I know the main point here is the big ideas, but I’m distracted by the idea of new cities. The Line looks really interesting. City of Telosa looks really interesting-- although that one almost sounds like an enormous city-size cohousing. If twenty families struggle to agree on blue or teal paint, or whether a patch of flowers is an enhancement or an abomination, I wonder how 50,000 people will agree on all the aspects of what makes a great new city.
True story: once when we lived in cohousing, a newcomer saw a patch of ratty flowers on the walkway, and replaced it with new flowers. It did look better but he was new and didn’t understand everything was done by consensus and the permission of the group.
A lot of people were distressed by the flowers. Series of intense community meetings were held. One resident insisted she felt violated and couldn’t walk past the flowers and ultimately left the community. (We left too, soon after, because it seemed like a crazy house. The rogue flower planter still lives there I think.)
Rogue Flower Planter is definitely a movie I would watch.
I mentioned something similar in a different comment but my biggest concern with most of these model cities is precisely that they try to change too much. I think cohousing is an interesting idea but jamming in every new idea about how to live both limits the potential population you can draw from and creates too many potential points of failure.
There was a model city from the 19th century I almost included - but would've just been shoehorning in - that had a lot of intriguing ideas but also had the idea that married men should be able to have sex with anyone's wives. Did that really need to be thrown in?
It's not a city. It's a prison. Top down control and decision-making by your keepers. You will have teal... and you will love it.
The global digital ID system (if fully adopted) will make the whole world an open air prison. Only obedient trusted travellers will be allowed access to all the goodies.
This future city giving me big Judge Dredd nostalgia so hard I can almost see Karl Urban's chin.
I do think part of the death of Big Ideas in the US has to do with the fact that, in my lifetime, we have mostly been in a constant state of political stalemate. Nothing gets done for so long that it begins to feel like nothing can get done and that this not-doing is normal.
Anyone who wants to Do Things is seen as a naive dreamer. Even when it's something we want, we still view them this way!
I know I'm cross mixing Karl Urban performances here but now I just imagine him walking through NEOM shouting "Oi, (c-word)" at people and headbutting them.
In college, I took a sociology course on experimental communities (both historic and current) it was simultaneously heart-warming to see people trying to build the world they wanted to live in. It was also incredibly disturbing to see what some of those fantasies looked like.
Hi there, new subscriber here. (I don't normally sub to anything but the ideas I've read so far are too great to ignore.) Question about this line at the end of the 3rd last paragraph: "We THIRD THING."
Is that a reference to something (and can someone please loop me in if so?), or is that a writer's note-to-self, as in "give a third example" ? (If it's the latter, I kinda adore it. I've definitely hit "submit" on a few things with unfinished little bits like that.)
Second, thank you for letting me know. What an embarrassing edit mishap. Typically I write these and always add a third thing to lists that's a bit silly, but I write those after writing the serious stuff. I guess this time I forgot to paste it despite doing multiple edits. I really appreciate you catching that!
You know the editors’ trick, right? When we want to hold a place for content we haven’t written (or thought up) yet, we put in SLUG (named after the lead slugs that printers used to hold a place in the page layout). Then, you just search on SLUG before you hit publish to make sure they’re all gone. I don’t actually even need to search, because the all-caps makes them stand out.
I’m so into all of this. And there is one concept city that is trying to be built in one of several United States locations (naturally all of them are NIMBYing). Telosa: https://cityoftelosa.com/
They’ve been looking at the desert in Utah as one possible location and I’m all about it. Our state is the most receptive to refugees so I say build it and then let them in!
I love Model City websites because they always look amazing, although I always worry that they're throwing too much at the wall at once. Which seems contradictory but I think if you're trying to change everything there's just too much room for error and you risk changing nothing.
But I fully support building more of these in Utah. It's the most visually stunning state in America and I'm always baffled more people don't live there.
They maybe are throwing too much at the wall at once, but I kind of like that. Right now cities are built randomly over time with no grand plan for how they might benefit their inhabitants. I’d much rather live in a city that has some grand design for how it might ideally suit its environment and people!
"Planned" cities are usually terrible. Just look at Milton Keynes in the UK. Even New York "planners" created a whole bunch of problems with their grid based street system. As you'll find with any grid system, a lack of easily identifiable visual cues means far more people get lost in it. Reliance on numbers and letters cannot compare to iconic corners, statues, buildings, columns, junctions, roundabouts, and arches when navigating your city. Organic growth provides all of this (and a certain charm) which is evident in European cities. And because there was no way they could have foreseen current levels of traffic maybe its time to get rid of it in city centres?
Amsterdam and Copenhagen underwent significant planning in the last 30 years to make them what they are now. Both removed cars and built infrastructure for bikes and pedestrians and are among the healthiest cities in Europe. Singapore used city planning to eradicate homelessness, 90 percent of the population owns their own home, and the emphasis on green space has made it one of the more beautiful cities in the world.
Technically all cities are “planned.” But there’s definitely good design and bad design. But to just let it accidentally sprawl in every direction with no parameters or intentionality (like where I live in Salt Lake City, or say Chicago) is not good planning!
