evolving operational needs. over time i have become more and more convin

This is not a master-planned community. Rather, it is a series of organic responses to evolving operational needs. over time i have become more and more convinced that this state of affairs is _better_.

bombcar 4y ago
Certain things lend themselves well to master-planning. TCP/IP, or where transit lines are run before the city builds up around them. But only things that really need to be master-planned do better when planned that way; much of the best "large things" seem to work out better when many of the aspects are organic and human-scale.
- CrazyStat 4y ago
  > where transit lines are run before the city builds up around them. I'm not sure even this is true. The city may not build up in the way the planners anticipated. Even if it does, it will change over time.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    Yeah, the main advantage of pre-building is that land is cheap and nobody's using it, vs post-building where you know where the density is but you have to get the land. In the cases I know of the density followed upon building the line, but that may not be universally true.
  - thewataccount 4y ago
    From my experience playing factorio, the best way to approach it is to plan out the areas you are building to allow future "backtracking" possible - increase space between buildings, ensure new "roads" are "reasonably" arranged to allow future expansion, etc. An example of this is ensuring that driveways/building distances are a certain minimum from the road, allowing you to expand a 2 lane road to 3, etc. You build your infrastructure to, or just past the edges of what you know is being built, and make sure you reserve space past that to accompany further expansion. The lets you expand the ~factory~ city while still allowing some sanity to the underlying infrastructure. * This will likely apply to anything that needs both preplanning and unknown future expansion such as codebases
    - bombcar 4y ago
      You see stuff like that done in some places (eg: https://goo.gl/maps/q4Qm1cjjF9rA6MQY6 https://goo.gl/maps/q4Qm1cjjF9rA6MQY6 - the "highway" has space all around it for expansion, and has had that for decades from when there was nothing there)
      - microtherion 4y ago
        That looks like an utterly car dependent community. I don't think you can have walkability without fairly dense construction.
  - alksjdalkj 4y ago
    They aren't independent, the city will tend to build up along the transit lines due to the easy access to transit. E.g., the NYC outer boroughs and the DC metro area.
    - Eleison23 4y ago
      That may be true for immovable train lines, but vehicle transit such as buses have routes which are subject to change, and therefore developers cannot depend on the transit lines being there in 10-20 years. Bus lines instead tend to follow where the traffic wants to go. Around here, many shopping malls double as bus stations because the primary aim of transit seems to be circulating consumers around places they will spend money.
      - wins32767 4y ago
        Consider the income levels of the staff that work at shopping malls and what that implies for their ability to pay for reliable personal transportation.
      - toast0 4y ago
        > Bus lines instead tend to follow where the traffic wants to go. Around here, many shopping malls double as bus stations because the primary aim of transit seems to be circulating consumers around places they will spend money. This is circular reasoning though. Bus lines go to the mall, but malls are built where the bus lines go. Malls use a lot of space, so carving out a little bit for transit is easy.
  - mattpallissard 4y ago
    Maybe not so much the where, but the how (zoning regs) matter. In SLC, the roads are pleasantly wide for a city it's age. Turns out they had to be wide enough for a wagon to turn around. Trying to avoid painting yourself into a corner without over thinking is the game.
  - vkou 4y ago
    > The city may not build up in the way the planners anticipated. It might not, but planners have a lot of forcing functions. For example, if they build a transformational backbone, and nobody uses some part of it, they can fix it, by say, moving major government offices to that area. Residents, other businesses, services will follow suit. What doesn't work is half-assed planning, where you have a grand, but myopic vision, implement it, and never adjust after-the-fact.
- puffoflogic 4y ago
  In what sense is TCP/IP master-planned? TCP has tons of options, and one of its key components, the congestion control algorithm, is unspecified and left up to client choice. Both of these facts have led to significant improvements, but even greater improvements were obtained by dumping TCP altogether, in large part because TCP ossified due to middleware behaving as if TCP were master-planned when it isn't. TCP, at least, is an anti-example to your point!
  - pclmulqdq 4y ago
    So is IP - which version are we talking about? The out-of-address-space v4 that wasn't future-proof enough to conceive of more than 4 billion computers? Or the reinvented ipv6 that seems to have gone way too far in the other direction (and not just in terms of address size)?
