City Layout Design: A programmer's perspective

The fundamental premise that this is starting out with is flawed which is that cities can be successfully designed upfront. This is what we painfully learned with our grand experiment with the modernist architecture movement.<p>The argument is roughly the same as the one against waterfall development in software engineering which is that it's impossible to know until actual implementation &#38; use what is successful or not.<p>Instead, successful cities are evolved and mixed use, with a mix of new and old buildings, strong social fabric and buildings built to be adaptable to changing needs.<p>See: How Buildings Learn, The Death and Life of Great American Cities and A Pattern Language for more context on this.

Orbital routes (such as the proposed circular roads) don't work well in practice because slight delays tend to propagate easily and quickly all the way around the circle, with no recovery time at either end of the route (because there is no end). This is why the Circle line of the London Underground was changed a few years ago into a spiral shape, and why the M25 motorway gets congested so easily.<p>A better configuration would be three spiral shapes, giving the route defined start- and end-points to allow recovery time for delays.

I don't understand why the author chose to kink the subways to preserve the same orientation in each satellite. Those corners are going to slow down trains and impose more wear, which means more failures. It also adds a huge amount of track (and associated road crossings, safety infrastructure, maintenance personnel, etc.) and trip time. This plan already abandons the rectilinear grid system in favor of circular roads; I don't see a reason to preserve the rail system's north-south axis in every city.<p>[edit] I should mention that overall, I quite like the design. It looks to me like you've arranged the space at a livable scale and with careful attention to the work/live/play cycle of its inhabitants.

I like Oskar Hansen idea - it's called Continuous Linear Form, and it says problems of cities arise from radial growth - city starts in the center and grows outwards in every direction.<p>So transport routes, parkings have to go throught the city, dividing it, using up space, making everybody go further and further to do anything, and isolating people in the center of the city from the nature.<p>So he imagined cities that are like lanes - growing from the center in only 2 directions. Everybody will have nature near, between such urbanised lanes will be villages, roads, etc - so transport will go throught wilderness, making it cheaper, and safer. These lanes should be continious, and areas of different functions should be placed repeatedly, in small distances, so nobody will have to go too far from home to servicing areas.<p>Of course - it's a little utopian idea, but still, I like it.<p>Some more info about Oskar Hansen, and his architecture:<p><a href="http://tnn.pl/Oskar_Hansen,2969.html" rel="nofollow">http://tnn.pl/Oskar_Hansen,2969.html</a><p>One of the districts he designed (he had to make compromises, so it's not really LCF, but still, it's nice district for its time). <a href="http://tnn.pl/uploaded/zdjecia/200806191346500.hansen_041.jpg" rel="nofollow">http://tnn.pl/uploaded/zdjecia/200806191346500.hansen_041.jp...</a>

This bears a striking resemblance to Canberra.<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Inner-canberra_01MJC.png" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Inner-canberra_01MJC.png</a><p>It would also be worth checking out New Urbanism, which has very similar goals for the designs of cities.<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Urbanism" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Urbanism</a>

Somewhat relevant, a guy designed the ultimate city, Magnasanti, in Simcity 4. Here's his video [1] and an interview [2]. Choice quote from the interview:<p><i>Vice: I think most people’s natural inclination after watching your video would be awe, followed by fear.</i><p><i>Vincent: I am in agreement. That was part of the intent of the video, for those that know, play, and love the game.</i><p>Introversion, an indie game company in the UK who created hacker favorites like Uplink has unfortunately shelved their game project played in a fully procedurally generated city, from the major neighbourhoods down to the individual floors of the buildings. You could get a demo of the city generator from the recent Humble Bundle. There are still some fascinating videos to find on their blog [3] or on youtube [4]<p>[1] <a href="http://youtu.be/NTJQTc-TqpU" rel="nofollow">http://youtu.be/NTJQTc-TqpU</a> [2] <a href="http://www.vice.com/read/the-totalitarian-buddhist-who-beat-sim-city" rel="nofollow">http://www.vice.com/read/the-totalitarian-buddhist-who-beat-...</a> [3] <a href="http://www.introversion.co.uk/subversion/" rel="nofollow">http://www.introversion.co.uk/subversion/</a> [4] <a href="http://youtu.be/J30i0gABfS8" rel="nofollow">http://youtu.be/J30i0gABfS8</a><p>[edit]: better link for the Subversion video

