5 ms·

Historically the way to deal with legacy urban design like this was to, you know, build new cities. Alas, we stopped founding new cities over a hundred years a

Historically the way to deal with legacy urban design like this was to, you know, build new cities. Alas, we stopped founding new cities over a hundred years ago in the U.S. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_in_the_Americas_by_year_of_foundation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_in_the_Americas...

bluGill 2y ago
Huh? When has someone built a new city? Nearly all attempts fail long term. Cities are located where they are for geographical reasons first and foremost, and so nearly all attempts fail. Where a new city did work it is either because it was a suburb of an existing city; or it has a good geographical reason to exist. The only cases I'm aware of where a city has moved is when the river it was one moved and so the people who lived there followed. Note that politics will sometimes create a city for a short time, but the city rarely sticks. Eventually a new king/dictator/government will come along that doesn't see a need to support the new city and it dies (usually to a farming village since those are needed all over, but in places where there are no farms they can disappear)
- maxwell 2y ago
  Only seeing hand waving, not a single number. Lots of cities were founded in the Americas over the past 10k years. No major cities have been incorporated in the U.S. since Anchorage in 1914 and Vegas in 1911. On the other hand, Colombia, Mexico, Canada, the Bahamas, Paraguay, Brazil, and Belize have founded major cities since then. Why not in the U.S.? Cancun was founded in 1970!
  - bluGill 2y ago
    Again, you can explain those newer cities by either politics (meaning I question how long they will last - though short of a medical breakthrough we will all be dead before we can see their death), or there are geographical reasons for a city to exist there. New York city has to exist there as a city - you can change the name, but the harbor is to useful to ignore.
    - maxwell 2y ago
      But New York Harbor no longer has any cargo ports. Shipping shifted to Newark Bay decades ago. Same with San Francisco. No longer any cargo ports. They're all in Oakland now. And what's even the advantage of living near a cargo port in the 21st century anyway?
      - woodruffw 2y ago
        There are at least two active cargo ports in the New York Harbor: the Port Jersey Marine Terminal in NJ, and the Red Hook Marine Terminal in Brooklyn. I believe the city has also been slowly reactivating the South Brooklyn Marine Terminal. I don't know if the average resident on NYC benefits much from living near a cargo port. But there are significant benefits to living in coastal areas: water has a moderating effect on climate, provides either natural sewage outfall (or fresh water, depending), and brings in tourists. It's not a coincidence that the overwhelming majority of cities exist on sea or lake coasts, followed by navigable rivers, and that there aren't all that many choice locations left.
        maxwell 2y ago
        Ah, good point, I stand corrected on New York Harbor, glad to see that. That seems true for most cities that made it through the Age of Sail, but less true before and unclear going forward. It seems trade routes by land were generally more important, and conquest and shipping were more carried out on land than sea until the technical developments of the 15th century. Most large ancient cities seem to have lied along the Silk Road, and many large (and late) ancient cities that still exist (Rome, Paris, London) aren't right on the sea as in the Americas. Going forward the bigger issue seems to be insurability. Who's going to hold the bag on all those high rises in Miami...
        woodruffw 2y ago
        Rome is on the Tiber, which flows directly into the Tyrrhenian Sea (via Ostia, which was Rome's "Oakland" and had its own sizeable population in antiquity). London, Thames. Paris, Seine. (Closer to MENA and the Levant, and you'll find that antiquity cities almost entirely exist on the Tigris, Euphrates, Nile, etc. You can find inland Silk Road ksour in countries like Morocco, but these too exist along seasonal rivers, and have correspondingly lower and nomadic populations.) I don't particularly disagree about climate change, and I think a lot of the coastal Southern US is in for a rough awakening in the next 15 to 30 years. But things haven't been so peachy inland either (the Midwest has had both more numerous and more severe floods, tornadoes, etc.). NYC's weather is also certainly going to become more extreme, and the city's response so far has been unimpressive.
  - marssaxman 2y ago
    Where would you put a new city, and what would be the point of going there? There are already settlements in every place it makes sense to live. Any new city would have to be developed on the strength of some newly-discovered resource; what would that be, and why would you not simply expand whichever town already happens to exist nearby, instead of going to all the expense of starting from scratch?
    - maxwell 2y ago