- pjlegato 4y ago
  At a broader level, TCP/IP was just one of many competing networking technologies. Nobody master planned which one would win. That emerged organically through gradual decentralized convergence as many individual actors concluded TCP/IP was in some sense "better" than the alternatives.
kapep 4y ago
I appreciate the beauty that comes with the organic evolution of these buildings but if it leads to a "break lock in emergency" door, it is definitely not better.
- lilyball 4y ago
  That door's state is due to the key being lost, not due to organic growth.
  - tomjakubowski 4y ago
    It's certainly incorporating local knowledge though
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - grogenaut 4y ago
    I think but could be wrong that the article alludes to but does not explicitly state but that door is in fact a joke for instance it is a door that has a file cabinet on the other side and they didn't want people to go through it and they made a joke by labeling it thus and pretending the keys are lost. McMurdo feels like the type of place where someone could acquire a crowbar in under 10 seconds and that is the true key for that door if you ever in fact needed to use it. A place I used to go to as a kid used to have a giant throw switch which said it would turn off the waterfall if thrown which was a joke they played on kids. It was in fact just the old Master throw switch for the house when they originally electric it up.
Georgelemental 4y ago
You may be interested in "Seeing Like a State" by James C. Scott, an entire book about this subject: https://www.amazon.com/Seeing-like-State-Certain-Condition/dp/0300078153 https://www.amazon.com/Seeing-like-State-Certain-Condition/d...
- odiroot 4y ago
  It begins as a very interesting book (especially the forest management example) but boy is it slow. The author tends to repeat his point ad nauseam.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
notduncansmith 4y ago
That is the central thesis of The Timeless Way of Building by Christopher Alexander, which I highly recommend.
conductr 4y ago
Don’t live there anymore but it’s basically why I actually liked no zoning in Houston
- gsk22 4y ago
  If you're affluent enough to mitigate the negative effects of no zoning, sure -- i.e., able to afford different housing if needed. If you lack that financial security, you may be stuck next to all sorts of undesirable properties, like a busy 24-hour shopping center. I saw that sort of thing frequently in Texas. Of course, poor people get less desirable properties even in cities with zoning. But zoning does discourage some of the more haphazard "jigsaw puzzle" construction where residential buildings frequently abut busy non-residential parcels.
  - conductr 4y ago
    Zoning does that too. Usually MF is designed as a buffer between commercial and single family (as proxy for more/less affluence). Without zoning, it just happens more naturally because the commercial is going to usually want to be on a major road, then land next to busy commercial is not desirable for single family housing so a MF developer will build there. The part I liked about it was the city was able to adapt to change. I saw the inner-loop part of Houston as a hellscape as a kid. Then ~2000s when inner-city gentrification began, it went quick. Neighborhoods tend to support more local business than the big box strip centers that proliferate in the master planned world. Also, master plans are just copy&pasted every couple of miles so it all just looks the same[0]. I liked having neighborhood restaurants and other quirky stuff inside an old house in the neighborhood, you actually knew the owner and it facilitated a sense of community. It's rarely ever actually in the neighborhood, just on a main thoroughfare that pretty much is high traffic regardless of the business use. I see living on a high traffic road not very different than living next to a busy shopping center. The other thing I've noticed now that I live in Dallas (which is pretty similar to Houston except with zoning). I frequently see an undeveloped parcel of land and I think, "wow a X shop would do well in this location." I look up zoning and it's not allowed. What is allowed, IMO, wouldn't do well in that location. That's why it's still undeveloped land. Some map drawn 50+ years ago probably made some bad assumptions. Typically the neighbors will fight any zoning change because they actually like that nice undeveloped lot next door. Developers with bigger pockets pay the neighbors off so they don't fight the zoning change. Hard to explain, but Dallas is known for 'lack of culture' and having lived in other Texas cities prior (Houston and Austin) I think it's largely due to with how it was designed. It's difficult to build anything unique or artistic here. Until it was banned a couple years ago, many of the city's in the metroplex building code would mandate exactly what brand and color of brick you could use. So we have entire small cities in the metroplex that are red brick (it was a trend in the 90s when that area was being swallowed by sprawl, and it's exactly what's off trend the last decade+) Actually, most cities still mandate it and if you're a developer you'd