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.