Housing the world population

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
81

I remember that book, I haven’t read it in probably 20 years. They do not so much live in arcologies as in secure buildings and housing complexes. Perhaps the closest thing to an arcology is that corporate farm they go on picnic at. But then again I am guessing that the workers at the farm live in housing on the farm itself.

And there are a lot of people like my brother who have literally lived in the same small town all their life, and have no desire to travel, or move anywhere else. He has held the same job at the same company since high school, and he turned 52 this month. How many people refuse to even consider moving out of Manhattan on this very board, or move out of San Francisco, or away from the LA Basin? What is the difference between refusing to move out of Manhattan, clusters of skyscrapers, masses of people, ageing infrastructure, limited job market, serious expensive living arrangements and being willing to live in an arcology with clean, new modern and efficient housing, businesses providing everything that you could want, the ability to mail order anything not instantly available, internet, cable, schools, libraries, theaters, restaurants ranging from small fast food franchises all the way through a Todd English venue [one could perhaps influence a name chef to come in and do up one of their franchise places, they put them in damned casinos…] If you are renting out business space, then the businesses can change and modify according to want and need. How frequently do we hear on the dope the need to simplify our lives, reduce our waste, become more ecologically responsible? How is staying in a crumbling ageing inefficient community more responsible than moving to a nice new ecologically responsible arcology? Even if you stay on the dole in the arcology, you are at least living in an ecologically sound facility instead of a crumbling ageing area.

Company Towns. Used to be all over the country. I actually lived in a military ‘company town’ called Craddock for a couple years. One of the oldest “planned communities” in the country.

And if you take into account that you can sort of think of it as a mall, a mall has 2 or 3 anchor stores, the major ‘industries’ providing employment. Then you have the supporting companies - fast food, convenience stores, small boutiques providing clothing, toiletries [bath and beyondish smelly crap] pet supplies, pretty much anything you would need or want, restaurants, book stores. Then you have the government services - police, fire, postal, libraries, schools, hospital and so forth. Anything that you can lease a space and buy a franchise for, and is legal in that state you can do. If you want to open a bar, and have the funding, you can. You want to open a nonhappy ending massage and reiki clinic, knock yourself out. You want to open a daycare, enjoy. You want to just go on welfare and live on the dole you get from the government [or are retired and have a pension] do so. If you are on the dole and want to make some money above the dole, sign up at the government job office, and get an assignment, and get paid minimum for the hours you work sweeping the corridors or washing windows.

You know how many people would live in an apartment attached to a mall? Comprendez-vous “mallrat”

And again, remind me of the difference between someone who refuses to move out of Manhattan’s hivemind for a larger living space that isnt a 3d floor walkup, with garbage strikes, crumbling infrastructure and a mass of humanity pressing around like in that Star Trec episode and someone willing to live in a nice comfortable arcology with everything conveniently at hand, and brand new facilities?

82

Had to look that term up. Apart from occupying space, what contribution would these individuals make to the arcology’s economy and social structure?

No idea what you’re asking. Maybe this is one of those US/UK culture things again. Maybe arcologies are a more workable concept in the USA.

83

I was suggesting the arcology be built by the government of an area [like Detroit, which admittedly has a crumbling infrastructure, whole neighborgoods standing empty and rotting, and has a very high rate of unemployment] to substitute for its own crumbling craptastic current traditional neighborhoods. I [way back in my earlier posts, and other threads on arcologies] posited that the savings would be worth it - replacing large areas of crumbling post apocalyptic city with modern, well built, highly ecologically sound arcologies and to just move the people out of the old craptastic places into a nice shiney new arcology. Smaller area, less infrastructure, newer infrastructure, better organization of resources would make more sense economically. If you are not having to maintain many square kilometers of empty nontaxed rotting neighborhoods, you can put the saved resources towards supporting the population and brand new infrastructure you now have.

Think of it like a giant planned community entirely of council housing, everybody gets issued a residence, and there is the equivalent of space for businesses to lease from the government. The government still pays the same dole to the people, still educates the kids, still provides health care, and businesses can still move into an area, rent space, hire people. Just instead of old crappy buildings that are less efficient in heating/cooling, electrical use, plumbing it is all sparkling new. Instead of people all having to commute out of town to a job because they own a home and cant manage to sell it, they can walk out their door, down an elevator to an internal tramway and run around the perimeter until they reach the segment that houses the shop they work in, hop off the tram and up the elevator to work. If they are in the unemployed group of people that is existing solely on the dole, they can register for all the usual governmental programs, and there might hopefully be a little office tucked away that provides minimum wage jobs as a temp doing things around the arcology that need doing - sweeping the corridors, washing windows, doing groundskeeping work in the landscaped areas, people who need someone to help build an IKEA cabinet can put in a request for someone to help out and pay minimum wage plus a small management fee, or if someone needs someone to replace someone who called out sick or is going on vacation …

As I said previously, I like to think positively about my fellow man. I think that with a little work an arcology could be a very positive way to solve problems like America’s crumbling infrastructure, forclosed properties and underemployed.

