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 500m x 500m 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, roughly 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!
EDIT: Got a couple of numbers wrong. That’s what I get for being so desperate to post this at 5AM in the morning.
I’ve given each Quad a different population within the Klick. (The surrounding Klicks are just copies to look nice / add context in the render.) Clockwise, from the top left: 950, 1,050, 1,572, and 2,408. That gives us a population density of 6,020 per square kilometer. However, this assumes 100 sqm (~931 sqft) per person. It could easily double to 12,000, and even hit 19,264 if they were all the densest quad.
Transport
The first thing to understand about the Quads is that they’re part of a hierarchical pattern for city transit.
We’ll start by talking about the pedestrian layer. One of the main issues in American cities and suburbs is that while people want to visit shops easily, they often don’t want to live right next to them (due to reasons of noise, crime, and so on). Thus while in traditional cities, shops are often on the bottom two floors of a building, making them easy to access, American cities and suburbs often rely on single-use zoning which necessitates travel by car, requiring building cities for cars rather than pedestrians, making them more difficult to live and work in and costing enormous sums of money.
In the Quad, we segment off an inner residential ring using a wall of 5-10m in height, which acts as both a security barrier and a noise barrier, reducing two main concerns of commercial buildings. The outer ring is then a mixed-use zone for commercial, residential, or even light industrial buildings that can contain shops, restaurants, and grocery stores. (It can also contain offices and additional apartments with the stores on the bottom layer, helping to defray costs for the stores.)
At ground floor, a resident of the Quad is only ever at most 250m (or just a few minutes on foot at 5kph) from the edge. Even if a quad only has one shop, it’s still only about 500m (6 minutes) away, with transit time likely dominated by going up or down the stairs of the pedestrian’s apartment building.
Pedestrian traffic is favored by limiting the number of vehicle roads within the quad, and creating low-velocity pedestrian streets (that can only be used by peds, bikes, and vehicles looking to load/unload) that are friendly to foot traffic and which are sized based on pedestrian streets in traditional cities.
The next layer is private vehicle traffic. Modern urban traffic planning apparently works on a hierarchical model in which smaller, slower roads collect traffic which builds into bigger, faster roads. We don’t actually want people using cars within the Quad since we want to encourage foot traffic and safe areas for children, so we put the parking lots at the inner edges, inside the wall to ensure the safety of the vehicles. These parking garages then exit onto lower-velocity roads on the inside of the Klick.
This serves several purposes. It minimizes the number of intersections on the main road, allowing traffic there to flow faster. It keeps traffic within the Klick slower so that residents can more easily take advantage of other shops and so on within the Klick (about 12 minutes on foot). It also lets our car residents have more options on where to exit into the city - important, for example, if we make the main roads one-ways for higher throughput.
The parking lots are also on the inside of the Klick because the wealthier townhouse residents are more likely to have cars, while the more common apartment residents are more likely to use the public transport on the opposite side.
Now, for the public transport layer. Each Klick has a public transport station in an outside corner, which effectively means each quad either has a public transport station, or is immediately across the street from a public transport station. It’s going to take at most around 5-10 minutes to reach the public transportation network. I like the idea of using tram-trains for this since we’ll likely have to move a lot of people, but the actual best choice will vary. As densities rise, a subway/metro may be appropriate and can be built under the main street.
Commercial areas are clustered around the public transport station, making them easy to hit on the way home or if you want to visit shops or offices from another quad. Big apartments are also clustered closer to the public transport station. The Quad’s Civic Center is a bit farther down but still not too far off.
We presume that heavy industry won’t be close to our Quad due to noise and pollution issues, and that lots of offices and the like that want to be close to each other will be down in the Central Business District in the middle of the city, and that even retail service personnel won’t want to move apartments that often, so the density of public transport is important.
Fortunately, one Klick contains between 2,000 and 12,000 people, so we should have enough density to afford some decent public transit! (At $100/resident/year in transit fees, we have between $200,000 and $1,200,000 to spend on transit services.)
