As to housing, I am very glad I do not live in a modular mobile-home grid city!
In my universe, houses are built with lots of different non-interchangeable designs to satisfy the owners.
And cities are laid out organically, according to topography and the vagaries of history. Not perfect, but in those cases that neighborhoods were quickly constructed in grids of modular, standardized (albeit often non-mobile) houses, it did not work out too well.
In my universe, modularity and mobility impose trade-offs like any other design characteristics, and although these things are actually available, non-mobile non-modular houses are often preferred.
Stewart Brand’s How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They’re Built (if you can find a print version) is a good sustained demonstration of how much people modify their buildings and how valuable that customization costs. It’s easy to forget in discussing standardization.
As to housing, I am very glad I do not live in a modular mobile-home grid city!
In my universe, houses are built with lots of different non-interchangeable designs to satisfy the owners.
And cities are laid out organically, according to topography and the vagaries of history. Not perfect, but in those cases that neighborhoods were quickly constructed in grids of modular, standardized (albeit often non-mobile) houses, it did not work out too well.
In my universe, modularity and mobility impose trade-offs like any other design characteristics, and although these things are actually available, non-mobile non-modular houses are often preferred.
Stewart Brand’s How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They’re Built (if you can find a print version) is a good sustained demonstration of how much people modify their buildings and how valuable that customization costs. It’s easy to forget in discussing standardization.
And the pattern language by Christopher Alexander: http://lesswrong.com/lw/jzr/my_april_fools_day_confession/arm0