Hm, frankly I have quite a few issues with this proposal, mostly boiling down to it ignoring the real world problems. Sorry if it sounds harsh, know that I didn’t mean it. Frankly, I like the idea of arcology very much myself, but I don’t believe it can work with the existing technologies only, at least not in an economically viable way.
>Keep in mind here that people are different and that some aren’t nearly as concerned with sunlight or windows in their own home.
Willingness of people to tolerate lack of sunlight (just like lack of any other nice thing) tends to have strong negative correlation with they ability to pay premium for it. So in practice we’re talking about poor people being confined to [effectively] underground ghettos and only richer people being able to afford natural sunlight in their homes. At least this fact should be explicitly mentioned and addressed in the discussion.
> you can bring columns of outside enclosed with windows and textured facades down into buildings periodically
Such things do exist, and they serve exactly one purpose—making the building nominally compliant with the regulations, while not increasing actual liveablility at all, especially in higher latitudes, where the sun will pretty much never be seen at the bottom of such a shaft. Speaking here from the experience of living a few years in Saint Petersburg, Russia, which is famous for courtyards of this type.
>A world where all the streets have shade and no cars
You do understand this sounds attractive only for a certain type of climates, and for others “every street being mostly in shadow” is a big downside, right?
A few more questions:
- It’s not just sunlight “underground” levels are deprived of. It’s also any kind of personal space outside one’s residence (like yard, terrace or patio), and yes any kind of view from a window, other than a wall of another building.
- What happens if you need to rebuild something on the −3d floor underneath a walking street?
- Do you have any calculations regarding the crane space? I know nothing about construction machinery, but just from gawking at it, seems like a crane can’t reach much further than a width of an average building. Which would imply that they kind of do require more or less entire street to be able to reach at every point of every building on it.
- Firemen aren’t the only ones who need to get around quickly, it also includes police and ambulance. And the latter also needs transport to carry patients and equipment.
- Speaking of firemen, carrying personnel isn’t the only function of a fire engine. Granted, you have CO2 and high-pressure water delivered through dedicated networks of pipes (which need to be built and maintained). What about hoses, chemical extinguishers, breathing apparatuses, tools, ladders and whatever other equipment is used in modern fire fighting—are firemen expected to carry it all on their backs? Also, how they would get with a fire hose on say 5th floor above a pedestrian-only street which is physically incapable of supporting a fire engine?
- How healthy is it from the noise/exhaust perspective to have a fully enclosed tunnel filled with trucks right behind your wall or underneath your floor? How much insulation and ventilation is required to make it healthy for the residents, as well as for the drivers and bus riders, and how much more expensive it makes the project?
- Regular cities in rainy climates see their drainage systems overflown from time to time. It usually ends up in small floods, blocked roads, damage to vehicles and first floors of the buildings. What such an event would look like with a park or street atop of a very wide building?
- What about snow? It won’t just flow down the drain pipe. Usually people clean it from the rooftops (which are often made inclined to facilitate the process) more or less manually and then use heavy machinery to clean it off the streets. You explicitly state that the top level is too weak to allow heavy machinery on it, so cleaning it can be a very labor-intensive task. Same goes to many other park-maintenance work, come to think about it.
- One of the common problems of modern cities is that they stink. Making them denser and more enclosed increases this problem proportionally.
- On a single lane street with no parking lane, every accident or failure immobilizing a car will completely block the traffic.
- Starship delivers relatively cheap stuff—like food—over regular streets where there’s plenty of bystanders. If you suggest delivering everything, including things like laptopts and phones and jewelry, by small robots driving through enclosed ways directly through your city’s ghetto, theft will become quite an issue.
- Without PRT, which is optional in your model as far as I understand it, disabled, old, obese, sick, injured or just very physically unfit people will have no good way of getting around.
- A roof of most high-raise building is covered by various air conditioning equipment, ventilation exhausts and such. There’ll be only more of these in buildings which have no streets between them. So a rooftop park should be full of these things, puffing out stench and hot air. You may raise them above the walking level, but it still won’t look very good.
- This creates a whole lot of new infrastructure every new building needs to be plugged into, as well as new requirements (ability to support extra weight, noise insulation), which makes new development a lot more expensive.
Overall it seems like you’re referring to “Seeing Like a State” as an example of what not to do, than go and do exactly what it warns against (full disclosure—I’m actually familiar with the book only from the SSC post). Rotating an evenly-spaced rectangular grid 45° and adding evenly spaced rectangular zig-zag to it doesn’t stop it from being an evenly-spaced rectangular grid. Obviously modern cities aren’t utilizing the space perfectly, but I believe in large part that “wasted” space provides slack to accommodate imperfect coordination, things breaking, environment and terrain, and other fuzziness of the real world. Your proposal addresses only a part of the coordination problems, by assuming the place is uniquely well-governed.
