I really like this kind of speculation (clearly marked as low probability, but not without effort to develop something that works in principle). I do think it’s a near-miss in terms of being an optimal path for cities though, as there are several alternatives with higher likelihood that honestly seem like they would create more value per amount of infrastructure/cost than easily-moved suburban-style homes.
First, apartments can be made better than they usually are. It’s just that usually when you move to get a job in the city, being cash constrained, you settle for the lowest budget option you can make work. The rent extracted is not lowered in accordance to the living conditions, because of the rent being extracted on the proximity to an employer.
So while it’s easy to say some people will insist on Rivendell for psychological reasons, that probably isn’t as essential as it seems. A bigger factor is that a big, high quality apartment is going to cost a very large amount. That isn’t because the physics demands a high cost for a big apartment in a high rise, but because scarcity pressures force the price upward.
Secondly, moveability correlates to smallness. So theoretically you could have e.g. a metropolis of parking garages and RVs, but a consequence of sticking to roadways as transit everyone would live in fairly small homes. At the more extreme end of small, japanese style sleeping pods, basically coffins.
As a transhumanist, I’m willing to make some trades for a better outcome. Modify my genetics to live longer, bones to be less breakable, zero gee tolerant, etc. But apart from intelligence enhancement and similar, I’d really prefer my brain and preferences not be altered much, and especially not via near term tech invented by humans. So I’d rather not self-modify to be content with coffin housing / deep crowding, and I expect this is common. And the process of getting used to it over time seems like a lot of suffering.
With good VR, it could be another story. However, an immersive VR environment in something like basically a bed in a box carries the risk of physical illness from inactivity. So you would need a gym routine or similar. It might be less safe to telework from such a thing if you’re spending the rest of your day inside of it as well. For long term use, this would probably also need to come with some kind of medical package—blood pressure check, temperature, and ways to get clean and dispose of bodily waste like with a bedridden patient. So such a device overlaps medical needs substantially.
Thus in the class of near term “what if someone Elon-like really gets a bee in their bonnet about it” questions, it seems possible that you get to a point where pods with built in equipment and easy access to amenities are better than a (much more expensive) suburban residence.
The reason pods are fascinating in spite of the technical hurdles is because they allow much higher volumetric density with (in principle!) none of the discomfort of being actually crammed into a slum. And a further benefit of VR with small box-shaped pods is that you can replace mass transit (and private cars) by shipping people in their own homes directly to the location. When they step out, assuming it’s scheduled ahead and robotically delivered at low gees, it’s sort of like being teleported.
So that’s one competing scenario with some risks, but high payoff, and it stops well short of the requirements for brains in jars or ems.
Perhaps not as likely as simply building taller apartments until the shortage goes away. However, even then, there’s the issue of coordinating and getting around building regulations. So the idea of moving somewhere empty and making a city from scratch has some appeal.
In 2011, a company called Broad Sustainable Building from China demonstrated that they could build 30 floor buildings (330 apartment capacity) in 2 weeks. The time lapse video is quite impressive. The cost was $1000/sqm or 3.3M. They’ve actually done several different buildings on similar timelines.
I’m not so sure the reason we haven’t done it here is all regulatory. Part of what they did to make it so cheap was set up a factory dedicated to the prefabricated componencts. Repeating that here in the US might push the start cost quite a bit higher. Still, it’s probably mainly regulations that prevent it, or render it a slightly more than trivial inconvenience, or whatever the blocker really is.
There was an interesting suggestion by u/jkaufman as to how one might hypothetically create location value a few years back. (For the record, I don’t agree with the critique of LVT, but I consider the article a great example of an educated near-miss that interestingly conveys foundational concepts): Land Value Taxes Are Distortionary.
Some great suggestions there IMO:
Buy cheap land in rural New Mexico.
Put down the subway tunnels before doing any construction.
Put in fiber internet, obviously.
Get big companies to sign on (ideally, before spending any money on it).
However, the real advantage really might be the lack of competing pre-existing interests in the location, rather than the pre-laid infrastructure. Here are some more examples of things centralized control/planning lets you do that a pre-existing city can’t easily do:
Define a wide radius where only buildings taller than a certain height are permitted. So no buildings need demolished to make room.
Rental agreements structured to mimic land value taxes.
Using prefab structural components like the BSB buildings?
Robot cars only. No streets for people to get killed trying to cross, not necessary to favor line of sight between buildings (put the roads in tunnels under and/or through the buildings).
Hexagonal buildings that lock side to side in a honeycomb mesh. Adds structural stability, making it (I think) possible to go higher per unit cost. More useful when you don’t need roads / roads are all in tunnels.
Mandate a set of identical building plans be used. Can be a somewhat large set to choose from, but the growth can be managed much easier if you are tiling similar things than if you have to re-plan for each tiny change on every vanity project.
So if you don’t focus on the narrow scenario, I think the OP has a heck of a lot of value. And as a general rationality point, I think it’s usually best to consider such proposals as intuition pumps for the concepts that motivate them, and figure out how to conceivably correct their deficits.
