Needs to all be underground for blast resistance.
Unironically: in the fictional Black Forest Country I developed to work out some of my ideas, the quad is the basic unit of civil defense and they’re all equipped with an underground shelter with freeze-dried food in case of nuclear war, hurricanes, tornadoes, etc.
One of the issues brought up in One Thousand Villages was that of cultural formation, drift, and separation, and of different communities (and different individuals) having different preferences and needs. This brought up the possibility of the nerds all moving to one community within a city, which brought up the possibility of zoning wars between jocks, otakus, and hipsters.
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.
Our field trip to the suburbs continues in our One Thousand Villages series of wildcat city planning.
Arkowa is a state in the American Midwest, where the legislature has graciously agreed to give our new Metropolitan Planning Authority control over an area of land to build a new city, off of a major highway. According to the news this is somehow tied into a scandal involving a group of climate vigilantes holding thousands of tractors hostage using a backdoor in hacked Ukrainian tractor firmware, but the news hasn’t been very reliable lately, so such suspicions can be safely disregarded.
Here we have a suburban klick, broken into four quads of various densities.
With American development comes the American love of the automobile. Many of our new residents are commuting to the neighboring city of Springfield for work, travelling along the highway, and there are limits to just how far we can stretch our city’s public transport infrastructure!
The One Thousand Villages series continues, as we return to the suburbs of Flatsville, our new town in the state of Arkowa.
Wanting to avoid the sins of past American cities and avoid creating a sparse and energy-inefficient sprawl that we may become unable to maintain, our Metropolitan Planning Authority has decided to plan with an eye towards public transit from the beginning.
At this point it becomes very tempting to just put trams in everywhere. They’re reasonably quiet, they don’t emit fumes, people love riding them, and property developers view them as a long-term investment.
Unfortunately, trams are quite expensive. And, quite frankly, it would be highly irresponsible for the MPA to build such heavy public transit without knowing where the densest areas of the city will be! We can’t just dedicate an entire zone to only hotels - what do you think this is, Brasilia?
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.
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.)
@wirehead-wannabe I recall you talking about wanting a college-campus-like environment with activities and whatnot as a living area, but outside of a college campus.
@mailadreapta I recall you talking about the difficulty of getting people to go for medium-density housing.
And I guess @bambamramfan I think I’ve mentioned a similar idea already. (Though it was a low-trust mechanism, I’m of the opinion that high trust is an equilibrium state which can be achieved through various mechanisms.)
There is an idea I’ve been kicking around for a while, which is to borrow an idea from computer science for resolving the challenges of urban areas by recursively reducing the size of problems until they can be adequately resolved. Thus, the city is reduced to a bunch of villages/towns.
The above render is for a rough sketch design that spans one kilometer and houses a population of around 5,000 or more, assuming an apartment is about 100 sqm (based on the size of an average apartment in the US). After reviewing it, I can’t help but think it should perhaps be about ¼ the size, but ah well. Grey is civic buildings, light green is residential, light blue is commercial, and light brown is footpaths.
My proposal, then, is to create a smaller community within the city with several key elements:
Probably this needs to be revised a lot more, starting with a reduction to 500m.
I think something like this might have the potential to lower crime and police violence, while reducing the opposition to medium-density living and increasing psychological and physical health.
But you know, I’m not an expert. There’s probably something terribly wrong with this.
Anonymous asked:
Maybe not every community has to be the same.
Not everyone actually likes cities for what they are. Suburbs aren’t evil in themselves, they just have too much infrastructure per taxpayer… and particularly if we remove the need for large numbers of automobiles, the math on them changes.
This is just a quick post, with a quick render.
The blog Urban Kchoze discusses Japanese Zoning practices thanks to this handy English-language brochure from the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, and Transport. It’s a great article, and you should read it.
The gist is that the Japanese system uses something more like a maximum allowable nuisance/density level rather than North American systems, which tend to limit one zone to one type of activity.
Here’s a preview of the sweet charts featured in the brochure and article, to give you a rough idea of how it works. As you can see, the allowable use increases, but allows the previous uses from before, except in some special cases and in the case of heavy industrial zones.
Japanese zoning has other features, such as standardized zone types set at the national level, and angle-based height regulations.
Mixed-use development is all the rage these days for a variety of reasons, and it is my intent that the OTV Game will embrace it, departing from the previous R-C-I zoning model of previous city-building games.
The exact mechanism is to be decided, but there will definitely be mixed-use zones.
My current plan is to have a palette with a few basic, pre-made zone types, including both the standard RCI and some Japanese-style zone types. The player could then paint individual zoning restrictions/allowances, and sample these to add on to palette slots of their own.
How many restrictions? That’s a function of the development time. It’s important to find a good balance between ease of use, granularity, simulation cost, and development time.
Ideally, the virtual property developers in the OTV Game could build not just single-use zones on mixed-use lots, but mixed-use buildings - something common in traditional cities and some other kinds of cities, where the bottom floors of a multi-story building may be shops or restaurants, while upper floors are offices or residential units.
SAN FRANCISCO—In an effort to reduce the number of unprovoked hostile communications on the social media platform, Twitter announced Monday that it had added a red X-mark feature verifying users who are in fact perfectly okay to harass. “This new verification system offers users a simple, efficient way to determine which accounts belong to total pieces of shit whom you should have no qualms about tormenting to your heart’s desire,” said spokesperson Elizabeth James, adding that the small red symbol signifies that Twitter has officially confirmed the identity of a loathsome person who deserves the worst abuse imaginable and who will deliberately have their Mute, Block, and Report options disabled. “When a user sees this symbol, they know they’re dealing with a real asshole who has richly earned whatever mistreatment they receive, including profanity, body-shaming, leaking of personal information, and relentless goading to commit suicide. It’s really just a helpful way of saying to our users, ‘This fuck has it coming, so do your worst with a clear conscience and without fear of having your account suspended.’” At press time, Twitter reassuredly clarified that the red X was just a suggestion and that all users could still be bullied with as little recourse as they are now.