First, I want to thank you for thinking critically about this. I appreciate your efforts and line of reasoning.
Poor people tend to want sunlight more and are less able to afford it here.
So first, note that this is correlation and not a direct relationship. I’d love to see a study here.
I think this also is mostly resolved by the market: Poor people wanting sunlight will live more crowded in sunlit sections. Middle class people not needing sunlight will live further down in less crowded conditions. Rich people will just pay the premium and live in spacious conditions with sun.
If sunlight turns out to be a huge constraint, it reduces maximum density considerably but still allows for densities multiple times the densest cities we see today.
Columns of outside don’t work in high latitudes for people that want sunlight.
I next mention dense thin rows of buildings lining streets. The streets would be north/south to handle this.
You need streets with not much shade for some climates.
Yeah, the streets with shade thing is just an example to show walkability in nice climates. I agree you can’t do all of these in such climates, and that may make them poor choices to starting such a city there.
What happens if you need to rebuild something on the 3rd floor underneath a walking street?
You can have thinner walking streets supported by the buildings to the side as well as the roof of the building supporting it, but in general you may have to shut down that street when rebuilding it.
How far can cranes reach anyway?
Typically 230 ft, so ideally you have a grid of crane points spaced so half the diagonal is that distance. With a square grid that gives 320 ft between adjacent grid points. You can either space streets to line up with this grid or the grid will be more constrained somehow.
Police and medical need to move quickly; fire and medical need to carry stuff.
Police, fire, and medical can still use truck lanes to carry a bunch of stuff quickly in an emergency. 15 mph is faster when things are much closer together. Elevators can bring them with equipment to the street level, where so long as their equipment is relatively lightweight, it can still be electrically powered and easy to move.
What about maneuvering fire hoses outside high floors?
You can use the building across the street, ladders on the outside of that building, extendable emergency bridges, something like a really tall maneuverable ladder that attaches to rails on another building, or a helicopter with a platform dangling from it.
What about truck noise and air pollution?
Heavy trucks are about 80 db at 50 ft going 30 mph. I think soundproofing a 60 db reduction isn’t that expensive, maybe $2 / sq ft of wall in the US? Since the air pollution is concentrated in one area, you can use air filters to get rid of most of it. Ventilation is also a lot cheaper than full HVAC.
Drainage system failure effects are multiplied.
Yeah, you either need very good drainage reliability and throughput or this won’t work in certain climates.
Snow
I’m not too sure about this; maybe salt the streets or use airplanes to blanket everything in salt? Maybe heat smaller sections and have people push snow into those sections? Also, you can still have some space on streets or roofs for heavy machinery in exchange for higher construction costs for that part of the roof.
Cities stink and higher density multiplies this.
So, crowding is the same. I don’t think either of us knows the exact causes of city stink, which would be helpful here. Air filters and ventilation should help address this.
Parking lanes are necessary to prevent failures from blocking traffic.
This depends a bit on how close you need parking to be in the case of failure. There’s still some parking, and even a parking lane can be filled with cars, as is usually the case in Manhattan. I imagine the solution here is adding paid parking spots until this is not a huge issue or having low latency towing.
Robo delivery theft
If robots are in a fully enclosed tube, it’s still pretty hard to just take one. The robots can also communicate position and video live with a computer system and the city can respond quickly if something is off.
transport accessibility
This already isn’t an issue with trains. Lightweight electric wheelchairs shouldn’t be an issue on the street. A few ramps at changing street levels can accommodate forced street level transitions.
rooftop HVAC street/park pollution
Air filters and lower surface area help a lot with stink and cooling here. Piping ventilation from buildings under streets through side buildings should help with concentrating this into parks. From there, concentrating HVAC units on rooftops minimizes interaction with walking space. You can also do most of the heating/cooling with ground-based heat pumps to reduce these units entirely to huge fans.
This creates a whole lot of new infrastructure every new building needs to be plugged into, as well as new requirements (ability to support extra weight, noise insulation), which makes new development a lot more expensive.
Definitely more expensive; However, I don’t think it’s that much more: Noise insulation is pretty cheap. The extra weight supported here is the same eventual overall weight. Again, this expense is borne when it becomes worth it anyway.
Seeing Like a State
*Note: I’ve also only read Scott’s post.
