Turned out we got freeze-drying instead.
Don’t you know that unsanctioned time travel is a crime? I thought my blog description was clear about this when it said “TIME CRIMINAL” at the top.
Interestingly, replacing all schooling with Khan Academy has one big problem in common with replacing a city with an agglomeration of villages:
You take away common ground, a schelling point to meet. No more class discussion. No more convenient shopping streets. No more pub crawls. No more cultural/literary touchstones. @mitigatedchaos
But all the pubs and shops are on the outside of the village walls, on the more heavily-trafficked streets, and thus publicly accessible, because businesses should be publicly accessible in order to get enough customers.
Even the civic center is on the outside edge so that you can have dudes over for your board gaming group or knitting club if there aren’t enough knitters in your village.
If I ever meet @mitigatedchaos in the year 1995, I’ll buy her a beer.
Past-her might probably be more thankful for a dire warning about the horrors of Shakira Law and no-go zones overtaking Europe. Eh? Eh? Wouldn’t you be, @mitigatedchaos?
Your mind jumps to this, and not 9/11?
Either Osama Bin Laden was breathtakingly stupid or delusional, or his goal wasn’t to just get the West to quit interfering in the Middle East.
9/11 is what creates the political capital necessary for George Bush to launch his Iraq War, even though it isn’t tied to it, killing thousands of Americans and over a hundred thousand Iraqis. It cost two trillion dollars, the entire lifetime economic output - total, not profit - of over five hundred thousand people, and is likely to cost an additional $4 trillion over time. This is in addition to the two trillion dollar cost of the 9/11 attack itself and its effect on the economy and the American psyche.
Before that, Islam was just considered a Weird Foreign Religion.
Of course, this would do nothing to prevent what happened at Rotherham.
However, what happened at Rotherham required the Left to jump to the defense of a designated politically-favored group when it was not justified. A lot of the Left’s sudden fascination with Islam is due to the right’s opposition to it - no 9/11 means there’s less right-wing opposition, which means there’s less left-wing counter-opposition in favor of a religion that is worse on most axes the Left says they care about than the fundamentalist Christianity they happily opposed before.
Which means “holy sht we need to do something about this systematic child sexual abuse” doesn’t get met with “SHUT UP YOU EVIL RACISTS!”
And with the other pathways in this timeline, perhaps Libya doesn’t get destabilized, or Syria doesn’t get destabilized, so there is no migration crisis.
More US military power conserved means more leverage against China and the ability to topple North Korea before the Kims get nuclear missiles. There’s a reasonably high probability that Saddam’s regime doesn’t collapse and so there’s no DAESH.
The benefits just keep going and going.
You don’t seem to understand me as well as you think you do.
How are you guys liking this sudden series of polygon-based urban planning posts?
What’s the purpose of all this Blendering? Are you just noodling around, or are you offering Serious Solutions to Today’s Problems?
I’m not dedicated enough in research to count as a Serious Person, but on the other hand a lot of Serious People have been very wrong lately.
The One Thousand Villages series is part of the general direction of this blog to search for overlooked or uninvented paths for society through an intuitive synthesis across multiple fields. (Also it has some nice art to look at which I’ll be adding to my portfolio.) The intent is that eventually some of these ideas will potentially be refined and studied more closely, possibly by others, helping society to escape a local maximum. This post on a reorganization of how schools work is similar. In both cases, the small details are less important than overall ideas that break from the consensus. It’s less about the intricate road layout than the idea of building sub-communities within cities, with friction of movement, as a means of overcoming some of the disadvantages of cities. The recent post is more about spreading the idea of guided busways as a concept.
“Okay,” you might say, “but I studied in that field and what you proposed doesn’t work for reason X.” And that would be a totally valid critique, so if you’re holding back of saying “Actually, that one-way flow through the kilometer was tried in a newtown in Britain and failed,” or something, you can go ahead with it.
Admittedly, it’s also for entertainment, too. I’m on Tumblr as opposed to writing my own SSC equivalent for a reason, I admit.
How are you guys liking this sudden series of polygon-based urban planning posts?
wonder if we could rig up an actual simulation of this stuff
I have no doubt that I could, but I can’t justify doing so without funding. You know how it is.
fund it via KickStarter on the basis that it’s developing levels for an fps-
actually that’s needless deception, the indie games market has demonstrated that people are more than willing to spend on incredibly niche geeky shit like simulating perfect virtual cities
Well, let’s see. To justify the project as a game, I’d need about 2,000 people to pay about $10, or about 1,000 people to pay about $20.
So let’s think about what that might look like.
As you may know, Skyrim compresses distance in a symbolic way by somewhere between a factor of 10 and 100. It’s how you can walk ten meters, kill a pack of wolves, then walk another ten meters and kill another pack of wolves. What often isn’t discussed is that most citybuilders do this as well, which is why they require such laughably overbuilt transit infrastructure. Cities: Skylines gives you about 36km2 to play with. Singapore is about 720km. Manhattan is about 59 kilometers.
