I enjoyed the post. Very excited about cheap delivery infrastructure and vacuum garbage disposal! =3 Actually furious that it hasn’t been made already!
I wonder if it would be possible to design an interior psuedoexterior space with very bright lighting and spacious open ceilings that would pretty much feel like being outdoors. It wouldn’t have to pretend to be an outdoor space and paint the ceiling blue or anything like that, I’ve always found that creepy, but if you raise ceilings and light and ventilate well, maybe that would be enough? Residents would have to supplement their Vitamin D, as it’s very unlikely that they’d be able to maintain the habit of visiting the surface gardens often enough, if the space worked properly. But most people probably need to supplement their Vitamin D regardless (especially during these trying times, by the way).
I have some thoughts about how to ensure that people end up being next to people they want to be next to… I think you do need a mechanism to arrange this. If you get rid of rent as a fitness-selector, haha, some people are going to want to replace that with something. But even without regards to that, a mechanism for this would be really useful for finding places you want, overcoming coordination problems of forming intentional communities, generally planning rearrangements of the city to maximize eudaimonia generation efficiency.
I guess I’ll outline it. This is the Propinquity Cities concept:
Residents (who have funded, maybe up-front, a portion of the construction costs of the city, and pay rates) submit a sort of utility function over features of their dwelling and the types of people and services they want to be near to.
There will need to be some process for keeping accurate records about the features dwellings have. There should be an accurate, up to date list of all of the apartments that face east, have wooden floors, contain a red room etc. Ideally, this would be resident-driven. No one should be unable to find a home that meets any of their weird preferences as a result of some beurocrat not thinking that feature was worth keeping records on.
Hm the residents’ preference functions could also be used to measure the population’s desires and inform ongoing construction. Since all construction is managed by the city, that will be necessary.
The city has an aggregation function over those, which is essentially its occupancy law.
An open process run by the city awards a prize to the group who can produce the highest-scoring allocation of residents to allotments according to the city aggregation function over the resident’s preference functions. The function also tries to avoid moving people around more often than is necessary. Most years (at least once the city has settled into things a bit), a person wont be moved.
Absolute pandemonium on moving day.
New intentional communities form in every corner of the city. Everyone is in a place where they want to be and are wanted. There is no rent to pay.
I attempted to address rent stuff in a reply to your other comment. I generally agree on psuedoexterior spaces.
I expect if intentional communities or micro placement coordination are valuable enough and rent/space unregulated, communities will outbid people with weaker ties both in construction and allocation. It’s possible you can overcome the frictional costs of all this allocation being centrally planned, but I’m skeptical of the overall value.
I enjoyed the post. Very excited about cheap delivery infrastructure and vacuum garbage disposal! =3 Actually furious that it hasn’t been made already!
I wonder if it would be possible to design an interior psuedoexterior space with very bright lighting and spacious open ceilings that would pretty much feel like being outdoors. It wouldn’t have to pretend to be an outdoor space and paint the ceiling blue or anything like that, I’ve always found that creepy, but if you raise ceilings and light and ventilate well, maybe that would be enough? Residents would have to supplement their Vitamin D, as it’s very unlikely that they’d be able to maintain the habit of visiting the surface gardens often enough, if the space worked properly. But most people probably need to supplement their Vitamin D regardless (especially during these trying times, by the way).
My main objection is that private ownership of urban land is totally incompatible with approaching an unboundedly low cost of living, as elaborated here https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fnzZCq4XCeoWGPEp8/a-scalable-urban-design-and-the-single-building-city?commentId=RsctKt8Hpvyr4uZRS but most of your post is still useful even given that.
I have some thoughts about how to ensure that people end up being next to people they want to be next to… I think you do need a mechanism to arrange this. If you get rid of rent as a fitness-selector, haha, some people are going to want to replace that with something. But even without regards to that, a mechanism for this would be really useful for finding places you want, overcoming coordination problems of forming intentional communities, generally planning rearrangements of the city to maximize eudaimonia generation efficiency.
I guess I’ll outline it. This is the Propinquity Cities concept:
Residents (who have funded, maybe up-front, a portion of the construction costs of the city, and pay rates) submit a sort of utility function over features of their dwelling and the types of people and services they want to be near to.
There will need to be some process for keeping accurate records about the features dwellings have. There should be an accurate, up to date list of all of the apartments that face east, have wooden floors, contain a red room etc. Ideally, this would be resident-driven. No one should be unable to find a home that meets any of their weird preferences as a result of some beurocrat not thinking that feature was worth keeping records on.
Hm the residents’ preference functions could also be used to measure the population’s desires and inform ongoing construction. Since all construction is managed by the city, that will be necessary.
The city has an aggregation function over those, which is essentially its occupancy law.
An open process run by the city awards a prize to the group who can produce the highest-scoring allocation of residents to allotments according to the city aggregation function over the resident’s preference functions. The function also tries to avoid moving people around more often than is necessary. Most years (at least once the city has settled into things a bit), a person wont be moved.
Absolute pandemonium on moving day.
New intentional communities form in every corner of the city. Everyone is in a place where they want to be and are wanted. There is no rent to pay.
I attempted to address rent stuff in a reply to your other comment. I generally agree on psuedoexterior spaces.
I expect if intentional communities or micro placement coordination are valuable enough and rent/space unregulated, communities will outbid people with weaker ties both in construction and allocation. It’s possible you can overcome the frictional costs of all this allocation being centrally planned, but I’m skeptical of the overall value.