      I'd connect the country with high-speed rail and focus entirely on manufacturing, just like China. Lots of cities and towns would pop up along the rail corridors, as in the UK and the first time we built out our rail infrastructure and everywhere else it's been done. The U.S. stopped building new cities around the same time we started adopting automobiles. Our highway system has enriched incumbent cities and created a nation of gas stations, inexpensive motels, restaurants that serve rapidly prepared food, tire salons, automobile dealerships, and billboards. Let's build Hyperdrive City, Nebraska, where you can rent an apartment on the 93rd floor of the mall for $200 a month: https://br.ifunny.co/picture/derek-eedrk-can-we-build-one-of-those-insane-neon-ZhQQBMOC9 https://br.ifunny.co/picture/derek-eedrk-can-we-build-one-of... Or one of these: https://www.cnn.com/style/article/chengdu-future-city-design-competition-masterplan/index.html https://www.cnn.com/style/article/chengdu-future-city-design...
      - jjav 2y ago
        > Let's build Hyperdrive City, Nebraska, where you can rent an apartment on the 93rd floor of the mall for $200 a month What is the motivation for a developer to build a 100 story (or at least 93 I guess) skyscraper in some empty field in Nebraska?
        maxwell 2y ago
        I mean, maybe we go with OKC instead: https://therealdeal.com/national/2024/01/28/who-is-real-estate-developer-scot-matteson https://therealdeal.com/national/2024/01/28/who-is-real-esta... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legends_Tower https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legends_Tower Or let's give Washington back to Maryland (like Alexandria to Virginia), move the federal district to Lincoln, and build a new Capitol to accommodate a House with representation more like 70k:1 than the current (abhorrent) 700k:1.
woodruffw 2y ago
Why would a new city preclude maintaining our existing ones? I don't necessarily disagree about building new cities, but I don't understand how that would solve the problem here: NYC is still the financial and entertainment capital of the world, and it's not like we can just let it decay. People live and stay here for a reason.
- maxwell 2y ago
  What if the infrastructure is (economically) unmaintainable? Ancient Rome had a million people at the turn of the 1st century and was the financial and entertainment capital of the world too. People lived and stayed there too, until they didn't. How many steam systems are left in the U.S. (outside college campuses)?
  - woodruffw 2y ago
    I don't think comparing Ancient Rome with NYC makes for a serious comparison, except in the broadest strokes. As for the steam system: it's an integral part of Manhattan's residential and commercial heating system. My understanding is that it pays for itself in charges to apartment buildings and businesses (including hospitals as mentioned), so there's no current question around its financial sustainability.
    - maxwell 2y ago
      Comparing cities doesn't makes for a serious comparison...? It sounds like the steam system is important because it's important? Do you have any numbers beyond idioms and anecdotes? At what point in the maintenance curve will the steam system become unprofitable? And to be clear, I love the NYC steam system, but for romantic reasons, not economic.
      - woodruffw 2y ago
        > Comparing cities doesn't makes for a serious comparison...? No; comparing antiquity Rome (a city whose collapse is a subject of ongoing historical debate) to NYC (a city that was built 2600 years later) does not make for a serious comparison. Better comparisons would be present-day Tokyo, London, Moscow, Paris, etc. These cities have similar infrastructural problems that they've been able to solve in ways that NYC hasn't, sometimes for political or historical reasons (e.g. being bombed so thoroughly that building new infrastructure is the only reasonable option). > And to be clear, I love the NYC steam system, but for romantic reasons, not economic. I don't love it, or hate it. I recognize that it's a piece of infrastructure, and that infrastructure comes with assumptions. You can either pay to maintain those assumptions, or pay to upend them. Either way, you pay. With NYC paying to maintain them is frequently optimal, since upending them requires revisiting other, even more costly assumptions. For NYC's steam system, concretely: there's been no real public noise from ConEd about the system's unmaintainability or unsustainability. They recently agreed to a new rate/fee schedule with the state PSC[1], on which I can find no significant controversial reporting. Edit: to make it more clear: ConEd's steam network provides heating and industrial steam to around 1500 buildings in Manhattan. That's 1500 buildings, most of which are near or over a century old, that would need to have steam boilers retrofitted into their basements (or have their entire steam plumbing ripped out and replaced with something else). That's a lot of time and money in already one of the world's most expensive labor markets. [1]: https://dps.ny.gov/system/files/documents/2023/11/pr23116.pdf https://dps.ny.gov/system/files/documents/2023/11/pr23116.pd...

