The Future Cities Project - mantownhuman

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
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Another thread had a side reference to The Future Cities Project, led by Austin Williams, with a manifesto under the name mantownhuman.

The manifesto rails against current trends in architecture, especially bureaucratic and environmental restraints, and wants new creativity to be put into urban areas, now housing half of mankind.

Google AI sums it better than I could.

Mantownhuman architecture would look like grand, permanent, and human-centric urban landscapes. Championed by The Future Cities Project, it would prioritize humanity’s creative dominion over nature—favoring bold, unashamedly artificial, and progressive cityscapes over meek, nature-deffered designs.

Because the philosophy openly rejects modern trends of “green” eco-cities, regulatory tick-boxing, and natural integration, mantownhuman architecture would feature specific characteristics:

  • Monumental Human Scale: Buildings would celebrate human aspiration, reason, and achievement rather than minimizing human presence to blend into the natural environment.
  • Urbanity Over Nature: It would focus on the triumph of cities and human civilization over natural limits, creating dense, distinct, and highly developed urban zones.
  • Rejection of “Eco-Design”: It would bypass designs that attempt to accommodate carbon-neutral, sustainability-obsessed trends that treat humans as secondary to nature.
  • Critical Modernism: Rooted in radical design and avant-garde Modernism, it would feature practical, structural elegance and bold, intellectual planning over organic fractals or amorphous “green” shapes.

As with most manifestos, details are fuzzy, overladen by big themes. Some of them sound good; others - they essentially reject climate change - are instant stoppers.

So what does the future they want look like? I can’t find examples even in videos they’ve done. They do cite past concept cities, all of which, if you know the history, were sheer anti-human unbuildable flights of fancy on the level of sf book covers. And what do they expect architects to do? Architects don’t build or run cities. A few bold buildings are always going to be overwhelmed by tens of millions of apartment blocks. Even China is not going to wipe away conurbations of 30 million people and start with a greenfield.

Has anyone ever looked into them? Is there any substance under the smoke? Are they total fringe or taken seriously? Do they ever even define their terms? What is “human-centric” or “bold, intellectual planning”?

Opinions on The War on Science, edited by Lawrence M. Krauss?
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Trantor, anyone?

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And I guess the half of humanity that doesn’t live in these cities can pay the environmental price for them. They should make sure their new mantown cities are well above ocean level.

Is there anything more obvious than the name they have put on this architecture agenda? “Mantown” (I mean they tacked “human” on the end, but come on, they’re not fooling anyone). Giant erection-substitutes all over the place, and no concessions to anything but the men who think they will build them. Permanent erections, every man’s dream I guess.

I’m not sure I have conveyed adequately the amount of contempt I have for this.

Which ones? It all sounds like grandiosity and power.

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Sounds a lot like Howard Roark pontificating in The Fountainhead.

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LOL, my thoughts exactly. Is the Rand family behind this?

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Now that is some authentic Frontier (of architecture) gibberish.

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Rethinking cities has become critical precisely because most humans will be living in them - or, more accurately, in a sprawl of hundreds of square miles surrounding some designated central area.

Saying that cities grow organically rather than being planned from scratch is technically true. Anything that is only “technically” true is off to a bad start. The reality of 21st century cities worldwide is that they followed the U.S. model of allowing real estate developers to build where and what they liked, taking advantage of the various governmental overseers that each set different sets of rules for their own localities. You can see this dysfunctionality all over the massively growing cities of Asia. Even in China, the government for years incentivized developers to build staggering numbers of instant towers to squeeze in as many people as possible with little coordination with the other necessities of city life, like schools, hospitals, stores, sewers, firefighters, on and on. Beijing went from having two expressway ring roads to seven. Madness.

Environmentalist-types want to bring back the 15-min city, something close to what I lived in as a youth. Within a 15-minute walk from my house were a supermarket, a grocery store, a bakery, a meat market, a fish market, a drug store, a library, a bank, and other normal civic amenities. A bus downtown, where downtown was still the center of shopping and everything else, took less than 10 minutes. Where I live today those are a 15-minute car drive away and unreachable by public transport. 15-minute city proposals are idealistic at best, achievable only in a few very dense cities and almost inevitably geared toward an upper-middle class audience.