84

I don’t see any particular reason to imagine that doing this in a single large structure would solve the problems in a significantly better way than just doing it by building a new (but fairly conventional) city.

How, for example, does it resolve the need to commute to elsewhere when there’s no suitable or satisfactory employment available more locally?

85

Oh no you don’t. What you’re proposing runs almost directly counter to what people have been doing over the last half century or so. Sprawl happened in this country because the room was available and people didn’t want to live in dense clusters.

at the risk of being warned for an insult, you sound like every other 16 year old know-it-all who thinks he has an original thought and believes that “if I could make everyone do what I want, the world would be perfect.”

As has been already posted by at least a few people, you’re not proposing anything new. And it hasn’t happened yet. Think about why.

We’re fucking not moles, for christ’s sake. Look up the rates of vitamin D deficiency. We need the sun. If you’re perfectly happy living in an underground bunker, then fine, but don’t you dare act like you have any moral authority to force everyone else to do so.

86

I know I am not proposing anything new, and I am not 16 years old.

And I am NOT suggesting anybnody lives underground. Has anybody fucking bothered looking at the arcology concept by Buckminster Fuller that I was proposing, the fucking thing is all terraces and windows. Jesus Fucking Christ. i certainly did not come up with the fucking idea, I was proposing a possibly municipal solution to a problem that exists currently. Why have urban sprawl where installing and maintaining a huge infrastructure is highly inefficient when you could take an opportunity to do something that is ecologically RECOMMENDED BY MANY PEOPLE ON THIS DAMNED BOARD. How many posts on the board are questioning why people live out in the ass end of nowhere and need cars, and the US no longer has much of a mass transit system, and our infrastructure is crumbling, and municipalities are suffering lack of income to maintain the infrastructure.

Screw it, I am out of the fucking thread. Try to explain to people around here can be like wrestling with pigs, y’all obviously like stick in the mud thinking.

87

The post you’re responding to doesn’t appear to have been aimed at you. Did you realise that?

88

What id like someone to explain is how an arcology is guaranteed to be superior to.Milton Keynes.

Clustering people vertically shortens commuter distances, but it increases commuter density - it seems to me that this cancels itself out - compensating for this by bumping up the transit capacity takes up space that could have been occupied residentially or commercially, again, offsetting its own benefit.

How is an arcology better than a modern horizontal town with a designed-in transit system and with strict governance on zoning and urban planning?

89

If a bunch of people are disagreeing with you, the mature thing to do is try to figure out why, and not just dismiss them as stupid.

and, by the way, I wasn’t replying to you in the first place, so you might not want to call other people idiots…

90

If we’ve had the technology to build arcologies for 100 years, why hasn’t anyone ever built one? There has never been a single functioning arcology.

To put it simply, we can imagine that a small-scale arcology is just a combined shopping mall and apartment complex. Why doesn’t that ever actually happen? Why don’t shopping mall developers ever add a wing of apartments to the mall?

As for the idea that we should gut the existing crumbling buildings in Detroit, and instead build an arcology for everyone to live and work in, well, why is it that Detroit is crumbling? Detroit is crumbling because there aren’t any jobs in Detroit, and all the workers who used to work there can’t find work. So they leave, leaving behind abandoned industrial, commercial, and residential space. The people of Detroit don’t need MORE infrastructure, they need LESS. Half of Detroit needs to be demolished, and not replaced with anything.

I guess I still don’t understand the insistence that all functions of an arcology need to be put into a single building. How would it help if all of Manhattan was in a single building? Because, in actuallity, the island of Manhattan is already an arcology as you guys are imagining, the only difference is that it is composed of lots of small modules that can be built, remodeled, demolished, and replaced independently, and that don’t depend on each other for structural integrity. Or to put it another way, Manhattan is an arcology, it’s just that it’s designed with a system of open-air channels that reach down to a uniform distance, an those open-air channels are also used for surface travel.

I hereby declare that an arcology is a solution in search of a problem. All the problems that arcologies are supposed to solve are instead solved by regular cities. If you want to encourage even denser development in core cities, then fine. But how is an arcology superior to a dense city core? I suppose you want to get rid of sprawl. But the problem is, if the arcology is functioning, the land around the arcology will be incredibly valuable due to easy access to the arcology, and so people will build next door. An arcology surrounded by wilderness or cropland doesn’t make sense, because the land right next to the arcology is much more valuable than the land 20 miles away. So even if you plop the arcology in the middle of Kansas, if the arcology is successful it immediately becomes the core of a new city. Or do we just decree that no buildings can be constructed within 100 miles of the arcology?