This is important and I want to address this further. Note that the design here doesn’t say “here’s exactly how the buildings are laid out and what they’re used for”, nor “we’re designing for this fixed density”. Furthermore, the design is not a whole lot different in scope from what we see today in many suburbs and cities. Grids are pretty common, and Jane Jacobs (sort of the antithesis of Le Corbusier, the father of Brasilia’s design) basically thinks they’re great (and a lot better than suburb culdesacs). A grid is fine in optimal conditions, and if the terrain and environment make that a dumb idea just drop the grid and design around the terrain. It’s not critical to have a perfect grid or anything.
Poor people tend to want sunlight more and are less able to afford it here.
While your other summaries are fair, this is very much not what I said. I’m not saying poor people want sunlight more, I’m saying humans regardless of income on average prefer having sunlight and whatever else windows give. (Proof: building codes, seasonal affective disorder, human evolutionary history and any housing market ever. Take e.g. the Bay Area rental housing—rooms with tiny windows do exist but they are confined to the cheapest segment of the market, which is exactly my point. While huge floor-to-ceiling panoramic windows is a common feature of luxury housing everywhere.)
So while yes some middle-class people will be ok with living on the underground levels, and some poor people will chip in to live more crowded but with sunlight. But large and by the principle will be (as it is now to some extent) - the higher floor the higher price. Compare how now, large and buy people live in old rundown apartments when they can’t afford any better, although sure there’s some fraction of people who can and just don’t care. So basically what I’m saying, is that your city’s worst neighborhoods are now very literally hidden under nice parks and walking streets with upscale restaurants (as you said cheaper restaurants will likely opt for delivery-only), physically invisible for the rich people in their penthouses. And sunlight and fresh air (as in actually fresh, not from HVAC) are in a sense turned from something everyone can have to luxury good. I’d be the last person to discard any project just because it looks ugly, but you need a big fat argument right on top about why it only looks ugly and in fact will be better for everyone (or realistically for most). And just saying “but some people don’t even like sunlight” solves the problem about as well as saying “but some people like to sleep under the open sky” solves the problem of homelessness.
Columns of outside don’t work in high latitudes for people that want sunlight.
Indeed you mention dense thin rows of buildings, but doesn’t it change the whole calculus here? And more or less turns this into a Manhattan with underground car tunnels, or something close to it? I’m also not quite convinced this approach will work that well even in California, in the sense of making people happy with their view. Plus, when there’s a lot of another problem arises with these shafts—they heat up very quickly without wind. Yes, ventilation, but that costs money and I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a “ventilated courtyard”, so probably nontrivial amount of money.
What about truck noise and air pollution?
Why are we talking about 50ft here? I thought, without any sidewalks and extra lanes, on the track-only street it’ll be more like 5 feet from the wall at most. And I’d guess pick noise is acceleration, not steady movement. Likely still can make it work, as well as ventilation, but if the costs were trivial we’d be building under or right next (as in, 10 feet) to highways all the time. Plus, add enclosed space—reflected sound just goes to the opposite wall.
Snow - maybe salt the streets or use airplanes to blanket everything in salt?
Just. No. The correct procedure is you first remove bulk of the snow, then add salt so any residuals melt and flow down the drains. If you salt half a feet of snow you’ll end up with half a feet of squishy, greyish-brown, caustic mud, which is exactly as good for shoes, clothes, health and city’s appearance as it sounds. Been there, tried that. (Not with airplanes though, this would have added benefit of salting anyone who had imprudence to be out or open their window at that time.)
The problem with melting is that water has huge heat of fusion. Going with your 0.5 miles example, to melt 6 inches of fresh snow—a large but not extraordinary amount to fall in a day or two—you’d need around 1.1 millions kwh of energy, which is on the same order of magnitude 200k people are consuming in winter in one day. That not counting heating it up to the melting point. So again, nothing impossible but even more expenses into infrastructure and electricity or fuel. On the other hand, in colder climates you’ll have to build heavier anyway to protect from cold, so probably making the top layer able to support some kind of machinery is less of an issue.
Robo delivery theft
Yeah, I also thought of a fully enclosed tube, but then you can’t share roads with heavy vehicles and need to build even more infrastructure. Not just the tube, but access ports to it in case a robot breaks and blocks it, something for robots to navigate off, and so on. Skilled people can hack a bike lock in seconds, I don’t think breaking into a robot with a crowbar would take much longer. Not unsolvable problems both, but add more expenses.
