Oceans Yet to Burn

diarrheaworldstarhiphop

urban planning

otvgame

urban planning one thousand villages otv game video games game development

philippesaner

Anonymous asked:

How about gentrification? I've seen the pro-property destruction people discussing that, and it's not illegal so appealing to the legal system wouldn't work. And often worker abuse laws are not enforced well, and bringing the lawsuits harms the workers.

theunitofcaring answered:

1) I do not think ‘your livelihood is destroyed and you are possibly injured or killed in a mass riot’ is an appropriate penalty for ‘some asshole decided you were participating in gentrification’

2) Random mass violence sure is a way to keep property values down, I guess, but if your goal is ‘low property values, period’ rather than ‘livable communities with affordable housing’ then we just profoundly disagree on priorities.

3) …and rioting and destroying businesses never harms the workers, I’m sure. Look, raise money so exploited workers can quit. Ask them what they want and do that - I guarantee you it’s not going to be ‘smash the business and attract tons of police attention’. Don’t decide for yourself who is guilty, decide for yourself that legal mechanisms won’t work, decide for yourself that peaceful mechanisms won’t work, destroy tons of stuff, and then call that ‘fighting for marginalized people’.

4) If your radical leftist politics amount to ‘Kristallnacht, but trust us, they deserve it’ then I’m sorry but fuck you.

mitigatedchaos

What violent leftists think will keep housing affordable: using mob violence to physically prevent outsiders from moving in to a neighborhood.

What would actually make housing affordable: Japanese Zoning Laws

philippesaner

What are Japanese zoning laws?

mitigatedchaos

They have a maximum zone type instead of strict limitations of one type for one zone.

Click that link. Look at how smart their plan is.

As a result of this and other policies, their booming metropolitan areas see no significant increase in housing prices relative to American cities and the UK. I had a chart I saved for this but it’s elsewhere. Basically, London prices have gone up like 500% without anywhere near a 500% increase in population, while Tokyo prices are up less than their % rise in population.

Source: theunitofcaring urban planning politics

Village in the Forest

We return to the edges of the city of Flatsville, Arkowa.

After a long period of decline, having overbuilt their infrastructure, the nearby suburb of Littelton has gone bankrupt. Previously, the state legislature gave our Metropolitan Planning Authority enormous power, and Flatsville status as a Special Economic Zone. Now they are demanding we Do Something about this before it hits the state news and becomes a scandal to be exploited by the Opposition Party.

@mailadreapta

Mmmkay, and how long does it take to make that moss grow?
Realistically these walls will look like this:
[highway sound barrier.jpg]
Which is not something I want surrounding my village.

solwardenclyffe

You could always install garden trays along the walls.

After reviewing Littelton’s finances, the MPA discovered that it was less costly (over the long term) to simply abandon the old town and move the residents into new quads in Flatsville. A truck has been sent to go gather Littelton’s ‘famous’ town bell.

We want our incoming suburbanites to feel safe and comfortable, so we build a 3m tall brick wall around the inner residential area of our quad. It has 4 wide vehicle entrances which are well lit and have security cameras, and an additional 8 pedestrian entrances which close at night.

Rather than hide the buildings from the city, as in Milton Keynes, we partially hide the wall and the city from the buildings, with a ring of tree cover which functions as a park, with a loop of bicycle path around the inner development. Additional park elements along the path will be added later.

Placement of our building lots also occludes the view straight through the quad. More organic arrangements of lots could be used, but a simple square grid with central park will suffice for now.

On the interior, narrow streets encourage foot traffic, with a ring of single-lane, one-way street with wide sidewalks for vehicles to load and unload and for access by emergency vehicles. (MPA parks planners are still fighting over just whose park will be demolished to add New Littelton’s parking lots.)

As with the other quads, the outer ring is mixed use (including commercial, residential, and light industrial), while the inner area is residential. Some small shops on the outside, with better access to traffic, can thus be easily walked to from within the central ring.

one thousand villages urban planning

Here’s an alternate layout, from dividing a 900m area into three parts. Cozy, isn’t it? Our rowhouses from earlier are 400sqm (4,300 sqft), so we can double up on them (as in the middle) without too much trouble.
But this might be too small. We... — Here’s an alternate layout, from dividing a 900m area into three parts. Cozy, isn’t it? Our rowhouses from earlier are 400sqm (4,300 sqft), so we can double up on them (as in the middle) without too much trouble.
But this might be too small. We wanted to adequately secure our village nestled in the city so that suburbanites would move to it, but this area isn’t large enough to be comfortable chilling in with edge friction, and outsiders will likely walk right through it frequently. This doesn’t get us enough edge on driving down bleedover crime from the commercial areas on the mixed-use outer ring. It does look pretty, though.

one thousand villages urban planning

mitigatedchaos

How are you guys liking this sudden series of polygon-based urban planning posts?

mitigatedchaos

@anaisnein

I think that you’re paying an interesting, perhaps useful, amount of attention to envisioning a dense way of life aligned to the felt and latent needs and wants of suburbanites, but that you’re focusing on them to the point of more or less ignoring the needs and wants of urbanites, as well as ruralites. (Horrible lexicon but eh.) What you’re creating looks to me emphatically like a suburb, not a city; no city-dweller would want to live in it; there’s no there there. It is interesting though!