Crime
One of the goals of the quad is to solve bigger city problems by reducing them to town-sized problems. Each quad has a population of between at minimum about 500 and at most about 5,000, and its residential area is surrounded by a wall that can be used to monitor traffic or control access. (It doesn’t have to be used for those purposes. The security level can be adjusted as needed.)
Relative to the wall, there are two kinds of criminals - those from outside it, and those from inside it. Inside criminals will eventually be spotted by the Quad’s security personnel, as they have a limited number of people to search through. Each new crime will quickly narrow the pool of suspects.
Outside criminals must enter the residential area, which means there is likely to be a record of their identities correlating with the time of the crime.
The residential wall also interrupts the formation of criminal networks (although ordinary people may come and go without so much trouble), as each crossing to commit a crime adds to the odds of being caught, and the security personnel have a much closer knowledge of the regulars in the quad than they would someone on the other side of the city.
If necessary, the city can go quad-by-quad to break up criminal and gang activity.
Police Misconduct
A particular problem in many cities (particularly American cities) is an overuse of force by the police.
In the Quad model, the majority of policing within the quad is done by Community Support Officers (CSOs), who are trained not only in police work, but also emergency medical care, fire suppression, and social work. They engage in foot patrols when not doing their other work.
CSOs should be familiar with the residents, which will humanize the residents to them, and also allow them to act with high context. CSOs will get to know who may be suffering from acute mental illness, who might have a bad home life, and so on, and thus be able to more accurately judge the level of threat.
This high context environment also makes it easier for the police to engage in regular detective work.
Community & Governance
The Quad is owned by a Quad Development Board which each resident holds a voting share in. This organization hires groundskeepers and makes decisions about new construction, but it also helps with another matter…
Many people find themselves somewhat alone while surrounded by crowds of people, lacking means to make new friends or socialize regularly, and thus the important socialization or support networks that go along with it. Thus, the QDB will arrange regular social functions for the Quad residents, whether coinciding with holidays or just because the timing is convenient.
To help with this goal, and also store things like shared exercise equipment, each Quad has a Civic Center. The civic center not only hosts the QDB’s gatherings, but also social clubs (that it can be difficult to find room for in one’s apartment!) and events like parties or even weddings. The civic center may also store equipment that can be loaned out to residents, or may have a library, and so on. Since sometimes people from elsewhere in the city (like the rest of the Klick, or several Klicks over) may want to join in on various social clubs (after all, not every hobby has two members in every thousand residents), the civic center is near the outside. Though as non-commercial property it doesn’t get direct placement right next to the transit stop.
(Note: It’s possible that the QDB could run a business other than the QDB, but I’m not sure that’s a good idea.)
The quad’s CSO station may be located in the civic center or it might be located somewhere else in the quad.
The Growing City
The QDB will make various development decisions about the Quad, though some limitations will be built into its charter (such as keeping the parks in the center). However, a lot of opposition to new construction is due to “changing the character of the neighborhood” - which includes lots of old residents moving out, or an increase in crime, or what-have-you. The Quads can limit crime as they usually do, and those who leave when new construction takes place can sell their share of control for a profit. This should lower the opposition to new construction and help prevent out-of-control housing prices.
There are some limits, for reasons of letting light through, based on traditional cities - buildings must terrace back above 6 stories.
Additionally, if housing within the quad is insufficient, it’s allowed to build housing in the mixed use zone in the outer ring.
Quads themselves can tile outwards, providing a straightforward development plan. One quad is also enough to begin the project of building quads. The basic principles all work with a unit of one.
The Shrinking City
However, not all cities are constantly growing. Some, like Detroit and Cleveland, are shrinking, and as they shrink, they often find that they cannot maintain sufficient funding to maintain their municipal infrastructure, which was based on density!
The quads can help with this. As quads fall below their maintenance level, they can be triaged and their residents moved to fuller quads. Services can then be shut off to the whole abandoned quad, rather than trying to maintain a water pipeline for a street where half the houses are abandoned. The city retreats to a group of core quads where services, including public transport, can be maintained.