Overall yes, you’re totally right that all these problems are solvable by throwing enough money on them (except for no windows in the “underground” levels. You either don’t have them and it’s a problem, or you do and it’s basically a regular densely built city plus some futuristic delivery infrastructure, if I understand the concept correctly). And in most cases it’s not huge amount of money. But those not huge amounts do add up, so does the space that some of the solutions require, and decreases in denizens’ comfort that some of them cause. Combined, it can easily change the outcome of the calculation.
Seeing Like a State
Firstly, I used grids only as a metaphor, obviously there’s nothing wrong with them per se, sorry if that wasn’t obvious.
Yes you do add some flexibility in some points. But the core approach remains the same—top down planning, centered around maximizing a relatively small amount of metrics under an unrealistically small amount of constraints, with a bunch of quick fixes added afterwards. I’m not familiar with how they go around planning successful suburbs and cities from scratch, but I’d guess there’s much more of “Here’s the best practices and approaches that worked in the past, and here’s some good examples, let’s build something similar but fixing the known problems”, and much less of “Here’s the two metrics that matter, lets crank them up as high as possible and then correct for whatever problems might come to mind”.
I think it’s illustrative how your suggested solutions to most of the problems require at least one of the three: governmental spending (air filters, snow, first responders), regulations (noise insulation, walls strength, ventilation) or centralization (robo delivery pipes, centralized heat pumps). The first two are inevitable provided by the government, which is rarely good at fine tuning to the precise needs of the population, the last can be in theory done by a private company, but that would be a monopoly with infinitely high entry barrier for competitors, so no better in practice. So it’s very easy to see how all of the problems—noise, stale air, ugly looking parks, lack of sunlight in winter and sizzling heat in the courtyards in summer—get solved just to the point where almost nobody actually dies and (optimistically) not too many people leave the city, but nowhere nearly enough to make the life there actually pleasant.
Another illustrative point is how when it comes to preferences people might actually have, you reason from the outside view of what’s technically possible. But they can supplement sunlight with LED lights, right? But someone able to walk 50 meters to their car but not 500 meters to the train station can use a wheelchair?Sure they can, but more often than not it’ll make them miserable, and probably incur extra financial costs on the people already not in the best position to handle them.
OK, I might not understand what you’re saying here. I agree that this is the primary issue people raise and that means this isn’t discussed enough, but I figured that would dominate the article if I focused on it.
A few things… Circulating air even from all the way outside is a lot cheaper and easier to deal with than the sunlight issue, so fresh air is really not a huge issue.
You mention “worst neighborhoods” near the ground implying there is a section of the city where crime is high, but there are no streets near the bottom: Any poor people living below are living in a small space accessible by stairs or elevators directly from the streets at the top.
Idk if this is complete, but here’s a capitalist argument: People vote with their feet. They can always live further out and commute in. If the conditions are actually worse than another place, poorer folks will try it out and leave to enjoy life somewhere more reasonable. If the full negative sunlight/window economic externalities caused by putting up a new building are assessed and charged to the new owner (I should include this), the owner won’t build if he (and others) can’t get enough return on the lower sections. If people don’t like not having sunlight and they’re still there, maybe it’s legitimately worth it to them? For example, maybe they’re earning way more money than they would otherwise.
Indeed you mention dense thin rows of buildings, but doesn’t it change the whole calculus here? And more or less turns this into a Manhattan with underground car tunnels, or something close to it? I’m also not quite convinced this approach will work that well even in California, in the sense of making people happy with their view. Plus, when there’s a lot of another problem arises with these shafts—they heat up very quickly without wind. Yes, ventilation, but that costs money and I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a “ventilated courtyard”, so probably nontrivial amount of money.
I think dense thin rows of buildings can still achieve very high per-floor area ratios, maybe 2⁄3 or so, allowing most of the ridiculously high density Manhattan doesn’t come close to. View can probably be included in the negative externalities charged to new construction. Hot air rises, giving a free ventilation force. Just want to note here that moving this amount of air with fans really isn’t that expensive anyway.
What about truck noise?
Yeah, 50 ft is just the figure I found. Trucks would also likely be going slower than 30 mph. “For every doubling of distance, the sound level reduces by 6 decibels.” Soundproofing is a combination of reflection and absorption; Add absorption materials to reduce echos. People live next to streets with trucks using them already, right?
Snow
Fair enough, how about pushing snow into chutes or tubs and having trucks ship it out? Or throw it into the trash AVAC system?
Robo delivery theft
Tbh fast response times, dash cams, high use streets, and police should be enough to handle this even with mixed traffic, although the separated infrastructure pays for itself readily in robot speed and throughput. Navigation can be done either with paint and optical sensors, magnetic markers, or fixed digital broadcasts from frequent points.
