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.