So presumably, this simulation game would work to aggressively limit computation so that it can do a lot more computation. It would rely on a grid of 5m squares instead of allowing as much freedom in road-building. Agents would all be represented in the sim, and their paths would be stored, but visual traffic would be represented as a statistical aggregate and not following individual cars from place of employment. The visual style would be fairly simple to conserve on cycles - even people would be represented with 2m tall boxes (children with shorter boxes, obviously). Traffic paths would primarily be updated opportunistically rather than continuously.
In exchange, each resident in the city would be simulated, and a wide array of more complicated municipal policies would be available, including state ownership of housing developments, the various components needed to try the One Thousand Villages, etc. There would also be “markets” that bid somehow on jobs or properties, to decide what to do with a mixed-use zone for instance. Just managing the fine details would end up requiring some minor automation and I bet there would be a “zone for subdivision” fill tool that caused a private property developer agent to insert a dynamically-generated slice of suburbia.
Possible elements could also include political costs/capital needed to push through bulldozing houses to install new light rail, disruptions from the global economy, etc. Another element could be the cultures thing @lockrum brought up, but rather than real ethnicities (which could make people upset, and also are the largest source of real ethnic tension), they’d be represented as high school cliques or various subcultures (jocks, otakus, hipsters) and you could forcefully integrate them Lee Kwan Yew style, or they might self-segregate automatically, or they might be atomized by the distribution of jobs and housing prices. (They would probably be depicted as different-coloured two meter rectangles instead of grey ones.)
Would people fund that? I’m unsure.
How are you guys liking this sudden series of polygon-based urban planning posts?
wonder if we could rig up an actual simulation of this stuff
I have no doubt that I could, but I can’t justify doing so without funding. You know how it is.
How are you guys liking this sudden series of polygon-based urban planning posts?
Bus Tracks
The One Thousand Villages series continues, as we return to the suburbs of Flatsville, our new town in the state of Arkowa.
Wanting to avoid the sins of past American cities and avoid creating a sparse and energy-inefficient sprawl that we may become unable to maintain, our Metropolitan Planning Authority has decided to plan with an eye towards public transit from the beginning.
At this point it becomes very tempting to just put trams in everywhere. They’re reasonably quiet, they don’t emit fumes, people love riding them, and property developers view them as a long-term investment.
Unfortunately, trams are quite expensive. And, quite frankly, it would be highly irresponsible for the MPA to build such heavy public transit without knowing where the densest areas of the city will be! We can’t just dedicate an entire zone to only hotels - what do you think this is, Brasilia?
One Thousand and One Villages
Follow-up to my post One Thousand Villages, separated out so Tumblr won’t harm my precious, precious PNGs, so let’s tag some people from the last one. @wirehead-wannabe @mailadreapta @bambamramfan Let’s also tag @xhxhxhx in case he finds it interesting or discovers some glaring flaw or something.
We’ll borrow Mailadreapta’s word here and refer to the new model as a Quad - it’s a 250m x 250m area as part of a larger 1km x 1km pattern. I decided to revisit the subject and get a better sense of the scale and proportions, and in doing so, I realized that 1km x 1km is just too big for a single unit (and also too big to start with as an experiment if someone were to attempt this). We’ll call the collection of four quads a Klick.
In the above images, green is residential, blue is mixed-use/commercial, yellow is light industrial, white is civic buildings, and orange is public transit.
Noting some feedback from @mailadreapta
I think the biggest problem is employment: there’s just no way you can ensure that everyone works in their own quad, so most people will still need to leave in order to work. I assume that a high-speed thoroughfare lie along the boundaries of the square (with transit) to accommodate this.
For a similar reason, I would put the commercial and civic buildings (except for the school) among the edge: these are these are places that will be visited often by people from other villages, so keep them away from the residential center.
This is, in fact, exactly the plan. Although I did have the civic center in the middle last time.
Now then, now that that’s out of the way, let’s do some uncredentialed urban planning!
I worry you’re a bit between two stools on the traffic thing – if you plug these into an existing North American urban environment, your grid will be overwhelmed by the traffic – you’d need to emphasize the park-and-ride bits, and break from your higher-level grid to accommodate the American need for more-hierarchical traffic patterns, and loop in some freeways – or your suburb will depend on whatever mass-transit network the urban area happens to have, which might not be great
but if you build these grids outside a metro, I think it’ll end up as a strange and perhaps-inefficient bedroom community – relative to replacement-level suburban plans, which have, you know, garages and lawns and cul-de-sacs – and with traffic problems comparable to those on your metro grid
I think mailadreapta highlights the real problem, which is the coordination problem – it’d be difficult to draw both residential tenants and employers at the same time, I think, without the state capacity and influence that American suburbs don’t really have – and it’s difficult to build grids that rely on transit infrastructure that most American metros just don’t have
I’m also enough of a liberal that this sort of detailed land use planning makes me uneasy
anyways, the thing that really creeps me out is that this all feels like social housing, complete with overbearing, overpowered social workers – in an ideal world, everyone will have enough money to avoid social workers and cops, but I certainly hope that I will have enough money to avoid social workers and cops
quick questions for @mitigatedchaos while im on a plane about to take off:
It seems like these communities are insulated enough that you’ll quickly have people sort themselves into tribes, like “I’m gonna move to Silicon Klick because they’ve got computer nerds like me!”. What will stop communities from devolving into factions that are actually hostile to outsiders?