have to file a lawsuit to get your non-conforming design permitted (you'd win because State of Texas banned this a few years ago, but many municipalities have conveniently not updated their building codes). Which segues to this; > If you lack that financial security, you may be stuck next to all sorts of undesirable properties But at least your in the mix of the city and somewhat able to interact and have social mobility, access to the core business districts and jobs that service the higher income citizens. In Dallas, the economic core/center of gravity is moving north towards Plano and those lacking financial security get pushed further and further south (usually). This essentially is a ghetto, food desert, high crime yet over policed, etc and provides little access to social mobility. It also reinforces a lot of the race issues that exist in our country. Dallas is very segregated compared to Houston. [0] Most of Houston is very guilty of this, most of it also has defacto zoning by another name. I forget what it is, ordinances on noise and traffic impact or something. The inner loop area is pretty organic and sense it's well developed, you pretty much know who your neighbor is going to be. If you buy a house next to an undeveloped lot, you're rolling the dice, but there's likely not any lots big enough to build an oil refinery or a shopping mall or whatever. If you're in a residential area, it's likely a small lot and will eventually be built as residential.
teddyh 4y ago
“The ITS system is not the result of a human wave or crash effort. The system has been incrementally developed almost continuously since its inception. As the system has matured there have always been new features to add to those under consideration as others were implemented or discarded.” — Donald E. Eastlake, ITS Status Report, AI Memo 238, 1972: https://its.victor.se/wiki/aim-238 https://its.victor.se/wiki/aim-238
tony_cannistra 4y ago
I was thinking about this playing Cities Skylines today. I feel like I hate "master-planning" things when I start the game, but then my cities end up being chaos and needing lots of demolishing to fix broken stuff. I might just be bad at Cities Skylines.
- thecopy 4y ago
  Unavoidable consequence of Cities Skylines almost forcing car-centric infrastructure :)
notatoad 4y ago
it's better as long as everybody realizes how they got to the current situation, and is willing to continue to make experimental, ad-hoc adjustements to suit the current needs as they change. the problem happens when somebody decides a design that was arrived upon by spontaneous growth is perfect as-is, and when needs change instead of just fixing it, you need a 6-month study and a planning commission to make a change to existing infrastructure that only had five minutes of thought put into the original design.
- version_five 4y ago
  I don't favor arbitrary requirement for studies but I think it's fair to acknowledge that whatever has grown organically over the years does have legitimate reasons why it's the way that it is, even if it wasn't master planned (arguably it probably makes more sense if it evolved) and so you cant really assume that the status quo can be dismissed just because it's not consciously deliberate
  - closeparen 4y ago
    It presumably had a good reason for being in each intermediate state before the one you became attached to, and people were presumably attached to those.
BurningFrog 4y ago
I believe all cities people love to visit were built organically by huge numbers if individual actors doing what they thought best with their part of it. Or are there any preplanned great cities I'm not aware of?
- 13of40 4y ago
  Barcelona gets a lot of love despite most of it being a very regular grid of city blocks.
  - Aqwis 4y ago
    Eixample is alright, and supposedly a decent place to live, but the main touristy part of Barcelona is the old town, Barri Gòtic, which is a typical chaotic maze of streets. Eixample receives a lot of visitors too, of course, but not so much, I think, because it's very charming in itself, but because it makes up a large part of the inner city and thus contains a lot of tourist attractions (including Sagrada Familia and other buildings by Gaudí) and shopping streets. Also, once you go beyond Eixample (except to the east) the city's not a regular grid anymore. In the end, Eixample and other, newer neighbourhoods built on a grid probably represent a (substantial, of course) minority of the city.
- mtalantikite 4y ago
  Paris could be considered planned, at least a large part of it: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haussmann%27s_renovation_of_Paris https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haussmann%27s_renovation_of_...
zeristor 4y ago
They’ve been planning replacing most of the buildings at McMurdo for a new design: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/09/the-new-mcmurdo-american-antarctic-base/540537/ https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/09/the-new-...
m463 4y ago
I think of long-established cities. You may have buildings of several different eras sitting next to one another, each with different ideas of electricity, water and sewage, connected to standard interfaces and coexisting.