New answers are absolutely necessary. New, even bold, ideas are absolutely necessary. I’ve studied future city proposals for 50 years and none of them passed the smell test as being replicable, even if a local example or two succeeded because some few individuals had the clout to push them through. Scaling a proposal up to the tens of millions is a vastly different achievement, as different as the range between a fireworks show and a moon colony, even if both involve rockets.

I’d like to look into something sane. This probably is not it, but I don’t know enough to dismiss it out of hand.

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Solution he is thinking of is probably some variant f Old Man River Cith, a totally planned and formated city for like 250 000 people, with the whole shebang integrated, business, residential, services.

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I recall all the ‘town and country planners’ that made such a mess of the UK in the twentieth century, aided somewhat by the Luftwaffe. Planning always seems to make a mess, but so does a lack of planning.

Yeah; that would be a nice model. I don’t drive, so a 15 minute city is ideal for me; but the constraints of distribution costs means that local shops are always more expensive than out-of-town supermarkets. Which means local shops are going out of business.

If we can’t have local shops, maybe delivery-based shopping might work - I’m old enough to remember delivery boys on their bicycles, but they disappeared during the 60’s. Maybe robot deliveries and an infrastructure that supports this would work, but that probably means losing the local shops and local community spirit. No-one goes to pubs any more, except for the occasional social meal with friends or family - you don’t go there to meet people.

Whatever model for a new, human-friendly city we adopt, we need to realise that everyone is constantly online all the time, so meeting people face to face is less important than it once was.

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I think the author might find the ecological balance and architectural subtleties of Gedi Prime too progressive.

It sounds like a partnership between Roark and Ken from Barbie designing a Mojo Dojo Casa House in the form of a massive Brutalist arcology for Megacity One.

To be honest, it’s hard to judge without seeing examples of what it actually LOOKS like.

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I read through several of the guy’s essays the other evening. The sense I got:

  • He feels that true creativity and imagination in architecture has been destroyed by regulations, especially related to sustainability and climate control.
  • He’s a climate-change skeptic, if not outright denier.
  • He’s also a DEI opponent.

Yeah, whatever a sane solution may be, I’m not at all convinced that his ideas are it.

At least Fountainhead-adjacent, IMO.

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Doesn’t Houston, Texas lack any sort of zoning? So wouldn’t it have evolved naturally to meet these standards?

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Houston does not have zoning laws, true. That doesn’t mean that it’s a free-for-all. Instead the issues of what can be built where are contested over a variety of stakeholders, from city government to local community activists. Here’s a good article on the complications involved. Spoiler: rich people have lots more power than poor people.

https://www.houstonlanding.org/no-zoning-in-houston-provides-flexibility-complications-experts-say-why-does-it-matter/

Also, the city of Houston has roughly 2.4 million residents, but the larger metro area has 7.9 million living in ten counties with 10,000 square miles and 120 incorporated governments. Only the state controls that entire area and building permits are not a state remit.

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Sounds sort of like the proposed Munger dorm. Which got canceled because it would be absolutely awful. Nobody wants to live in places like that, and nobody but sadists wants anyone else to live there.

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And regarding the “urbanity over nature” characteristic, that seems inconsistent with the popularity of urban parks or even street trees. Even die-hard urbanites like a little nature in their cities.

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A giant monument dedicated to Ego Over Eco.

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Let’s go back to 1894. King Camp Gillette, his safety razor and fortune years in the future, had a plan. Everybody in America, all 60 million, would live in one supercity, which he called “Metropolis.” They would all be housed in identical high-rise buildings, powered by the inexhaustible hydropower of Niagara Falls. The city would replace Rochester.

It would focus on the triumph of cities and human civilization over natural limits, creating dense, distinct, and highly developed urban zones. ✓

it would feature practical, structural elegance and bold, intellectual planning over organic fractals or amorphous “green” shapes. ✓

And since Gillette was, at the time at least, a militant anti-trust campaigner, it would all be owned by the people, everybody in the world getting one of a billion shares.

Bold, rational thinking. Best of all, he put it down on paper with illustrations, detailed to the nth degree.

I wouldn’t mind a crazy utopia. Just show it to me.