Seeing Like a State
OK, the point I’m trying to make here is that these critiques apply as much to existing suburbs and cities as they do here in the sense that: Centralized systems like mass transit, utilities, and emergency services are everywhere. Regulations and codes around building and transportation are everywhere. Government spending on centralized systems and many more things is also everywhere. The amount of top down planning used in existing municipalities is already quite high, and I think this about matches it, not being notably more other than just actually addressing super-high density development. I just don’t think the comparison to master-planning is actually reasonable.
If anything this design moves more things from a flat “no, everything has to be this way” to a “sure if it’s actually worth it” approach to regulation. I’m sure there are things about peoples’ preferences I’m not aware of here, and it’s important to make things a little flexible and open to later change because of that. However, I’m not sure you have a better understanding, either. Existing systems have made the decision for us on a lot of matters and may realistically not have a lot of reason to those decisions.
Hm, frankly I have quite a few issues with this proposal, mostly boiling down to it ignoring the real world problems. Sorry if it sounds harsh, know that I didn’t mean it. Frankly, I like the idea of arcology very much myself, but I don’t believe it can work with the existing technologies only, at least not in an economically viable way.
>Keep in mind here that people are different and that some aren’t nearly as concerned with sunlight or windows in their own home.
Willingness of people to tolerate lack of sunlight (just like lack of any other nice thing) tends to have strong negative correlation with they ability to pay premium for it. So in practice we’re talking about poor people being confined to [effectively] underground ghettos and only richer people being able to afford natural sunlight in their homes. At least this fact should be explicitly mentioned and addressed in the discussion.
> you can bring columns of outside enclosed with windows and textured facades down into buildings periodically
Such things do exist, and they serve exactly one purpose—making the building nominally compliant with the regulations, while not increasing actual liveablility at all, especially in higher latitudes, where the sun will pretty much never be seen at the bottom of such a shaft. Speaking here from the experience of living a few years in Saint Petersburg, Russia, which is famous for courtyards of this type.
>A world where all the streets have shade and no cars
You do understand this sounds attractive only for a certain type of climates, and for others “every street being mostly in shadow” is a big downside, right?
A few more questions:
- It’s not just sunlight “underground” levels are deprived of. It’s also any kind of personal space outside one’s residence (like yard, terrace or patio), and yes any kind of view from a window, other than a wall of another building.
- What happens if you need to rebuild something on the −3d floor underneath a walking street?
- Do you have any calculations regarding the crane space? I know nothing about construction machinery, but just from gawking at it, seems like a crane can’t reach much further than a width of an average building. Which would imply that they kind of do require more or less entire street to be able to reach at every point of every building on it.
- Firemen aren’t the only ones who need to get around quickly, it also includes police and ambulance. And the latter also needs transport to carry patients and equipment.
- Speaking of firemen, carrying personnel isn’t the only function of a fire engine. Granted, you have CO2 and high-pressure water delivered through dedicated networks of pipes (which need to be built and maintained). What about hoses, chemical extinguishers, breathing apparatuses, tools, ladders and whatever other equipment is used in modern fire fighting—are firemen expected to carry it all on their backs? Also, how they would get with a fire hose on say 5th floor above a pedestrian-only street which is physically incapable of supporting a fire engine?
- How healthy is it from the noise/exhaust perspective to have a fully enclosed tunnel filled with trucks right behind your wall or underneath your floor? How much insulation and ventilation is required to make it healthy for the residents, as well as for the drivers and bus riders, and how much more expensive it makes the project?
- Regular cities in rainy climates see their drainage systems overflown from time to time. It usually ends up in small floods, blocked roads, damage to vehicles and first floors of the buildings. What such an event would look like with a park or street atop of a very wide building?
- What about snow? It won’t just flow down the drain pipe. Usually people clean it from the rooftops (which are often made inclined to facilitate the process) more or less manually and then use heavy machinery to clean it off the streets. You explicitly state that the top level is too weak to allow heavy machinery on it, so cleaning it can be a very labor-intensive task. Same goes to many other park-maintenance work, come to think about it.
- One of the common problems of modern cities is that they stink. Making them denser and more enclosed increases this problem proportionally.
- On a single lane street with no parking lane, every accident or failure immobilizing a car will completely block the traffic.
- Starship delivers relatively cheap stuff—like food—over regular streets where there’s plenty of bystanders. If you suggest delivering everything, including things like laptopts and phones and jewelry, by small robots driving through enclosed ways directly through your city’s ghetto, theft will become quite an issue.
- Without PRT, which is optional in your model as far as I understand it, disabled, old, obese, sick, injured or just very physically unfit people will have no good way of getting around.
