We should be building new cities

[Aimless]

Why aren't we building more awesomely designed super-efficient super-green new cities for the future???

I think we should. We could initially dedicate them to appropriate businesses/industries eg. IT/telecom/wrestling, using the heat generated to heat houses and the like. We could use them to test out all sorts of green tech. We could connect them to large nearby cities with trains. They would be in constant development/evolution, with regular updates to the OS. In time they would offload our existing clunkers and finally replace them.

It would be beautiful, and it would be made from new green concrete

[Nessus]

Why aren't we building more awesomely designed super-efficient super-green new cities for the future???

Because humanity is reactive, not proactive. Because the free market seeks the solution of least resistance, which does not encourage creating wholly new infrastructure.

[Aimless]

It should be a priority of governments not just of businesses. There are a couple of these projects underway already, but I can't think of any recent examples in the west. And you thought they were serious about stimulating the economy, bah

[Dreadnaught]

China's tried this. Led to a ton of empty ghost towns.

I love cities and I think the density of cities does create the energy efficiencies we're going to need to survive. But centrally-planned cities don't give people any reason to develop them, plus they are almost literally too boring for people to want to live in them.

A city can't exist without a way for people to expand it and shape it in some fashion. Obviously urban planning and zoning laws are needed to guide things, but I really believe the growth has to be organic. Or else humanity will reject it, like the first five matrixes.

It would be beautiful, and it would be made from new green concrete

Speaking strictly from an environmental perspective, I would suspect making massive new concrete cities would be most energy-wasteful than improving existing cities. No matter how "green" the concrete was.

[Hazir]

You'd have to look at cities like Brasilia and Astana before you demand planned cities.

[Aimless]

Why on earth for? It's in BRASIL, it was built in the '60s, and isn't the be all/end all of planned cities.


It looks like I was wrong wrong wrong:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_planned_cities

They shoulda looked at Brasilia

[wiggin]

The reasons cities exist aren't just to provide a place for people to live and work. They are generally sited on a location that is important for some reason - transportation, defensibility/strategic value, natural resources, etc. Building a city from scratch on a location that doesn't already have a city is largely silly, since it doesn't have any major reason to exist. Certainly there has been effort put into various experiments with new developments or neighborhoods, but other than an expensive Potemkin village to make environmental lobbies happy, there's no real reason to build a new city from scratch along some planning rubric. That's generally far more wasteful and inefficient than letting it grow on its own.

I generally feel that the easiest way to affect undesirable behavior (such as environmentally poor cities) is to provide incentives for people to economize on their own - from taxing water to waste to pollution to carbon, it all adds up to an incentive structure for people to make do with less. Generally this is far more effective and efficient than any externally imposed set of rules (e.g. instead of limiting someone's carbon production to X tons/year - or worse, nationalizing power production and switching wholesale to a cleaner alternative, increase the taxes until average consumption drops to that level). Case in point - several dry countries have been building desalinization plants at a breakneck pace to meet growing demand for fresh water. Yet many analyses have concluded that much fewer (expensive and energy intensive) plants would be needed if they just sought to curb domestic water usage by information campaigns and slightly higher water taxes. Planning an entire city along a specific set of environmental rules goes entirely against this principle.

[Lebanese Dragon]

Eventaully minx you will be right as population size and resource scarcity force ultra efficiency, and this positioning wiggin brings up will be largely mute as transportation issues are resolved. Why not do it currently, wait ayear and this brand new city made is already outdated. It's probably most efficient to create virtual cites on computers first and really go through a process, before making this massive investment you speak of. And look at how close all major technologis are to advancing to decide to build now or to wait a few years before some techonology is reoslved an can be implemented into the city. or design the city to be ready to deal with technology advances.

Many things to consider. IT's a big cost, and you have to make it sometime. There is intell that needs to be gathered first ot make the decisino correctly.

[Dreadnaught]

Why on earth for? It's in BRASIL, it was built in the '60s, and isn't the be all/end all of planned cities.

I suspect they never imagined people would be mocking them in such a manner. We have the benefit of hindsight to see that the results were just awful.

It looks like I was wrong wrong wrong:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_planned_cities

They shoulda looked at Brasilia

A lot of those cities can only be called "planned" in a very superficial way. A lot are in the Zionist Entity.

[']['ear]

I see others have answered this. And Dread on the benefits of cities, except for one thing: you are looking through FREEEEDOOOMM!!! rose-colored glasses and are engaging in idealistic-driven historical revisionism. The "organically grown" cities you so adore were not that way at all. As often as not, the invisible hand of the market was nudged aside by the not-so-invisible hand of a) local governments and b) cronyism/corruption. But agreed, pre-planning hasn't fared well.

