I-Like-To-Bike

Check the Atlas in your library. Note that "questions" about Denmark and The Netherlands and whatever bike/pedestrian friendly areas you are dreaming are attracting immigration because of bicycle/pedestrian friendliness, are NOT located in Copenhagen.

kickstart

They're highlighting the disparity between the urban rich and the rural poor, not the actual living environments.

Roody

What's arcology?

Roody

Indoor pollution...are you talking about farts and stuff? Or what?

Roody

Good points. History tells us that the development of infrastructure for cars required intensive co-operation and government planning. Roads and streets didn't just magically or "naturally" appear. They were developed by governments in response to lobbying pressure and political persuasion from a lot of people who had a vision of a car-centered world. This plan didn't seem inevitable or even possible in 1900. The first proponents of automobiles were seen as foolish dreamers. Much as those of us with ideas about cities becoming less car-centered are currently seen by some as foolish fantasists.

One thing I think it's important to consider is that your question about how to develop cities that are more sustainable and less car dependent does not have just one correct answer. Every location will require different answers. As for building "up, down, or out"...that's foolish for many of our thinly populated American cities, the real answer is to promote infill development--using more of the "wasted" space between buildings for future development. My back yard, in a central city neighborhood, is huge. You could build another house back there, and still have enough room lefgt over for two good-sized gardens. You could put in a third house if you were willing to give up most of the lawn. My city was developed after cars came into being, and there's lots of spare room everywhere. They're trying to promote infill development to some extent, but people really don't understand it very well. (As evidenced by several of the posts in this thread!)

Walter S

Most people will not happily give up the "wasted" space in their yards for new development. That's where the trampoline goes.

chewybrian 

It's a sort of bio-dome, self-sufficient bubble building, where people, animals and plants live together. Most people will reference it from video games. In games, it often allows you to pack your citizens very densely for maximum productivity, and sometimes even launch them into space.

chewybrian 

It's just a matter of pricing properties to include actual costs. As things are, taxes are based on assessed values, which may or may not accurately reflect the costs to the city, county, etc, of building that home in a certain way in a given location. If the new homeowner had to pay 'impact fees' that reflected those costs at the time of purchase, they might get sticker shock and find a large lot unattractive. (Assume it included the extra costs of running sewage, water, utility lines further per home, building and maintaining more roads, having higher costs for fire and police protection, etc.)

Instead, they pay property tax based on assessed value, when property away from town may actually be cheaper, resulting in lower taxes, yet cost the city more in the end. When the city falls behind, they may raise property tax across the board, yet that big lot owner may never really pay their full share.

It's similar to the core problem with car ownership that the LCF bashers conveniently ignore. If you subsidize something, you naturally get more of it, and the free ride for those subsidized must necessarily be paid for by those less interested in the product or activity being subsidized. It's unfair and creates waste.

It is thoroughly reasonable to expect that products and activities be priced at market rates, allowing people to pay the full load for what they want. That's all. You don't need tight government control or infringement on peoples' free choices. Just let them pay for what they want, and some subtle positive changes should result.

Walter S

I agree. But there's one big problem. Millions of people enjoy these subsidies and they are by far the voting majority and will not quietly see their taxes dramatically increased. So talk all you want about what people should do or pay. That won't change things.

denis123

They also mention the reduces access to health care service.

gerv 

Yes... sometimes the problems can be solved in a completely "micro" fashion. You solve a problem in your backyard. Others see the solution and like it. It becomes a "pattern" for more development.

For many years, software developers (of which I am one..) have been utilizing Christopher Alexander's "pattern" approach. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Pattern_Language

Perhaps we could also use it to solve urban development ... as it was originally intended.

Darth Lefty 

It's a "human scaled city" where you pack the humans up in a giant apartment building and let the harvesters rule the Earth.

Actually I know it from driving past Arcosanti on the way to Flagstaff throughout my youth...

Mobile 155

You didn't read my link I see. But funny if you did. But we had a son with childhood asthma and even back then it was suggested it would be better to get out of the Downtown area. Back then it was only an observation but later we learned about urban air quality. Ironically my son got into heating and air conditioning and turned me on to the difference between indoor urban living and suburban and rural living. I posted the direct link to one of the studies earlier but here is a breakdown by a company referring to the study with bullet points.

https://aireserv.com/blog/city-vs-suburban-air-quality

and yes I know this is not from a disinterested party which is why I posted the study earlier. It is only to make a point.

Roody

I would love to build a new house in my backyard and collect a grand or more every month on rent. Current city ordinances won't allow that, unfortunately. This would be a good time to change some of those laws, since rental values are generally going up a lot more than ownership values.

Roody

Sorry, it's a stupid article. I read the first couple paragraphs and fell on the floor.

gerv 

I checked out an article on Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arcology

The goals of combining architecture with ecology seems interesting enough, so densely populated areas can be food self sufficient. A side effect of this is that there's green space built right in.

What I don't see in the article are specific items characteristic of these designs. For example, what would be the maximum height of these buildings... or what provisions should exist for humans to walk around inside..

I get kind of nervous too when designs are rather top down.... a product of "vision" . In this case there must be some designer experience behind the vision... just that I don't see it in the article.

tandempower

Suburban expansion was subsidized by mortgage underwriting. Developers see that they can expect a certain sales price from houses based on the availability of mortgages so they seek out cheap land, clear it, and build a subdivision. Many older neighborhoods have more unique houses because they were build individually instead of in bulk.