"Let's Kick Around Carfree.com" by New World Economics contains worthwhile criticisms of this design idea.<p><a href="http://www.newworldeconomics.com/archives/2009/111509.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.newworldeconomics.com/archives/2009/111509.html</a><p>Another worthwhile article is "Let's Take a Trip to Suburban Hell."<p><a href="http://www.newworldeconomics.com/archives/2010/030710.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.newworldeconomics.com/archives/2010/030710.html</a>

Satellites emerge in big cities too, they're called neighbourhoods. The extent of how far people are willing to walk in their daily lives will scope the size of a neighbourhood and that also pressures people to concentrate their daily activities within the same neighbourhood.<p>Public transit will lift the limit somewhat: people are willing to spend only so much time commuting or going to/from hobbies but with good public transit people will frequent other neighbourhoods on a regular basis. Public transit will be cheap as long as densities are high enough and that's why big cities are dense and have public transit. Large car-based "cities" aren't actually cities, they're just glorified urban office parks with people living in the suburbs: public transit will never work there efficiently.<p>The reason why you can't design a city is that a meaningful city can only grow organically based on whatever people happen to make of it. Commerce will surface when the place and time are right. Predesigning a neighbourhood will result in either a lot of dead space or a preformed area that nobody will consider their own.

Its interesting seeing some of the similarities between the OP and Washington DC. There aren't the mini cities the same way (maybe Reston or Arlington would qualify) but the Beltway is the major highway for cars that circles the city with designated bus lanes on most of the in/out spokes. Large subway/lightrail network with MASSIVE parking structures at the perimeter to encourage public transportation. Fairly walkable downtown areas (especially the national mall area). And yet even despite these advances driving in DC is a terrible experience.

Read "A Pattern Language" by Christopher Alexander. <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Pattern-Language-Buildings-Construction-Environmental/dp/0195019199" rel="nofollow">http://www.amazon.com/Pattern-Language-Buildings-Constructio...</a>

When I read<p><pre><code> I have structured my city into smaller circular satellite cities (C1 to C6) which in turn are placed within a circle *with the airport at the center.* </code></pre> I found myself wondering how happy the inhabitants would be about constant overhead air traffic, not to mention the crash risk for the immediately surrounding buildings.

Surprisingly, I found it rather similar to Tokyo actually.<p>Tokyo, too, has multiple sub centres which are mostly self-sufficient. They are connected by a train running around in a circle and have central hubs where trains depart into the suburbs. Stations are largely accommodated with large bicycle parking lots to facilitate train usage. However, even though Tokyo is one magnitude bigger than NYC, the transportation fees are fairly high, too. Also, the Japanese solved the parking space problem, by making it a requirement to have a parking space in order to be able to buy a car.

Check out some of the circular city patterns around Amersfoort, Netherlands -- and of course Amersfoort itself is circular but older and more organic: <a href="http://maps.google.com/maps?q=Amersfoort,+Utrecht,+The+Netherlands&#38;hl=en&#38;ll=52.196165,5.379782&#38;spn=0.023885,0.0315&#38;sll=37.0625,-95.677068&#38;sspn=62.057085,64.511719&#38;geocode=Fc_WGwMdMzZSAA&#38;hnear=Amersfoort,+Utrecht,+The+Netherlands&#38;t=h&#38;z=15" rel="nofollow">http://maps.google.com/maps?q=Amersfoort,+Utrecht,+The+Nethe...</a>

Was anyone else reminded of the early conceptual drawings and plans for EPCOT Center?

LA is spread-out and almost flat, due to the earthquake active zone.

This reminds me of <a href="http://carfree.com/" rel="nofollow">http://carfree.com/</a>

wont the city center become a bottle neck?