Oxford UK removed traffic from the city centre quite some time ago. I remember parking up in the exterior car parks and waiting for the regular shuttles into town. It's a system I'd like to see emulated in all cities that can accomodate it, but it's obviously not popular with inner city car owners.
I guess you¡re right about organic growth. Just because something grows organically doesn't mean it won't be an ugly mess. A well designed environment can be just as successful. Central Park is a good example.
This was such a fun--and convincing!--essay! And I’m not just saying that because I also like that quote from Rush. You give me hope that we as a society can go back to giving new ideas a try. Who knows? Some of them might just work!
Incidentally, I highly recommend Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future, which has really cool airships.
I haven’t completely read this post, I need time to focus on your writings, but one thing I did pick up was “urban sprawl”, where we live it has progressed at such a rate in the past eight years and we can see plans for further development of cheek to jowel housing, hardly any trees due to lack of space, and the infrastructure struggles to keep up with the population growth. The other major problem we are having here in Australia is lack of rental properties and if you can get something the cost is out of most peoples reach, no wonder our grandchildren are still living at home. Keep up the good work, you certainly keep me interested in what you have to say.
Energy, resources, supply lines. That's all that needs to be said really. And maybe that's why people with their head screwed on and their finger on the pulse poo poo a lot of these fanciful knock ups that can be whipped up in a jiffy in any pretentious architecture studio that's still getting contracts.
Our global empire-building system is hitting a brick wall. It's nice to dream but it's not ok to be deaf, dumb and blind to the stark issues that lay before us unless of course one is already self-anesthetizing as a form of lazy prepping.
When (not if) the SHTF, it'll be interesting to see (through bursts of chaos and smoke) what, in fact, is possible if anything is possible at all.
And this all depends on available energy and who maintains access to it in a shrinking game of musical chairs and whether nation states can even manage to keep the lights on or citizens warm during winter.
In a global game of expecting cheap Colombian bananas to arrive in your local supermarket every monday without fail... everything is indeed set up to do exactly that... fail that is.
We're already collapsing. No amount of mental gymnastics gets around that fact. And novel energy solutions would have to magically appear and be ready to plug and play.
Even if we removed all the stupid restrictions on nuclear and went all in Chinese style we'd probably still not make it.
I know the main point here is the big ideas, but I’m distracted by the idea of new cities. The Line looks really interesting. City of Telosa looks really interesting-- although that one almost sounds like an enormous city-size cohousing. If twenty families struggle to agree on blue or teal paint, or whether a patch of flowers is an enhancement or an abomination, I wonder how 50,000 people will agree on all the aspects of what makes a great new city.
True story: once when we lived in cohousing, a newcomer saw a patch of ratty flowers on the walkway, and replaced it with new flowers. It did look better but he was new and didn’t understand everything was done by consensus and the permission of the group.
A lot of people were distressed by the flowers. Series of intense community meetings were held. One resident insisted she felt violated and couldn’t walk past the flowers and ultimately left the community. (We left too, soon after, because it seemed like a crazy house. The rogue flower planter still lives there I think.)
Rogue Flower Planter is definitely a movie I would watch.
I mentioned something similar in a different comment but my biggest concern with most of these model cities is precisely that they try to change too much. I think cohousing is an interesting idea but jamming in every new idea about how to live both limits the potential population you can draw from and creates too many potential points of failure.
There was a model city from the 19th century I almost included - but would've just been shoehorning in - that had a lot of intriguing ideas but also had the idea that married men should be able to have sex with anyone's wives. Did that really need to be thrown in?
Which one? I’m thinking of Oneida, but there are so many! 😂
Yes! That was exactly the one. What a mix of good and strange ideas.
And yet it had a lot of success!!
It's not a city. It's a prison. Top down control and decision-making by your keepers. You will have teal... and you will love it.
The global digital ID system (if fully adopted) will make the whole world an open air prison. Only obedient trusted travellers will be allowed access to all the goodies.
I got a Tesla in 2019 and my main reason was to be a little bit of Space X.
This future city giving me big Judge Dredd nostalgia so hard I can almost see Karl Urban's chin.
I do think part of the death of Big Ideas in the US has to do with the fact that, in my lifetime, we have mostly been in a constant state of political stalemate. Nothing gets done for so long that it begins to feel like nothing can get done and that this not-doing is normal.
Anyone who wants to Do Things is seen as a naive dreamer. Even when it's something we want, we still view them this way!
I know I'm cross mixing Karl Urban performances here but now I just imagine him walking through NEOM shouting "Oi, (c-word)" at people and headbutting them.
Honestly makes me want to live there more.
That's the dream
Fell asleep to Dredd last night... now I read this... synchronicity?
In college, I took a sociology course on experimental communities (both historic and current) it was simultaneously heart-warming to see people trying to build the world they wanted to live in. It was also incredibly disturbing to see what some of those fantasies looked like.
Scott Alexander does (did?) a weekly report on model cities. Your comment is the perfect encapsulation of my reactions every time I read it.
Hi there, new subscriber here. (I don't normally sub to anything but the ideas I've read so far are too great to ignore.) Question about this line at the end of the 3rd last paragraph: "We THIRD THING."