I really like this kind of speculation (clearly marked as low probability, but not without effort to develop something that works in principle). I do think it’s a near-miss in terms of being an optimal path for cities though, as there are several alternatives with higher likelihood that honestly seem like they would create more value per amount of infrastructure/cost than easily-moved suburban-style homes.
First, apartments can be made better than they usually are. It’s just that usually when you move to get a job in the city, being cash constrained, you settle for the lowest budget option you can make work. The rent extracted is not lowered in accordance to the living conditions, because of the rent being extracted on the proximity to an employer.
So while it’s easy to say some people will insist on Rivendell for psychological reasons, that probably isn’t as essential as it seems. A bigger factor is that a big, high quality apartment is going to cost a very large amount. That isn’t because the physics demands a high cost for a big apartment in a high rise, but because scarcity pressures force the price upward.
Secondly, moveability correlates to smallness. So theoretically you could have e.g. a metropolis of parking garages and RVs, but a consequence of sticking to roadways as transit everyone would live in fairly small homes. At the more extreme end of small, japanese style sleeping pods, basically coffins.
As a transhumanist, I’m willing to make some trades for a better outcome. Modify my genetics to live longer, bones to be less breakable, zero gee tolerant, etc. But apart from intelligence enhancement and similar, I’d really prefer my brain and preferences not be altered much, and especially not via near term tech invented by humans. So I’d rather not self-modify to be content with coffin housing / deep crowding, and I expect this is common. And the process of getting used to it over time seems like a lot of suffering.
With good VR, it could be another story. However, an immersive VR environment in something like basically a bed in a box carries the risk of physical illness from inactivity. So you would need a gym routine or similar. It might be less safe to telework from such a thing if you’re spending the rest of your day inside of it as well. For long term use, this would probably also need to come with some kind of medical package—blood pressure check, temperature, and ways to get clean and dispose of bodily waste like with a bedridden patient. So such a device overlaps medical needs substantially.
Thus in the class of near term “what if someone Elon-like really gets a bee in their bonnet about it” questions, it seems possible that you get to a point where pods with built in equipment and easy access to amenities are better than a (much more expensive) suburban residence.
The reason pods are fascinating in spite of the technical hurdles is because they allow much higher volumetric density with (in principle!) none of the discomfort of being actually crammed into a slum. And a further benefit of VR with small box-shaped pods is that you can replace mass transit (and private cars) by shipping people in their own homes directly to the location. When they step out, assuming it’s scheduled ahead and robotically delivered at low gees, it’s sort of like being teleported.
So that’s one competing scenario with some risks, but high payoff, and it stops well short of the requirements for brains in jars or ems.
Perhaps not as likely as simply building taller apartments until the shortage goes away. However, even then, there’s the issue of coordinating and getting around building regulations. So the idea of moving somewhere empty and making a city from scratch has some appeal.
In 2011, a company called Broad Sustainable Building from China demonstrated that they could build 30 floor buildings (330 apartment capacity) in 2 weeks. The time lapse video is quite impressive. The cost was $1000/sqm or 3.3M. They’ve actually done several different buildings on similar timelines.
I’m not so sure the reason we haven’t done it here is all regulatory. Part of what they did to make it so cheap was set up a factory dedicated to the prefabricated componencts. Repeating that here in the US might push the start cost quite a bit higher. Still, it’s probably mainly regulations that prevent it, or render it a slightly more than trivial inconvenience, or whatever the blocker really is.
There was an interesting suggestion by u/jkaufman as to how one might hypothetically create location value a few years back. (For the record, I don’t agree with the critique of LVT, but I consider the article a great example of an educated near-miss that interestingly conveys foundational concepts): Land Value Taxes Are Distortionary.
Some great suggestions there IMO:
Buy cheap land in rural New Mexico.
Put down the subway tunnels before doing any construction.
Put in fiber internet, obviously.
Get big companies to sign on (ideally, before spending any money on it).
However, the real advantage really might be the lack of competing pre-existing interests in the location, rather than the pre-laid infrastructure. Here are some more examples of things centralized control/planning lets you do that a pre-existing city can’t easily do:
Define a wide radius where only buildings taller than a certain height are permitted. So no buildings need demolished to make room.
Rental agreements structured to mimic land value taxes.
Using prefab structural components like the BSB buildings?
Robot cars only. No streets for people to get killed trying to cross, not necessary to favor line of sight between buildings (put the roads in tunnels under and/or through the buildings).
Hexagonal buildings that lock side to side in a honeycomb mesh. Adds structural stability, making it (I think) possible to go higher per unit cost. More useful when you don’t need roads / roads are all in tunnels.
Mandate a set of identical building plans be used. Can be a somewhat large set to choose from, but the growth can be managed much easier if you are tiling similar things than if you have to re-plan for each tiny change on every vanity project.
So if you don’t focus on the narrow scenario, I think the OP has a heck of a lot of value. And as a general rationality point, I think it’s usually best to consider such proposals as intuition pumps for the concepts that motivate them, and figure out how to conceivably correct their deficits.