Blogger Infuriates Urbanites With This One Weird Trick! You Won’t Believe It!

That might be it. I am a suburbanite at heart, and when I did live in the city, it was on an American university campus - which I liked - and American university campuses are often little medium-density villages within the city, taking up about 2km2 of space, permeable along the edges and with a self-selected population, a civic center for social clubs to gather, park areas throughout, predominantly moved about through walking.

If I were British, I might live in Milton Keynes entirely unironically. Many of the residents love it there, even though it’s derided as a “non-place” by outsiders. It just seems like a strange objection to me, and my intuitive response - to give different areas unique architecture or let them dynamically cluster businesses on some purpose - is probably not what the urbanites are looking for.

What I’m focusing on are, yes, questions of how to convince suburbanites to leave the sprawl and live more densely, without using social, economic, or governmental power to force them to do so.

What is a suburb? It’s somewhere safe, with ample trees, grass, forest, where you can walk the streets at night. You can ride your bike recreationally right from your house. On the fourth of July, everyone has a cookout outside and the smell of food wafts through back yards (but otherwise you aren’t flooded with food smells). Sometimes the neighborhood will put up a tent in a cul-de-sac and have a block party. Children run free to play with little need for adult supervision. Wild animals sometimes wander through yards.

People sometimes talk about those suburbanites and their darn autos and wasteful lawns (though it’s less wasteful if you don’t live in Arizona or California!), but there’s a real appeal there, something that has to be acknowledged and transformed in order to win people over.

How can I make the city safe like a suburb? How can I make it green like a suburb? How can I make this dense enough to pool resources for various goods and hit the threshold for public transit like a city? So that they can hang out with people and walk to shops, fixing the sins of the suburb?

It shouldn’t be too much of a surprise for the result to be a densified suburb.

Though, perhaps you can help me to understand. What does it mean for there to be a there?

one thousand villages urban planning suburbs

squareallworthy

mitigatedchaos

How are you guys liking this sudden series of polygon-based urban planning posts?

squareallworthy

What’s the purpose of all this Blendering? Are you just noodling around, or are you offering Serious Solutions to Today’s Problems?

mitigatedchaos

I’m not dedicated enough in research to count as a Serious Person, but on the other hand a lot of Serious People have been very wrong lately.

The One Thousand Villages series is part of the general direction of this blog to search for overlooked or uninvented paths for society through an intuitive synthesis across multiple fields. (Also it has some nice art to look at which I’ll be adding to my portfolio.) The intent is that eventually some of these ideas will potentially be refined and studied more closely, possibly by others, helping society to escape a local maximum. This post on a reorganization of how schools work is similar. In both cases, the small details are less important than overall ideas that break from the consensus. It’s less about the intricate road layout than the idea of building sub-communities within cities, with friction of movement, as a means of overcoming some of the disadvantages of cities. The recent post is more about spreading the idea of guided busways as a concept.

“Okay,” you might say, “but I studied in that field and what you proposed doesn’t work for reason X.” And that would be a totally valid critique, so if you’re holding back of saying “Actually, that one-way flow through the kilometer was tried in a newtown in Britain and failed,” or something, you can go ahead with it.

Admittedly, it’s also for entertainment, too. I’m on Tumblr as opposed to writing my own SSC equivalent for a reason, I admit.

squareallworthy

I have no expertise on urban planning, no. But it strikes me that starting from a blank slate is exactly the wrong approach, and likely to lead you to repeat the same mistakes that plague other planned communities. The world does not need another Brasilia or Salt Lake City.

mitigatedchaos

I think that depends in part on our goals, or we might say that there is a tradeoff. In the United States, we’ve got expensive suburban sprawl as what people do unplanned, and traffic-choked cities with freeways bumper-to-bumper with cars, elevated crime rates…

Once the buildings have been built, it’s an expensive fight to install transit infrastructure, because you have to knock down peoples’ homes and businesses. If a bunch of corridors were left as park land to be converted later, it would be a lot easier.

But we want people to live more densely, right? For environmental reasons and maybe social reasons. How can we get the suburbanites to come in from the suburbs?

It turns out that suburbs have all sorts of nice features that people like, which is why they move out to them when they can afford to. I think those features can be replicated at a higher density, making the suburbanites more comfortable with living in a denser area, saving on carbon, etc if there’s some planning.

Likewise, people fight against density. Why? A variety of reasons, including crime, noise, having to give up their home, etc. But with a different structuring of both land and incentives, that could be changed, preventing yet more resource-consuming suburban sprawl.

Source: mitigatedchaos one thousand villages urban planning

Bus Tracks

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?

Keep reading

one thousand villages urban planning public transport art the mitigated exhibition politics policy

lockrum

mitigatedchaos

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!

Keep reading

xhxhxhx

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

lockrum

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.

mitigatedchaos

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.

Source: mitigatedchaos one thousand villages urban planning

one thousand villages urban planning

TL;DR

Village in the Forest

Bus Tracks

One Thousand and One Villages

Curb-Guided Busway

See, that’s what the app is perfect for.

TL;DR

Village in the Forest

Bus Tracks

One Thousand and One Villages

Curb-Guided Busway