Is that a reference to something (and can someone please loop me in if so?), or is that a writer's note-to-self, as in "give a third example" ? (If it's the latter, I kinda adore it. I've definitely hit "submit" on a few things with unfinished little bits like that.)
First, thank you for subscribing!
Second, thank you for letting me know. What an embarrassing edit mishap. Typically I write these and always add a third thing to lists that's a bit silly, but I write those after writing the serious stuff. I guess this time I forgot to paste it despite doing multiple edits. I really appreciate you catching that!
I thought you did THIRD THING intentionally and I was tickled to death by it
You know the editors’ trick, right? When we want to hold a place for content we haven’t written (or thought up) yet, we put in SLUG (named after the lead slugs that printers used to hold a place in the page layout). Then, you just search on SLUG before you hit publish to make sure they’re all gone. I don’t actually even need to search, because the all-caps makes them stand out.
I’m so into all of this. And there is one concept city that is trying to be built in one of several United States locations (naturally all of them are NIMBYing). Telosa: https://cityoftelosa.com/
They’ve been looking at the desert in Utah as one possible location and I’m all about it. Our state is the most receptive to refugees so I say build it and then let them in!
I love Model City websites because they always look amazing, although I always worry that they're throwing too much at the wall at once. Which seems contradictory but I think if you're trying to change everything there's just too much room for error and you risk changing nothing.
But I fully support building more of these in Utah. It's the most visually stunning state in America and I'm always baffled more people don't live there.
They maybe are throwing too much at the wall at once, but I kind of like that. Right now cities are built randomly over time with no grand plan for how they might benefit their inhabitants. I’d much rather live in a city that has some grand design for how it might ideally suit its environment and people!
"Planned" cities are usually terrible. Just look at Milton Keynes in the UK. Even New York "planners" created a whole bunch of problems with their grid based street system. As you'll find with any grid system, a lack of easily identifiable visual cues means far more people get lost in it. Reliance on numbers and letters cannot compare to iconic corners, statues, buildings, columns, junctions, roundabouts, and arches when navigating your city. Organic growth provides all of this (and a certain charm) which is evident in European cities. And because there was no way they could have foreseen current levels of traffic maybe its time to get rid of it in city centres?
Amsterdam and Copenhagen underwent significant planning in the last 30 years to make them what they are now. Both removed cars and built infrastructure for bikes and pedestrians and are among the healthiest cities in Europe. Singapore used city planning to eradicate homelessness, 90 percent of the population owns their own home, and the emphasis on green space has made it one of the more beautiful cities in the world.
Technically all cities are “planned.” But there’s definitely good design and bad design. But to just let it accidentally sprawl in every direction with no parameters or intentionality (like where I live in Salt Lake City, or say Chicago) is not good planning!
Oxford UK removed traffic from the city centre quite some time ago. I remember parking up in the exterior car parks and waiting for the regular shuttles into town. It's a system I'd like to see emulated in all cities that can accomodate it, but it's obviously not popular with inner city car owners.
I guess you¡re right about organic growth. Just because something grows organically doesn't mean it won't be an ugly mess. A well designed environment can be just as successful. Central Park is a good example.
This looks pretty cool!
This was such a fun--and convincing!--essay! And I’m not just saying that because I also like that quote from Rush. You give me hope that we as a society can go back to giving new ideas a try. Who knows? Some of them might just work!
Incidentally, I highly recommend Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future, which has really cool airships.
I haven’t completely read this post, I need time to focus on your writings, but one thing I did pick up was “urban sprawl”, where we live it has progressed at such a rate in the past eight years and we can see plans for further development of cheek to jowel housing, hardly any trees due to lack of space, and the infrastructure struggles to keep up with the population growth. The other major problem we are having here in Australia is lack of rental properties and if you can get something the cost is out of most peoples reach, no wonder our grandchildren are still living at home. Keep up the good work, you certainly keep me interested in what you have to say.
Energy, resources, supply lines. That's all that needs to be said really. And maybe that's why people with their head screwed on and their finger on the pulse poo poo a lot of these fanciful knock ups that can be whipped up in a jiffy in any pretentious architecture studio that's still getting contracts.
Our global empire-building system is hitting a brick wall. It's nice to dream but it's not ok to be deaf, dumb and blind to the stark issues that lay before us unless of course one is already self-anesthetizing as a form of lazy prepping.
When (not if) the SHTF, it'll be interesting to see (through bursts of chaos and smoke) what, in fact, is possible if anything is possible at all.
And this all depends on available energy and who maintains access to it in a shrinking game of musical chairs and whether nation states can even manage to keep the lights on or citizens warm during winter.
In a global game of expecting cheap Colombian bananas to arrive in your local supermarket every monday without fail... everything is indeed set up to do exactly that... fail that is.
We're already collapsing. No amount of mental gymnastics gets around that fact. And novel energy solutions would have to magically appear and be ready to plug and play.
Even if we removed all the stupid restrictions on nuclear and went all in Chinese style we'd probably still not make it.
Too little too late.
And I'm a techno-optimist.
Thinking of Buckminster Fuller.