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.
Yeah if you’ve got a city of millions of people you kinda can’t just have those sorts of places entirely centralized, and if you do it’s inaccessible to a lot of people.
Though the disagreement i have is probably something of a similar nature, which is that the discrete and semi-permeable nature of quads sort of adds an insularity that is detrimental to the broad economic benefits of cities, and there are economies of agglomeration which I don’t think get fully captured here. Like, Jane Jacobs would just say the blocks are too big and you need lots of short streets to get the full benefits of a dense city.
It also makes me think of A City Is Not A Tree, actually. I was dissatisfied by that piece on a couple of levels, but I still think it makes some good points which are applicable here.
What do you think of university campuses?