[LittleFuzzy]

I see others have answered this. And Dread on the benefits of cities, except for one thing: you are looking through FREEEEDOOOMM!!! rose-colored glasses and are engaging in idealistic-driven historical revisionism. The "organically grown" cities you so adore were not that way at all. As often as not, the invisible hand of the market was nudged aside by the not-so-invisible hand of a) local governments and b) cronyism/corruption. But agreed, pre-planning hasn't fared well.

I didn't see him talking about Freedom or the invisible hand. I saw him talking about the need for zoning laws and urban planning. He objected to central planning. An organically-grown city is one responding locally to changes/concerns as they become relevant, rather than having the whole thing laid out from the very beginning.

[RandBlade]

Well said Fuzzy/Dread, cities grow they aren't just plopped on a map and if you do that you'd better have a damn good reason - see Canberra in Australia which has an interesting history.

We are building new cities, from towns. My town of Warrington now has everything in it that a few decades ago would have made it called a city, it's still called a town for historic reasons. As for green, you should learn about planning laws if you think we aren't already moving down the green path. Try buying a new build house like I have this year, the standards for any new home would make most old homes fail. We even have special light fittings that will only accept energy saving light bulbs, by law a minimum percentage of lights must be energy-efficient and to prevent new owners just replacing them with regular bulbs only energy efficient bulbs can work.

[Aimless]

thomas edison knew of a thousand ways to not make a lightbulb

[GGT]

What's the difference between urban planning and central planning? They both require government---funds and zoning. DC and Philly are planned cities, Central Park was pre-planned (laid out from the very beginning), all required plenty of governmental 'hands'.

According to wiki, Versailles, Melbourne, Helsinki, Stockholm are planned cities.....even Rand's Warrington:

Warrington is home to one of the most important strategic development projects in Europe in the Omega Development Site close to the M62. It will be a vibrant, active and sustainable business community which is to be developed in stages over the next 30 years. The site for this is the 575 acres (2.33 km2) of space on the former Burtonwood Airbase. The cost of this is set to reach £1billion.
Other developments in Warrington include the Wire Works on Winwick Street which is set to transform the gateway into the town centre with a mixture of retail, cafes, bars, apartments, and an 8-screen cinema.
These are other developments have been delayed by the economic climate.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warrington,_England

[agamemnus]

This.

A little aside...

I generally feel that the easiest way to affect undesirable behavior (such as environmentally poor cities) is to provide incentives for people to economize on their own - from taxing water to waste to pollution to carbon, it all adds up to an incentive structure for people to make do with less.

The liberLULZ irony in this is that "liberlulz" want people to do exactly the opposite, and expect to "help" the poor (eg: by stealing from everyone else, and making everyone poor). For example, subsidized housing in Massachusetts is largely in apartments where water and electricity use is not metered at all. They do impose extra charges if they see extra outside fans or air conditioners, but that's it. And then they raise the utility costs, because it's all just too expensive-- people over-use the water, and the system is strained! Or, people under-use the water, and there aren't enough customers! MOAR MOAR MOAR...

----

Anyway, we shouldn't be building new cities. We should be setting down rules for efficiency and pollution in the suburban areas, where most people really ultimately end up in a free society. (at least a "free" society that doesn't continuously pack more and more people into the same amount of space)

[RandBlade]

Omega hasn't been built yet, it's a redevelopment of what used to be Burtonwood Air Base, one of the Americans largest air bases in the UK in WWII and the Cold War. It looks just green at the moment.

The wire works haven't been built yet either, and are a redevelopment again - this time of the old and closed down wire factories. The towns nickname is 'the wire' because of them and the local radio station is called Wire FM. There was no planning for them. The Omega development etc are additions to our town.

[EyeKhan]

Why aren't we building more awesomely designed super-efficient super-green new cities for the future???

I think we should. We could initially dedicate them to appropriate businesses/industries eg. IT/telecom/wrestling, using the heat generated to heat houses and the like. We could use them to test out all sorts of green tech. We could connect them to large nearby cities with trains. They would be in constant development/evolution, with regular updates to the OS. In time they would offload our existing clunkers and finally replace them.

It would be beautiful, and it would be made from new green concrete

Yeah! Like completely self-contained arcologies under giant glass domes where everyone wears a jumpsuit colored for their ant-like role in society.