For schooling, staying in the same K-12 school with the same people would suck. Your ex is with you in three of your classes. Everyone knows about the time you pissed your pants during a math test. Your childhood bully still kicks your roller backpack.
What will we do about the kids who grow up different? It seems like from your original post that you don’t expect much movement between communities, which would suck more than it has to for any black sheep.
i have more questions but we’re about to start taxiing
edit: OH GOD sorry for the unreadable wall of text. i was on mobile and forgot to disable markdown formatting.
It seems like these communities are insulated enough that you’ll quickly have people sort themselves into tribes, like “I’m gonna move to Silicon Klick because they’ve got computer nerds like me!”. What will stop communities from devolving into factions that are actually hostile to outsiders?
By law, the development boards managing each klick or quad are not allowed to discriminate on the basis of race, nationality, sexual orientation, etc.
Not touched on in this post is that, to promote additional development and stave off NIMBYism causing mass urban sprawl, the ownership of the of the quads would have to be structured differently than one might normally do, such that net influx into the community involves a payoff to the existing residents.
Given how people actually handle home buying, I just don’t think it’s going to hit the point of being too hostile, unless you get into issues that you aren’t supposed to talk about under Liberalism.
Additionally, allowing variation on the architecture/events/etc within the quads increases municipal-level cultural diversity, even though it decreases quad-level cultural diversity. This is because culture is not individual, but networked.
Why should one set of rules rule over every community? Diversity, real diversity, means real differences.
As such, while I might limit the external architecture on the outside of the klick for the benefit of the city, I’d like to see some flexibility on aesthetics and some other things.
Let us suppose the Neo-Edo Development Group obtains a quad and builds it out in a faux traditional Japanese architectural style for otakus. It still has its civic center, but the layout contains fewer exercise machines and instead has a little movie theater. As the population density of geeks is higher, a dedicated gaming store opens in its commercial outer zone, which normally would not have met critical mass.
The Flatsville Athletic Association also develops a quad. They install more bike paths in their quad, more athletic equipment in their civic center, and a gym in their border zone called the Flatsville Sports Dome.
The Flatsville Commerce Association builds a gorgeous complex of shops and apartments called Le Petit Paris, including a miniature Eiffel Tower.
If they all have to compromise, they won’t be as satisfied with the outcome. And if they all just have no architectural rules, the network effects of having a whole block of one architectural style won’t be present, and they’ll all fight each other to install zoning rules to protect their property value.
By allowing them to separate, they don’t have to fight to prevent each other from building copies of foreign architecture.
For schooling, staying in the same K-12 school with the same people would suck. Your ex is with you in three of your classes. Everyone knows about the time you pissed your pants during a math test. Your childhood bully still kicks your roller backpack.
I should have added more qualifiers in my response to @mailadreapta. A lot of school location depends on density, and the appeal of putting the elementary school in the same quad is that children can walk to and from it safely and parents can be nearby if needed. I’d let people send their kids to schools in other quads/klicks. At the middle school level, schools would tile outwards recursively more, and ideally I’d sort them on performance, but that’s something for another post (and probably not part of my one thousand villages series).
What I think people like Mailadreapta are after is actually a political issue.
The reason school vouchers are gaining enough marginal popularity in America to become a real deal is that they are a way to bypass disruptive students, because public schools are not permitted to exclude or punish them. Some urban American school districts are spending enormous amounts of money and getting abysmal results. Actually acknowledging some of why this happens would damage the ideology of certain political factions, so it won’t be solved, and instead people will engage in an arms race to move to “good school districts,” which exclude people with nothing to lose because people with nothing to lose don’t have money. That creates suburban sprawl
I think Mailadreapta’s reasoning here is that it’s feasible for regular people to solve some of these issues at the neighborhood scale, but it just isn’t feasible for one determined neighborhood to solve them in the entire city.
What will we do about the kids who grow up different? It seems like from your original post that you don’t expect much movement between communities, which would suck more than it has to for any black sheep.
Actually no, I expect people to move between communities, particularly when they move housing. My goal isn’t to stop movement, but to create friction.
That probably sounds kind of weird, but there are thresholds, rates, that sort of thing when it comes to culture and policing and development, where the result of X+1 is not linear relative to X.