bombcar 4y ago

Certain things lend themselves well to master-planning. TCP/IP, or where transit lines are run before the city builds up around them. But only things that really need to be master-planned do better when planned that way; much of the best "large things" seem to work out better when many of the aspects are organic and human-scale.

CrazyStat 4y ago
> where transit lines are run before the city builds up around them. I'm not sure even this is true. The city may not build up in the way the planners anticipated. Even if it does, it will change over time.
- bombcar 4y ago
  Yeah, the main advantage of pre-building is that land is cheap and nobody's using it, vs post-building where you know where the density is but you have to get the land. In the cases I know of the density followed upon building the line, but that may not be universally true.
- thewataccount 4y ago
  From my experience playing factorio, the best way to approach it is to plan out the areas you are building to allow future "backtracking" possible - increase space between buildings, ensure new "roads" are "reasonably" arranged to allow future expansion, etc. An example of this is ensuring that driveways/building distances are a certain minimum from the road, allowing you to expand a 2 lane road to 3, etc. You build your infrastructure to, or just past the edges of what you know is being built, and make sure you reserve space past that to accompany further expansion. The lets you expand the ~factory~ city while still allowing some sanity to the underlying infrastructure. * This will likely apply to anything that needs both preplanning and unknown future expansion such as codebases
  - bombcar 4y ago
    You see stuff like that done in some places (eg: https://goo.gl/maps/q4Qm1cjjF9rA6MQY6 https://goo.gl/maps/q4Qm1cjjF9rA6MQY6 - the "highway" has space all around it for expansion, and has had that for decades from when there was nothing there)
    - microtherion 4y ago
      That looks like an utterly car dependent community. I don't think you can have walkability without fairly dense construction.
- alksjdalkj 4y ago
  They aren't independent, the city will tend to build up along the transit lines due to the easy access to transit. E.g., the NYC outer boroughs and the DC metro area.
  - Eleison23 4y ago
    That may be true for immovable train lines, but vehicle transit such as buses have routes which are subject to change, and therefore developers cannot depend on the transit lines being there in 10-20 years. Bus lines instead tend to follow where the traffic wants to go. Around here, many shopping malls double as bus stations because the primary aim of transit seems to be circulating consumers around places they will spend money.
    - wins32767 4y ago
      Consider the income levels of the staff that work at shopping malls and what that implies for their ability to pay for reliable personal transportation.
    - toast0 4y ago
      > Bus lines instead tend to follow where the traffic wants to go. Around here, many shopping malls double as bus stations because the primary aim of transit seems to be circulating consumers around places they will spend money. This is circular reasoning though. Bus lines go to the mall, but malls are built where the bus lines go. Malls use a lot of space, so carving out a little bit for transit is easy.
- mattpallissard 4y ago
  Maybe not so much the where, but the how (zoning regs) matter. In SLC, the roads are pleasantly wide for a city it's age. Turns out they had to be wide enough for a wagon to turn around. Trying to avoid painting yourself into a corner without over thinking is the game.
- vkou 4y ago
  > The city may not build up in the way the planners anticipated. It might not, but planners have a lot of forcing functions. For example, if they build a transformational backbone, and nobody uses some part of it, they can fix it, by say, moving major government offices to that area. Residents, other businesses, services will follow suit. What doesn't work is half-assed planning, where you have a grand, but myopic vision, implement it, and never adjust after-the-fact.
puffoflogic 4y ago
In what sense is TCP/IP master-planned? TCP has tons of options, and one of its key components, the congestion control algorithm, is unspecified and left up to client choice. Both of these facts have led to significant improvements, but even greater improvements were obtained by dumping TCP altogether, in large part because TCP ossified due to middleware behaving as if TCP were master-planned when it isn't. TCP, at least, is an anti-example to your point!
- pclmulqdq 4y ago
  So is IP - which version are we talking about? The out-of-address-space v4 that wasn't future-proof enough to conceive of more than 4 billion computers? Or the reinvented ipv6 that seems to have gone way too far in the other direction (and not just in terms of address size)?
pjlegato 4y ago
At a broader level, TCP/IP was just one of many competing networking technologies. Nobody master planned which one would win. That emerged organically through gradual decentralized convergence as many individual actors concluded TCP/IP was in some sense "better" than the alternatives.