- A roof of most high-raise building is covered by various air conditioning equipment, ventilation exhausts and such. There’ll be only more of these in buildings which have no streets between them. So a rooftop park should be full of these things, puffing out stench and hot air. You may raise them above the walking level, but it still won’t look very good.
- This creates a whole lot of new infrastructure every new building needs to be plugged into, as well as new requirements (ability to support extra weight, noise insulation), which makes new development a lot more expensive.
Overall it seems like you’re referring to “Seeing Like a State” as an example of what not to do, than go and do exactly what it warns against (full disclosure—I’m actually familiar with the book only from the SSC post). Rotating an evenly-spaced rectangular grid 45° and adding evenly spaced rectangular zig-zag to it doesn’t stop it from being an evenly-spaced rectangular grid. Obviously modern cities aren’t utilizing the space perfectly, but I believe in large part that “wasted” space provides slack to accommodate imperfect coordination, things breaking, environment and terrain, and other fuzziness of the real world. Your proposal addresses only a part of the coordination problems, by assuming the place is uniquely well-governed.
First, I want to thank you for thinking critically about this. I appreciate your efforts and line of reasoning.
So first, note that this is correlation and not a direct relationship. I’d love to see a study here.
I think this also is mostly resolved by the market: Poor people wanting sunlight will live more crowded in sunlit sections. Middle class people not needing sunlight will live further down in less crowded conditions. Rich people will just pay the premium and live in spacious conditions with sun.
If sunlight turns out to be a huge constraint, it reduces maximum density considerably but still allows for densities multiple times the densest cities we see today.
I next mention dense thin rows of buildings lining streets. The streets would be north/south to handle this.
Yeah, the streets with shade thing is just an example to show walkability in nice climates. I agree you can’t do all of these in such climates, and that may make them poor choices to starting such a city there.
You can have thinner walking streets supported by the buildings to the side as well as the roof of the building supporting it, but in general you may have to shut down that street when rebuilding it.
Typically 230 ft, so ideally you have a grid of crane points spaced so half the diagonal is that distance. With a square grid that gives 320 ft between adjacent grid points. You can either space streets to line up with this grid or the grid will be more constrained somehow.
Police, fire, and medical can still use truck lanes to carry a bunch of stuff quickly in an emergency. 15 mph is faster when things are much closer together. Elevators can bring them with equipment to the street level, where so long as their equipment is relatively lightweight, it can still be electrically powered and easy to move.
You can use the building across the street, ladders on the outside of that building, extendable emergency bridges, something like a really tall maneuverable ladder that attaches to rails on another building, or a helicopter with a platform dangling from it.
Heavy trucks are about 80 db at 50 ft going 30 mph. I think soundproofing a 60 db reduction isn’t that expensive, maybe $2 / sq ft of wall in the US? Since the air pollution is concentrated in one area, you can use air filters to get rid of most of it. Ventilation is also a lot cheaper than full HVAC.
Yeah, you either need very good drainage reliability and throughput or this won’t work in certain climates.
I’m not too sure about this; maybe salt the streets or use airplanes to blanket everything in salt? Maybe heat smaller sections and have people push snow into those sections? Also, you can still have some space on streets or roofs for heavy machinery in exchange for higher construction costs for that part of the roof.
So, crowding is the same. I don’t think either of us knows the exact causes of city stink, which would be helpful here. Air filters and ventilation should help address this.
This depends a bit on how close you need parking to be in the case of failure. There’s still some parking, and even a parking lane can be filled with cars, as is usually the case in Manhattan. I imagine the solution here is adding paid parking spots until this is not a huge issue or having low latency towing.
If robots are in a fully enclosed tube, it’s still pretty hard to just take one. The robots can also communicate position and video live with a computer system and the city can respond quickly if something is off.
This already isn’t an issue with trains. Lightweight electric wheelchairs shouldn’t be an issue on the street. A few ramps at changing street levels can accommodate forced street level transitions.
Air filters and lower surface area help a lot with stink and cooling here. Piping ventilation from buildings under streets through side buildings should help with concentrating this into parks. From there, concentrating HVAC units on rooftops minimizes interaction with walking space. You can also do most of the heating/cooling with ground-based heat pumps to reduce these units entirely to huge fans.
Definitely more expensive; However, I don’t think it’s that much more: Noise insulation is pretty cheap. The extra weight supported here is the same eventual overall weight. Again, this expense is borne when it becomes worth it anyway.
*Note: I’ve also only read Scott’s post.
