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The perfect city by foxboyprower
- In the last journal I mentioned my interest in efficiency and explained a little about urban sprawl. Expanding on those, I'll get to the idea on which I want to focus.
- A sloppy city that suffers from bad road layout and a lot of urban sprawl is a result of bad planning. Something to consider is how old the city is. When a little town begins with a poor design, it's not a big deal at the time. It's so small everyone can probably just walk to the market or saloon (it's at this point you should figure out how old I'm talking about). But as dirt roads are paved and more businesses and houses are built, things are only slightly inconvenient. Tearing down the old town to start from scratch would be costly and require a lot of work. So the poorly designed town is the foundation for the big city it will someday become. The poor design isn't a problem until it's too late to fix it.
- When it is first built, the small town might have a bad design for good reasons. The settlers might have needed shelter quickly and had no time to plan. The town might have been built to support one industry (ex: fishing) but later shifts to an economy supported by another industry (ex: mining). Technological limits might force people to build in a poor design. Say a train track needs to be built, but there is a mountain in the way. The most efficient path would be through the mountain, but the resources don't exist at the time to make a hole through it. A path around is built at the time. Decades later when the technology exists to make a hole through the mountain and fix the track, it doesn't happen. The poor design is already done and breaking it to start over would be a lot of work. What is the downside to this? Let's use simple math and terrible price guessing (like monopoly). It costs $5000 to drill through the mountain, but the builders only have $2000 and that's just enough to build a track around the mountain. The fuel and time costs of going around the mountain are only $3 a trip. With value of the train cargo, that's not a really big deal. But when one train makes that trip each day, it takes only four and a half years for the money wasted by the trip to add up to the amount needed to make the hole so the track can be fixed. It can be ignored, but over decades of use, the money wasted adds up to large amounts.
In order to ensure this never happened, a new city would have to have a lot of planning in advance (this is where my interesting idea comes into play). So in terms of planning, what would the ideal city look like? What things would need to be considered when planning it? For one thing a mass transportation system such as a metro would have to be planned to have efficient, helpful paths yet still have a system in place to keep transportation running while maintenance is done on some of the tracks. The city and businesses would have to be laid out in such a way that pedestrians have a minimum travel distance from their metro stop to their work. For those who would use the road, the roads would have to be arranged to be an efficient path that promoted a smooth and safe flow of traffic. The water, municipal waste systems, and electrical grid would have to be laid out in the most efficient manner that would also allow for low maintenance costs. The amount of jobs provided by businesses and the amount of people that can live in the city would have to be balanced out. - Even when the city is made, it will have to be maintained to keep its efficient integrity. New businesses and housing will have to be carefully placed so as not to disrupt flow of traffic and resources. It would take a lot of planners, but I wonder what the place would look like.
The perfect city
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Comments
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Maybe. They probably wouldn't like my plans allocating a huge amount of resources paying a full team of engineers, urban planners, economists, and business advisors then using more money to start building a new city. ^^;;
Yeah I have lots of good ideas. Unfortunately all they are at the moment are ideas.
And the government needed for this would be a bit more restrictive. Not really freedom loving... at least in terms of building stuff, having children and a few things like that.-
Well, its better than all that money being either used for out of place, stupid projects, or the government officials just taking it for themselves... At least you could see that your tax money was being used to keep things running smoothly, you know?
I'd be down for some population control though; its only natural that our numbers be controlled by something, Nature does it by illness and starvation, and since the majority of us aren't doing either, we need to be responsible and do it ourselves before our population implodes because we simply don't have enough resources to go around. (I don't want to live to see that, its gonna be a pretty grisly scene.)
See, you need to be president now. :P
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Well the project would be really costly in the short term.
Actually I would probably give subsidies to birth control companies and encourage adoption rather than having your own baby. And if a family doesn't comply, local law would force them to leave within a certain amount of time or loose their place of residence.
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Population control is really something i'll be down too. I would still someday have a family of my own, but with so many humans in the world, the cost of every day things will keep climbing higher and higher and raising even one child is now expensive.
I also agree with all this needless construction. A phase i always keep using, If you build it, your going to have to maintain it. Constructional groups keep building, yet hardly anyone buying much anymore. we should only build when its becomes a necessary, rather then wasting resources. We as a spices really need to step up in conversation for ourselves, before we finished off what we already wounded of our rare planet in the cosmos.
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I'd buy a house if it was guaranteed to last a good 500 years.
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The only things that would last that long would be a building made entirely out of stone
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Or titanium
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Or Cuendillar.
I been reading the wheel of times :-)>
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NamelessTraveler
I love your journals, they're always so well-written, and about things that are of actual concern as a society. :D
But you should be mayor of somewhere, they could use people like you in the government that are that mindful of the people's needs. :3