kapep 4y ago

I appreciate the beauty that comes with the organic evolution of these buildings but if it leads to a "break lock in emergency" door, it is definitely not better.

lilyball 4y ago
That door's state is due to the key being lost, not due to organic growth.
- tomjakubowski 4y ago
  It's certainly incorporating local knowledge though
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- grogenaut 4y ago
  I think but could be wrong that the article alludes to but does not explicitly state but that door is in fact a joke for instance it is a door that has a file cabinet on the other side and they didn't want people to go through it and they made a joke by labeling it thus and pretending the keys are lost. McMurdo feels like the type of place where someone could acquire a crowbar in under 10 seconds and that is the true key for that door if you ever in fact needed to use it. A place I used to go to as a kid used to have a giant throw switch which said it would turn off the waterfall if thrown which was a joke they played on kids. It was in fact just the old Master throw switch for the house when they originally electric it up.

Georgelemental 4y ago

You may be interested in "Seeing Like a State" by James C. Scott, an entire book about this subject: https://www.amazon.com/Seeing-like-State-Certain-Condition/dp/0300078153 https://www.amazon.com/Seeing-like-State-Certain-Condition/d...

odiroot 4y ago
It begins as a very interesting book (especially the forest management example) but boy is it slow. The author tends to repeat his point ad nauseam.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

notduncansmith 4y ago

That is the central thesis of The Timeless Way of Building by Christopher Alexander, which I highly recommend.

conductr 4y ago

Don’t live there anymore but it’s basically why I actually liked no zoning in Houston

gsk22 4y ago
If you're affluent enough to mitigate the negative effects of no zoning, sure -- i.e., able to afford different housing if needed. If you lack that financial security, you may be stuck next to all sorts of undesirable properties, like a busy 24-hour shopping center. I saw that sort of thing frequently in Texas. Of course, poor people get less desirable properties even in cities with zoning. But zoning does discourage some of the more haphazard "jigsaw puzzle" construction where residential buildings frequently abut busy non-residential parcels.
- conductr 4y ago
  Zoning does that too. Usually MF is designed as a buffer between commercial and single family (as proxy for more/less affluence). Without zoning, it just happens more naturally because the commercial is going to usually want to be on a major road, then land next to busy commercial is not desirable for single family housing so a MF developer will build there. The part I liked about it was the city was able to adapt to change. I saw the inner-loop part of Houston as a hellscape as a kid. Then ~2000s when inner-city gentrification began, it went quick. Neighborhoods tend to support more local business than the big box strip centers that proliferate in the master planned world. Also, master plans are just copy&pasted every couple of miles so it all just looks the same[0]. I liked having neighborhood restaurants and other quirky stuff inside an old house in the neighborhood, you actually knew the owner and it facilitated a sense of community. It's rarely ever actually in the neighborhood, just on a main thoroughfare that pretty much is high traffic regardless of the business use. I see living on a high traffic road not very different than living next to a busy shopping center. The other thing I've noticed now that I live in Dallas (which is pretty similar to Houston except with zoning). I frequently see an undeveloped parcel of land and I think, "wow a X shop would do well in this location." I look up zoning and it's not allowed. What is allowed, IMO, wouldn't do well in that location. That's why it's still undeveloped land. Some map drawn 50+ years ago probably made some bad assumptions. Typically the neighbors will fight any zoning change because they actually like that nice undeveloped lot next door. Developers with bigger pockets pay the neighbors off so they don't fight the zoning change. Hard to explain, but Dallas is known for 'lack of culture' and having lived in other Texas cities prior (Houston and Austin) I think it's largely due to with how it was designed. It's difficult to build anything unique or artistic here. Until it was banned a couple years ago, many of the city's in the metroplex building code would mandate exactly what brand and color of brick you could use. So we have entire small cities in the metroplex that are red brick (it was a trend in the 90s when that area was being swallowed by sprawl, and it's exactly what's off trend the last decade+) Actually, most cities still mandate it and if you're a developer you'd have to file a lawsuit to get your non-conforming design permitted (you'd win because State of Texas banned this a few years ago, but many municipalities have conveniently not updated their building codes). Which segues to this; > If you lack that financial security, you may be stuck next to all sorts of undesirable properties But at least your in the mix of the city and somewhat able to interact and have social mobility, access to the core business districts and jobs that service the higher income citizens. In Dallas, the economic core/center of gravity is moving north towards Plano and those lacking financial security get pushed further and further south (usually). This essentially is a ghetto, food desert, high crime yet over policed, etc and provides little access to social mobility. It also reinforces a lot of the race issues that exist in our country. Dallas is very segregated compared to Houston. [0] Most of Houston is very guilty of this, most of it also has defacto zoning by another name. I forget what it is, ordinances on noise and traffic impact or something. The inner loop area is pretty organic and sense it's well developed, you pretty much know who your neighbor is going to be. If you buy a house next to an undeveloped lot, you're rolling the dice, but there's likely not any lots big enough to build an oil refinery or a shopping mall or whatever. If you're in a residential area, it's likely a small lot and will eventually be built as residential.