This is important and I want to address this further. Note that the design here doesn’t say “here’s exactly how the buildings are laid out and what they’re used for”, nor “we’re designing for this fixed density”. Furthermore, the design is not a whole lot different in scope from what we see today in many suburbs and cities. Grids are pretty common, and Jane Jacobs (sort of the antithesis of Le Corbusier, the father of Brasilia’s design) basically thinks they’re great (and a lot better than suburb culdesacs). A grid is fine in optimal conditions, and if the terrain and environment make that a dumb idea just drop the grid and design around the terrain. It’s not critical to have a perfect grid or anything.
While your other summaries are fair, this is very much not what I said. I’m not saying poor people want sunlight more, I’m saying humans regardless of income on average prefer having sunlight and whatever else windows give. (Proof: building codes, seasonal affective disorder, human evolutionary history and any housing market ever. Take e.g. the Bay Area rental housing—rooms with tiny windows do exist but they are confined to the cheapest segment of the market, which is exactly my point. While huge floor-to-ceiling panoramic windows is a common feature of luxury housing everywhere.)
So while yes some middle-class people will be ok with living on the underground levels, and some poor people will chip in to live more crowded but with sunlight. But large and by the principle will be (as it is now to some extent) - the higher floor the higher price. Compare how now, large and buy people live in old rundown apartments when they can’t afford any better, although sure there’s some fraction of people who can and just don’t care. So basically what I’m saying, is that your city’s worst neighborhoods are now very literally hidden under nice parks and walking streets with upscale restaurants (as you said cheaper restaurants will likely opt for delivery-only), physically invisible for the rich people in their penthouses. And sunlight and fresh air (as in actually fresh, not from HVAC) are in a sense turned from something everyone can have to luxury good. I’d be the last person to discard any project just because it looks ugly, but you need a big fat argument right on top about why it only looks ugly and in fact will be better for everyone (or realistically for most). And just saying “but some people don’t even like sunlight” solves the problem about as well as saying “but some people like to sleep under the open sky” solves the problem of homelessness.
Indeed you mention dense thin rows of buildings, but doesn’t it change the whole calculus here? And more or less turns this into a Manhattan with underground car tunnels, or something close to it? I’m also not quite convinced this approach will work that well even in California, in the sense of making people happy with their view. Plus, when there’s a lot of another problem arises with these shafts—they heat up very quickly without wind. Yes, ventilation, but that costs money and I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a “ventilated courtyard”, so probably nontrivial amount of money.
Why are we talking about 50ft here? I thought, without any sidewalks and extra lanes, on the track-only street it’ll be more like 5 feet from the wall at most. And I’d guess pick noise is acceleration, not steady movement. Likely still can make it work, as well as ventilation, but if the costs were trivial we’d be building under or right next (as in, 10 feet) to highways all the time. Plus, add enclosed space—reflected sound just goes to the opposite wall.
Just. No. The correct procedure is you first remove bulk of the snow, then add salt so any residuals melt and flow down the drains. If you salt half a feet of snow you’ll end up with half a feet of squishy, greyish-brown, caustic mud, which is exactly as good for shoes, clothes, health and city’s appearance as it sounds. Been there, tried that. (Not with airplanes though, this would have added benefit of salting anyone who had imprudence to be out or open their window at that time.)
The problem with melting is that water has huge heat of fusion. Going with your 0.5 miles example, to melt 6 inches of fresh snow—a large but not extraordinary amount to fall in a day or two—you’d need around 1.1 millions kwh of energy, which is on the same order of magnitude 200k people are consuming in winter in one day. That not counting heating it up to the melting point. So again, nothing impossible but even more expenses into infrastructure and electricity or fuel. On the other hand, in colder climates you’ll have to build heavier anyway to protect from cold, so probably making the top layer able to support some kind of machinery is less of an issue.
Yeah, I also thought of a fully enclosed tube, but then you can’t share roads with heavy vehicles and need to build even more infrastructure. Not just the tube, but access ports to it in case a robot breaks and blocks it, something for robots to navigate off, and so on. Skilled people can hack a bike lock in seconds, I don’t think breaking into a robot with a crowbar would take much longer. Not unsolvable problems both, but add more expenses.
Overall yes, you’re totally right that all these problems are solvable by throwing enough money on them (except for no windows in the “underground” levels. You either don’t have them and it’s a problem, or you do and it’s basically a regular densely built city plus some futuristic delivery infrastructure, if I understand the concept correctly). And in most cases it’s not huge amount of money. But those not huge amounts do add up, so does the space that some of the solutions require, and decreases in denizens’ comfort that some of them cause. Combined, it can easily change the outcome of the calculation.