bluGill 2y ago

Huh? When has someone built a new city? Nearly all attempts fail long term. Cities are located where they are for geographical reasons first and foremost, and so nearly all attempts fail. Where a new city did work it is either because it was a suburb of an existing city; or it has a good geographical reason to exist. The only cases I'm aware of where a city has moved is when the river it was one moved and so the people who lived there followed. Note that politics will sometimes create a city for a short time, but the city rarely sticks. Eventually a new king/dictator/government will come along that doesn't see a need to support the new city and it dies (usually to a farming village since those are needed all over, but in places where there are no farms they can disappear)

maxwell 2y ago
Only seeing hand waving, not a single number. Lots of cities were founded in the Americas over the past 10k years. No major cities have been incorporated in the U.S. since Anchorage in 1914 and Vegas in 1911. On the other hand, Colombia, Mexico, Canada, the Bahamas, Paraguay, Brazil, and Belize have founded major cities since then. Why not in the U.S.? Cancun was founded in 1970!
- bluGill 2y ago
  Again, you can explain those newer cities by either politics (meaning I question how long they will last - though short of a medical breakthrough we will all be dead before we can see their death), or there are geographical reasons for a city to exist there. New York city has to exist there as a city - you can change the name, but the harbor is to useful to ignore.
  - maxwell 2y ago
    But New York Harbor no longer has any cargo ports. Shipping shifted to Newark Bay decades ago. Same with San Francisco. No longer any cargo ports. They're all in Oakland now. And what's even the advantage of living near a cargo port in the 21st century anyway?
    - woodruffw 2y ago
      There are at least two active cargo ports in the New York Harbor: the Port Jersey Marine Terminal in NJ, and the Red Hook Marine Terminal in Brooklyn. I believe the city has also been slowly reactivating the South Brooklyn Marine Terminal. I don't know if the average resident on NYC benefits much from living near a cargo port. But there are significant benefits to living in coastal areas: water has a moderating effect on climate, provides either natural sewage outfall (or fresh water, depending), and brings in tourists. It's not a coincidence that the overwhelming majority of cities exist on sea or lake coasts, followed by navigable rivers, and that there aren't all that many choice locations left.
      - maxwell 2y ago
        Ah, good point, I stand corrected on New York Harbor, glad to see that. That seems true for most cities that made it through the Age of Sail, but less true before and unclear going forward. It seems trade routes by land were generally more important, and conquest and shipping were more carried out on land than sea until the technical developments of the 15th century. Most large ancient cities seem to have lied along the Silk Road, and many large (and late) ancient cities that still exist (Rome, Paris, London) aren't right on the sea as in the Americas. Going forward the bigger issue seems to be insurability. Who's going to hold the bag on all those high rises in Miami...
        woodruffw 2y ago
        Rome is on the Tiber, which flows directly into the Tyrrhenian Sea (via Ostia, which was Rome's "Oakland" and had its own sizeable population in antiquity). London, Thames. Paris, Seine. (Closer to MENA and the Levant, and you'll find that antiquity cities almost entirely exist on the Tigris, Euphrates, Nile, etc. You can find inland Silk Road ksour in countries like Morocco, but these too exist along seasonal rivers, and have correspondingly lower and nomadic populations.) I don't particularly disagree about climate change, and I think a lot of the coastal Southern US is in for a rough awakening in the next 15 to 30 years. But things haven't been so peachy inland either (the Midwest has had both more numerous and more severe floods, tornadoes, etc.). NYC's weather is also certainly going to become more extreme, and the city's response so far has been unimpressive.
- marssaxman 2y ago
  Where would you put a new city, and what would be the point of going there? There are already settlements in every place it makes sense to live. Any new city would have to be developed on the strength of some newly-discovered resource; what would that be, and why would you not simply expand whichever town already happens to exist nearby, instead of going to all the expense of starting from scratch?
  - maxwell 2y ago
    I'd connect the country with high-speed rail and focus entirely on manufacturing, just like China. Lots of cities and towns would pop up along the rail corridors, as in the UK and the first time we built out our rail infrastructure and everywhere else it's been done. The U.S. stopped building new cities around the same time we started adopting automobiles. Our highway system has enriched incumbent cities and created a nation of gas stations, inexpensive motels, restaurants that serve rapidly prepared food, tire salons, automobile dealerships, and billboards. Let's build Hyperdrive City, Nebraska, where you can rent an apartment on the 93rd floor of the mall for $200 a month: https://br.ifunny.co/picture/derek-eedrk-can-we-build-one-of-those-insane-neon-ZhQQBMOC9 https://br.ifunny.co/picture/derek-eedrk-can-we-build-one-of... Or one of these: https://www.cnn.com/style/article/chengdu-future-city-design-competition-masterplan/index.html https://www.cnn.com/style/article/chengdu-future-city-design...
    - jjav 2y ago
      > Let's build Hyperdrive City, Nebraska, where you can rent an apartment on the 93rd floor of the mall for $200 a month What is the motivation for a developer to build a 100 story (or at least 93 I guess) skyscraper in some empty field in Nebraska?
      - maxwell 2y ago
        I mean, maybe we go with OKC instead: https://therealdeal.com/national/2024/01/28/who-is-real-estate-developer-scot-matteson https://therealdeal.com/national/2024/01/28/who-is-real-esta... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legends_Tower https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legends_Tower Or let's give Washington back to Maryland (like Alexandria to Virginia), move the federal district to Lincoln, and build a new Capitol to accommodate a House with representation more like 70k:1 than the current (abhorrent) 700k:1.