teddyh 4y ago

“The ITS system is not the result of a human wave or crash effort. The system has been incrementally developed almost continuously since its inception. As the system has matured there have always been new features to add to those under consideration as others were implemented or discarded.” — Donald E. Eastlake, ITS Status Report, AI Memo 238, 1972: https://its.victor.se/wiki/aim-238 https://its.victor.se/wiki/aim-238

tony_cannistra 4y ago

I was thinking about this playing Cities Skylines today. I feel like I hate "master-planning" things when I start the game, but then my cities end up being chaos and needing lots of demolishing to fix broken stuff. I might just be bad at Cities Skylines.

thecopy 4y ago
Unavoidable consequence of Cities Skylines almost forcing car-centric infrastructure :)

notatoad 4y ago

it's better as long as everybody realizes how they got to the current situation, and is willing to continue to make experimental, ad-hoc adjustements to suit the current needs as they change. the problem happens when somebody decides a design that was arrived upon by spontaneous growth is perfect as-is, and when needs change instead of just fixing it, you need a 6-month study and a planning commission to make a change to existing infrastructure that only had five minutes of thought put into the original design.

version_five 4y ago
I don't favor arbitrary requirement for studies but I think it's fair to acknowledge that whatever has grown organically over the years does have legitimate reasons why it's the way that it is, even if it wasn't master planned (arguably it probably makes more sense if it evolved) and so you cant really assume that the status quo can be dismissed just because it's not consciously deliberate
- closeparen 4y ago
  It presumably had a good reason for being in each intermediate state before the one you became attached to, and people were presumably attached to those.

BurningFrog 4y ago

I believe all cities people love to visit were built organically by huge numbers if individual actors doing what they thought best with their part of it. Or are there any preplanned great cities I'm not aware of?

13of40 4y ago
Barcelona gets a lot of love despite most of it being a very regular grid of city blocks.
- Aqwis 4y ago
  Eixample is alright, and supposedly a decent place to live, but the main touristy part of Barcelona is the old town, Barri Gòtic, which is a typical chaotic maze of streets. Eixample receives a lot of visitors too, of course, but not so much, I think, because it's very charming in itself, but because it makes up a large part of the inner city and thus contains a lot of tourist attractions (including Sagrada Familia and other buildings by Gaudí) and shopping streets. Also, once you go beyond Eixample (except to the east) the city's not a regular grid anymore. In the end, Eixample and other, newer neighbourhoods built on a grid probably represent a (substantial, of course) minority of the city.
mtalantikite 4y ago
Paris could be considered planned, at least a large part of it: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haussmann%27s_renovation_of_Paris https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haussmann%27s_renovation_of_...

zeristor 4y ago

They’ve been planning replacing most of the buildings at McMurdo for a new design: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/09/the-new-mcmurdo-american-antarctic-base/540537/ https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/09/the-new-...

m463 4y ago

I think of long-established cities. You may have buildings of several different eras sitting next to one another, each with different ideas of electricity, water and sewage, connected to standard interfaces and coexisting.