The reason an arcology doesn’t actually exist is that it’s totally inflexible. You have X amount of space, and there’s no room to expand or contract. What if people move away? What if more people want to move to the arcology? How do you accomodate them? In a conventional city, you start building more high-rise apartments, and build detached houses in empty lots. How would this work in an arcology? If you can imagine how the solution would be to build a high-rise apartment just next to the arcology, and connect that high-rise to the arcology with transportation and electricity and so on, well, why not have the rest of the arcology built the same way? A bunch of little modules that can be reconfigured however the individual owners or renters like, subject to whatever restrictions the locality cares to enforce. And then we’re back to a regular city.

91

I wonder if there are any apartments that attach to this underground shopping mall. I have seen hotels integrated inside airports, which contain many features of shopping malls.

So all we need is for an airport to close down but have their stores remain, or one of the apartments above crystal city to fully integrate transportation to the stores (if they haven’t already,) in order to answer “yes” to your question.

92

European towns tend to be the opposite, the notion of “commercial areas” being separated from “living areas” is still very new here. You get many buildings where there are garages underground, the ground floor is stores, the first floor is offices and the rest is flats. Some urban malls are like that as well: 2-3 floors of garages, 1-2 floors of stores, flats (some of which are or double up as offices).

But people don’t expect to spend their life in the building.

93

We’ve got quite a few combined residential and shopping sites in the UK, however, the people that live there don’t necessarily work there or shop there, and vice versa.

It may be that these are too small to be properly comparable to arcologies, but I think they demonstrate a general rule that as the distance from a person’s home increases, so does the opportunity of a suitable/desirable job and so does the availability of useful shops.

This is just a geometric thing - it’s more likely there will be a job for me within a radius of ten miles than within a radius of one mile, simply because a ten mile circle is an area 100 times larger.

One of the things that arcologies attempt to do is to stack and organise that area so as to decrease the likely distance between my home and my ideal job, but in doing so, they introduce new constraints and problems that (IMO) outweigh the benefits.

94

Thanks for the input everybody. If you are still interested in this topic, I am going to release a paper i wrote on this subject in a week or two. It is very long and probably still will not address all the issues with building a society like this. Feel free to criticize it when I post it. lol, maybe I can post some more kiddie pics with it too. :smiley:

95

dude, I know for a fact that one person does not need 2000sq feet for themselves. Given that everybody is different, it would be better to build structures of all sizes, in many different area’s to accommodate the desired living environment of the people.
by the way im not 16 either, im 17:smack:.

This one structure i proposed was just ONE of possibly many. I suggested underground because the possibility of geothermal power that would power the whole city 3 times over, possibly more, and heating from the earth its self. There are many things that would make an underground structure more relabel, stronger, safer, and more efficient than an above ground structure, or in the water.

No one can do it perfect my friend. One group of people may be fine with just one room. Another group may want an 8000sq foot house for just themselves. Maybe a family. One group may want to live in a very secure structure. One group may want access to the ocean on a daily basis. Another group may want to be on the top floor of a super tall structure.

If you can sit here and nit pick everything I say. Surely you can sit her and come up with a solution.

And on last thing, I decided the structure underground would gain a good amount of support from the surrounding earth, It would be possible to make it modular. Meaning, After the exo-skeleton is built, which will not be that difficult once the earth decides to move out of the way, we can literally move any size home in to position.

at today standards, maybe we could build one in two years.

if the only goal was to build one, not monetary gain, 6 months to excavate the hole, and another 3 months to lay the exo-skeleton in place.

96

This might not be a problem. If you dig a big hole and put people in it, the ocean will come to them. Well, water of some kind, anyway.

You shouldn’t be complaining that people are nitpicking your suggestion - you should be welcoming it. If it’s a good idea, then criticism will just make it stronger, because it will be easy to defend - and all you’ll need to do to answer the critics is just explain yourself in greater detail.

If that doesn’t seem to be possible, it could be an indication that it isn’t such a great idea after all, or at least, needs thinking out some more.

97

good point. It is just childish to keep over-exaggerating the confinements of a huge room, or large house, especially since I addressed that in previous post.
My first design was a template to show that it could be done and could house many individuals with at least moderate comfort.

I appreciate the new criticism, but beating a dead horse with a stick is annoying at some point.

98

I went back and re-read the whole thread. I’m honestly not seeing where you directly answered very many of the criticisms and objections. <shrug>

99

Mangetout, thanks for pointing that out. I will get that paper out ASAP so people don’t have to try and read through all those LONG post.

100

Good luck with it (I mean that most sincerely).

Try asking yourself, of each particular feature of your design: “Is this better than all possible alternatives? Why/how is it better?” If you can answer those questions succinctly, you may have silenced your critics in advance.