woodruffw 2y ago

Why would a new city preclude maintaining our existing ones? I don't necessarily disagree about building new cities, but I don't understand how that would solve the problem here: NYC is still the financial and entertainment capital of the world, and it's not like we can just let it decay. People live and stay here for a reason.

maxwell 2y ago
What if the infrastructure is (economically) unmaintainable? Ancient Rome had a million people at the turn of the 1st century and was the financial and entertainment capital of the world too. People lived and stayed there too, until they didn't. How many steam systems are left in the U.S. (outside college campuses)?
- woodruffw 2y ago
  I don't think comparing Ancient Rome with NYC makes for a serious comparison, except in the broadest strokes. As for the steam system: it's an integral part of Manhattan's residential and commercial heating system. My understanding is that it pays for itself in charges to apartment buildings and businesses (including hospitals as mentioned), so there's no current question around its financial sustainability.
  - maxwell 2y ago
    Comparing cities doesn't makes for a serious comparison...? It sounds like the steam system is important because it's important? Do you have any numbers beyond idioms and anecdotes? At what point in the maintenance curve will the steam system become unprofitable? And to be clear, I love the NYC steam system, but for romantic reasons, not economic.
    - woodruffw 2y ago
      > Comparing cities doesn't makes for a serious comparison...? No; comparing antiquity Rome (a city whose collapse is a subject of ongoing historical debate) to NYC (a city that was built 2600 years later) does not make for a serious comparison. Better comparisons would be present-day Tokyo, London, Moscow, Paris, etc. These cities have similar infrastructural problems that they've been able to solve in ways that NYC hasn't, sometimes for political or historical reasons (e.g. being bombed so thoroughly that building new infrastructure is the only reasonable option). > And to be clear, I love the NYC steam system, but for romantic reasons, not economic. I don't love it, or hate it. I recognize that it's a piece of infrastructure, and that infrastructure comes with assumptions. You can either pay to maintain those assumptions, or pay to upend them. Either way, you pay. With NYC paying to maintain them is frequently optimal, since upending them requires revisiting other, even more costly assumptions. For NYC's steam system, concretely: there's been no real public noise from ConEd about the system's unmaintainability or unsustainability. They recently agreed to a new rate/fee schedule with the state PSC[1], on which I can find no significant controversial reporting. Edit: to make it more clear: ConEd's steam network provides heating and industrial steam to around 1500 buildings in Manhattan. That's 1500 buildings, most of which are near or over a century old, that would need to have steam boilers retrofitted into their basements (or have their entire steam plumbing ripped out and replaced with something else). That's a lot of time and money in already one of the world's most expensive labor markets. [1]: https://dps.ny.gov/system/files/documents/2023/11/pr23116.pdf https://dps.ny.gov/system/files/documents/2023/11/pr23116.pd...