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!
we segment off an inner residential ring using a wall of 5-10m in height
That is way too high, taller than most houses, and living with that sort of thing hanging over me would make me feel like I lived in a prison. A 2-3 meter fence should be sufficient for most purposes, and much cheaper; if the crime problems caused by people from other quads is significant enough that you actually need a 5m wall, then I don’t know what to tell you.
You don’t specifically mention schools, so I’ll throw one thing out there: every quad absolutely should have its own K-12 school, possibly more than one depending on density. Crossing quad boundaries to attend school should be a rare exception. You might have quads within the same klick that share a high school or some amenities (especially large space-eating things like football fields), but again it’s important that the school feels like it belongs to the quad, and each quad should have its own “school district” or something similar.
I don’t think you should have any through traffic in the quad. Access to parking should be the only roads in the place.
Quads should have names, so that residents can say “I live in Fairview” or whatever, and nearby people know what that means.
That is way too high, taller than most houses, and living with that sort of thing hanging over me would make me feel like I lived in a prison. A 2-3 meter fence should be sufficient for most purposes, and much cheaper; if the crime problems caused by people from other quads is significant enough that you actually need a 5m wall, then I don’t know what to tell you.
Well, 3m is probably enough. If it’s only 2m then tall people with actual upper body strength can climb over it. Mostly though I originally made it that height for noise suppression. If that isn’t an issue at 3m then 3m is fine.
You don’t specifically mention schools, so I’ll throw one thing out there: every quad absolutely should have its own K-12 school, possibly more than one depending on density. Crossing quad boundaries to attend school should be a rare exception. You might have quads within the same klick that share a high school or some amenities (especially large space-eating things like football fields), but again it’s important that the school feels like it belongs to the quad, and each quad should have its own “school district” or something similar.
At the 500 density it isn’t dense enough (because we don’t know how many children there will be), but once it gets high enough that’s feasible. I was thinking of an internal school mostly in the sense that the young children can safely walk to the school unsupervised and play outside in the park. I imagined the civic building in the lower right middle of the klick as a high school for the surrounding quads.
You also seem to have something else in mind with this. School as a method of increasing community cohesion?
I admit, if I were building one of these as an ideological group rather than because I’d convinced the city or a developer to do it, I’d definitely want my quad to have its own school.
I don’t think you should have any through traffic in the quad. Access to parking should be the only roads in the place.
Maybe. Aside from maneuverability for exiting the quad in the morning, and going 5kph on the pedstreets to move furniture, because I hate moving furniture, I wanted faster access for emergency service vehicles.
Quads should have names, so that residents can say “I live in Fairview” or whatever, and nearby people know what that means.
Absolutely. It’s a branding thing.
And now for some @xhxhxhx comments.
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
If we’re building a new quad by itself, we should ideally place it right next to a light rail station, or some place we can convince the government to install a light rail station.
But yes, the grid would need to break at higher and higher levels for even thicker thoroughfares, particularly in America where the mass transit is anemic. I’d recommend building many of the roads outside the quads with medians with trees and buffers of lawns, both of which can be bulldozed later if necessary as density increases. (Our sample klick edge roads are six lanes, but I was going to reserve the outer lane for either parking or trams.)
A lot depends on who is building the quad and why. If it’s a corporation building housing for a facility in China, they can just install a bus route and let the rest of the commuters sort themselves out. If it’s an American city that gets a Singaporean-style Housing and Development Board, they can buy up land at the edge of the city’s light rail network and develop several kilometers at once, then extend the light rail network to meet it. If it’s an American private land developer, they could hire a bus to travel to the public transport network but they’ll also need to install a lot more parking and build near a sufficiently large road.
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
This is actually something for future consideration, which is, can these be built at low density in such a way that they can and do scale up to higher densities? And I think the answer is yes, which may be the subject of a future blog post.
Anyhow, there’s a reason the outer edge is mixed use and not purely commercial-zoned, so I don’t think it would be too much less efficient.
It would also be possible to convert an area of a city without a lot of demolition if you have a long-term-thinking administration. You’d build the wall and the parking areas, convert over some of the streets, add a park or queue one for the first building to be vacated, then rezone the outer perimeter and wait for commercial development.
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
Part of the outside being mixed use in this case is that I’m only assuming that shops will be the outer commercial layer at first, rather than offices, and thus that some of the rest will be filled in with more residential units that are later flipped as development increases. While this doesn’t reduce the daily workday commuting, it does reduce some shopping commuting.
I’m also enough of a liberal that this sort of detailed land use planning makes me uneasy
Fair enough. But that in itself involves unsolved coordination problems. Fortunately, if the quad plan doesn’t work out, it isn’t particularly destructive and you can just knock the wall over and refurbish the civic center as shops, offices, or apartments.
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
As Scott pointed out in comparing homicide rates while investigating gun crime, America has an astonishing level of crime. This approach isn’t really needed in places like the town where I grew up, which was full of self-selected professionals and had a population of only a couple tens of thousands. Likewise, that town didn’t need a school voucher program to maintain the quality of its schools, because all the parents there would punish their children if they were disruptive enough to be an issue, or else at least raised them such that they didn’t attack the teachers in the middle of class.
However, for the cities, I am willing to go to almost Singaporean lengths to get the situation under control. The terrible situations in some of our cities are not only costing the nation some of its potential, but also all those people living there having to suffer through the crime, the failed city services, and so on. If it becomes possible to simultaneously lower crime and police brutality, there are costs I’m willing to pay.
Or, to put it another way, hinted at by your very paragraph - rich people can already afford functional communities. How can we bring functional communities, safe, happy, and healthy communities, to the poor? The dominant thought seems to be that it’s just a matter of wealth transfer, or “reducing discrimination,” but I think there are structural issues and cultural issues that need to be resolved for all that spending to have the desired effect.
If it helps for context, the original reason I pondered this was in the design of a fictional Pseudo-East Asian Police State that I use as a sort of a storage place for my ideas. (Though there, like in many of its other aspects, the future is rooted in the past and they’d built walled villages for environmental reasons for millennia.)