Firstly, I used grids only as a metaphor, obviously there’s nothing wrong with them per se, sorry if that wasn’t obvious.
Yes you do add some flexibility in some points. But the core approach remains the same—top down planning, centered around maximizing a relatively small amount of metrics under an unrealistically small amount of constraints, with a bunch of quick fixes added afterwards. I’m not familiar with how they go around planning successful suburbs and cities from scratch, but I’d guess there’s much more of “Here’s the best practices and approaches that worked in the past, and here’s some good examples, let’s build something similar but fixing the known problems”, and much less of “Here’s the two metrics that matter, lets crank them up as high as possible and then correct for whatever problems might come to mind”.
I think it’s illustrative how your suggested solutions to most of the problems require at least one of the three: governmental spending (air filters, snow, first responders), regulations (noise insulation, walls strength, ventilation) or centralization (robo delivery pipes, centralized heat pumps). The first two are inevitable provided by the government, which is rarely good at fine tuning to the precise needs of the population, the last can be in theory done by a private company, but that would be a monopoly with infinitely high entry barrier for competitors, so no better in practice. So it’s very easy to see how all of the problems—noise, stale air, ugly looking parks, lack of sunlight in winter and sizzling heat in the courtyards in summer—get solved just to the point where almost nobody actually dies and (optimistically) not too many people leave the city, but nowhere nearly enough to make the life there actually pleasant.
Another illustrative point is how when it comes to preferences people might actually have, you reason from the outside view of what’s technically possible. But they can supplement sunlight with LED lights, right? But someone able to walk 50 meters to their car but not 500 meters to the train station can use a wheelchair?Sure they can, but more often than not it’ll make them miserable, and probably incur extra financial costs on the people already not in the best position to handle them.
Thanks again for your input!
OK, I might not understand what you’re saying here. I agree that this is the primary issue people raise and that means this isn’t discussed enough, but I figured that would dominate the article if I focused on it.
A few things… Circulating air even from all the way outside is a lot cheaper and easier to deal with than the sunlight issue, so fresh air is really not a huge issue.
You mention “worst neighborhoods” near the ground implying there is a section of the city where crime is high, but there are no streets near the bottom: Any poor people living below are living in a small space accessible by stairs or elevators directly from the streets at the top.
Idk if this is complete, but here’s a capitalist argument: People vote with their feet. They can always live further out and commute in. If the conditions are actually worse than another place, poorer folks will try it out and leave to enjoy life somewhere more reasonable. If the full negative sunlight/window economic externalities caused by putting up a new building are assessed and charged to the new owner (I should include this), the owner won’t build if he (and others) can’t get enough return on the lower sections. If people don’t like not having sunlight and they’re still there, maybe it’s legitimately worth it to them? For example, maybe they’re earning way more money than they would otherwise.
I think dense thin rows of buildings can still achieve very high per-floor area ratios, maybe 2⁄3 or so, allowing most of the ridiculously high density Manhattan doesn’t come close to. View can probably be included in the negative externalities charged to new construction. Hot air rises, giving a free ventilation force. Just want to note here that moving this amount of air with fans really isn’t that expensive anyway.
Yeah, 50 ft is just the figure I found. Trucks would also likely be going slower than 30 mph. “For every doubling of distance, the sound level reduces by 6 decibels.” Soundproofing is a combination of reflection and absorption; Add absorption materials to reduce echos. People live next to streets with trucks using them already, right?
Fair enough, how about pushing snow into chutes or tubs and having trucks ship it out? Or throw it into the trash AVAC system?
Tbh fast response times, dash cams, high use streets, and police should be enough to handle this even with mixed traffic, although the separated infrastructure pays for itself readily in robot speed and throughput. Navigation can be done either with paint and optical sensors, magnetic markers, or fixed digital broadcasts from frequent points.
OK, the point I’m trying to make here is that these critiques apply as much to existing suburbs and cities as they do here in the sense that: Centralized systems like mass transit, utilities, and emergency services are everywhere. Regulations and codes around building and transportation are everywhere. Government spending on centralized systems and many more things is also everywhere. The amount of top down planning used in existing municipalities is already quite high, and I think this about matches it, not being notably more other than just actually addressing super-high density development. I just don’t think the comparison to master-planning is actually reasonable.
If anything this design moves more things from a flat “no, everything has to be this way” to a “sure if it’s actually worth it” approach to regulation. I’m sure there are things about peoples’ preferences I’m not aware of here, and it’s important to make things a little flexible and open to later change because of that. However, I’m not sure you have a better understanding, either. Existing systems have made the decision for us on a lot of matters and may realistically not have a lot of reason to those decisions.