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Ideas of how cities and towns can be arranged to keep car (and oil) dependency
to a bare minimum by building to the human scale. Sustainability is the goal.
I will just quote parts of the first two paragraphs for what that website link says:
“Sustainable architecture is a general term that describes environmentally conscious design techniques in the field of architecture.
In the broad context, sustainable architecture seeks to minimize the negative environmental impacts of buildings by enhancing efficiency and moderation in the use of materials, energy, and developmental space.”
For general aspects of urban planning there are plenty of techniques that can help too. Car free zones is one example, and also great efficient public transportation, great pedestrian friendly/very walkable zones, and promoting enough density and lack of sprawl.
However, the density can still be mixed (medium density, high density, low density) and does not have to entirely be high density.
Outside of Urban Planning and Architecture, there are plenty of general sustainable environmental practices that have to be promoted too and all of this for many areas of the world instead of just a few places.
1. They have big greenspaces in the middle of the city blocks that don't look suitable for use as backyards or parks, I think they're supposed to act as communal courtyards, but I'm skeptical as to how well that will work.
2. Also related to the shape of the block, the houses would be very narrow. The standard building depth is supposedly 30ft, so from the diagram, that suggests a width of 10-15ft. I don't see this as an advantage. While I'm opposed to very wide buildings of 100ft or more, I think the ideal width is in the 20-50ft range. Right now the floorplates look to be 300-450sf with a few that are a bit bigger, which means a lot of stairs to climb. They should have more buildings with floorplates in the 1000-4000sf range which would be suitable for apartments with units of 1-2 floors.
3. Street width, I think the width of the standard street might be a bit greater than necessary, especially when there are squares at intersections and courtyards as well. Their districts are 2500ft across and would have a central boulevard of 100ft, standard streets of 25ft and alleys that are smaller. Dubrovnik, Croatia is a medieval city I'm familiar with, it used to be a Venetian port. The walled city of Dubrovnik is a bit smaller than their districts at about 1500ft across, but their streets are much narrower. Their central boulevard is about 40ft wide, the standard street is about 8ft and a few alleys are narrower still. I guess you could nudge it up to around 12ft for standard streets for easier access by emergency vehicles, but 25ft is too much imo. That's about the curb to curb width of a typical suburban residential street in Toronto.
This is Dubrovnik's central boulevard of about 40ft, if there are no cars, that's pretty wide, even with all the tourists in the summer, it's wide enough. A 100ft car free central boulevard is at risk of feeling empty and unwelcoming like Pyongyang can be.
From: Panoramio - Photo of Dubrownik, g
4. I don't think very many new cities will be built. Even in China, I think many of the "new cities" are more like appendages of existing cities, so I'm not sure if there is that much value in trying to design a city from scratch. In all cities in North America and many cities elsewhere, what you'd want is to basically adapt/improve existing cities, and in a few countries like China, design appendages to existing cities. Are there any major new cities built from scratch in the last 40 years or so that aren't attached to existing cities and are still successful anywhere in the world?
5. Not sure about the idea of lobes for transportation. I think it would be beneficial to connect the lobes with other transit lines and build other neighbourhoods along these new lines.
Keep them small. The future lies with towns of around 10-50,000 people. Not megacities, and not little villages.
Agree about keeping cities nice and compact. Preferably surrounded by nearby farmland and local industry. Providing for a self-sustaining community with local production of most if not all of life's essentials.
Though I'm not sure what you have against small villages? Nearby rural farming villages just outside the city could form the agricultural breadbasket, serving as a source of local food production....no more 3,000 mile Caesar salads.
I like many of the ideas presented here. I like the idea of how Manhattan can be retrofitted to be less car dependent and many parts car free. However I am not so sure about the whole snowflake shaped city though. Wouldn't a grid be more efficient spacewise? Though the train system on the snowflake type city is genius where you can get to any other of the nodes in 35 minutes or something like that.
Great idea... now we just need to create lots of 500 year old buildings built by hand with natural stone and proper pre-industrial proportioning, a homogenous culture with a long history and strong social connections/relationships to make it worth walking around in.
There is SO much more going on in the video's examples than just no cars...
I like many of the ideas presented here. I like the idea of how Manhattan can be retrofitted to be less car dependent and many parts car free. However I am not so sure about the whole snowflake shaped city though. Wouldn't a grid be more efficient spacewise? Though the train system on the snowflake type city is genius where you can get to any other of the nodes in 35 minutes or something like that.
I don't think a grid pattern is necessarily more efficient. Just the easiest and simplest to design. I prefer a more irregular pattern as shown at 1:35. More interesting to navigate. Walking through square block after square block gets old fast. Though you can have a combination of grid and irregular areas within the same city. An irregular pattern helps to liven up the city and just makes it feel like a lively and interesting place to be. OTOH, cities built on a very rigid, grid pattern gives you a sense of deadness and monotony. Maybe not always but usually. At least to me it does.
Great idea... now we just need to create lots of 500 year old buildings built by hand with natural stone and proper pre-industrial proportioning, a homogenous culture with a long history and strong social connections/relationships to make it worth walking around in.
Why not? Masonry would be a great skill for young people to acquire. Traditional buildings are designed to last forever unlike the throw-away manufactured boxes of today that are disposable within a generation or two. Traditional buildings are also very green. They don't require great inputs of fossil fuels to build and maintain.
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