The market for housing within city centers fell because of what used to be called, "white flight," which was sort of a racist term for what should have been called, "middle-class flight." What happens is that crime (mostly spawned by drugs) is increased in an area, and people who can afford to move away do, causing prices to fall in the area they're moving out of and rise in the subdivisions they are buying into. Developers and everyone else thus profits from devaluing some areas this way and pushing up values in others. It provides the economy with a sense of modernizing, and the people whose properties lose value must either work harder to make up the difference or just stay put and attempt to survive whatever social-cultural degeneration results from exodus and crime-increases.

Effective policing is done by government and protects property values, lives, and quality of life. Otherwise you end up with a society that is perpetually building new subdivisions as refuge from the old ones that are falling to blight.

Rooftop gardens have been achieved in some cities. The strength of a roof needs to be able to withstand the extra weight of water and moist soil on top of it. As I mentioned in an earlier post, designs that achieve maximum root-volume with minimum soil/water are needed. A tree is anchored by its tap-root, so if engineers can figure out ways to allow the tap root and other roots to grow into a pipe system built-into the building, trees may be able to grow on rooftops. Of course, you could also just grow plants, vines, shrubs, etc. instead of trees on roofs, but the question is whether the sunlight/carbon absorption is sufficient to make up for the trees displaced by having the building on the land in the first place.

Walter S

Seems like growing food would be the thing? Put people close to where their food grows and you don't waste energy and infrastructure on shipping it.

tandempower

Lots of urban gardening experiments went on a few years ago. Idk what has become of them. Rather than focus on exactly what to do with arable rooftops, it might be wise to just focus on developing architectural designs that can sustain the weight and chemical erosion caused by plant growth. Then, whether the plants are trees, shrubs, vegetables, or whatever, you have standardized designs and building codes that ensure the infrastructure is there for humans to be able to live underneath plants, which benefit from the sunlight while protecting us from it.

It also makes sense to consider building designs that don't obstruct sunlight from the ground too much to have trees and plants there as well. Do we really want the ground-level of dense cities to consist of dark streets and sidewalks because all the light is blocked by tall buildings? Pyramids and artificial hill designs can reflect sunlight while providing stacked layers of indoor space. I suppose tall buildings could also be situated in ways that capture sunlight and bring it down to ground level, by having angles and heights designed with this purpose in mind.

chewybrian 

I don't think they've really got a full plan yet. It's a way we might live far out in the future, though.

If we don't destroy each other, and continue to reproduce way too fast, we could end up stacking people up. We might need the domes and the height to protect us from what could become a toxic environment by then. Or we could end up in a Mad Max scenario. Hopefully no zombies, at least. Who knows? We might become enlightened and make smart choices, too.

Predictions of the future are predictably, horribly wrong, for the most part.

Roody

Urban farming and gardening is big right now in Michigan, and I imagine in a lot of other places as well. (I recall that Burlington VT was in the forefront of growing food within the city limits.) Here in some of Michigan's depopulated cities, there's lots of wasted space that's perfect for small scale and fairly large scal agriculture. My city has added more than al hundred urban garden spaces, mostly in vacant lots, since the Great recession. The scale is much greater in Detroit and Flint, for example.

noglider 

I've been thinking about this. I'm inspired by the video about Groningen, Netherlands. (LINK) The explanation was that they wanted to reduce use of motor vehicles (MV), so they divided the city into quarters and made it necessary to take the "ring road" to go from one quarter to the next. This makes a trip in a MV take longer than a trip on foot, bicycle, or bus. It worked for them.

I wonder if it can be applied to big cities.

In my mind, the more dense a place is, the greater the disincentive to using MVs should be. Private MVs take up too much space around the passenger and are thereby too space-greedy. Not only that, they go fast enough to be hazards to bicycles, pedestrians, wheelchair users, etc. So allow local delivery trucks through streets in dense areas but only if their trips on those streets are short. Motor traffic should move efficiently between or around dense sectors but not through them. A private MV trip should end at a parking lot on or near a big road, and from there, the traveler should do the last mile or so on foot or bus or bicycle or something similar.

I wish I had a traffic modeling app to show what I'm envisioning.

What do you folks think?

Ekdog

I've seen that video, and it really makes me want to visit Groningen and check out what they're up to first-hand. I have no doubt it would work elsewhere if people had the same will to reduce car usage in their communities, but that's a big "if." The Dutch are light years ahead of most other parts of the world when it comes to promoting cycling. The difficult part is changing attitudes elsewhere, where people would fight against such innovation tooth and nail.

noglider 

Well, as has probably been said thousands of times, making things better for the population often involves making it worse for individuals. A car trip is usually faster than anything else, even in moderately bad traffic. So telling someone who wants to drive that we will all be better off if people didn't drive doesn't come as much comfort.

I-Like-To-Bike

Outside of the LCF brand of pleasure derived from sticking it to everybody who doesn't share their lifestyle choice, what is the significant gain for anybody from such a scheme?

Ya do realize that many if not most bicyclists, pedestrians, and even wheelchair users may prefer to use or be driven in their privately owned automobiles to and from their home on many if not most occasions when they leave their neighborhood; especially in inclement weather or if they are not up for a mile walk to and from their car at every stop on their travels. How does everybody (including bicyclists, pedestrians, and even wheelchair users) or anybody gain by a scheme forcing them to park a mile away from their destination? Do their automobiles take less precious space or what?