Self Sustaining Cities

[Simon_Jester]

What's the military situation? You'd mentioned it being like a bigger version of the Stalingrad battle but your description sounds more like North Korea where everyone has spent decades prepared for the war that may or may not come. The level of fighting and the weapons in use would indicate whether or not your system is practical. For example, there are certain liberties people would take if they think that putting up the defense is a pretense and there's not really ever going to be a war, if these guys are just the equivalent of garrison troops. But it's a different situation if you're talking about a contentious border where people are getting killed every year and of course a proper all-out shooting war is different from that.

Corollary to that: the reason that people (and this isn't just the grunts we're talking about; it's the generals too) take "certain liberties" is very natural. People cannot stand the social strains implicit in industrialized warfare indefinitely. It's just too much, on many levels. The rapid casualties, battles being fought on an incomprehensible scale, the brutal reality that even as a civilian your entire world* can be wiped out almost as an afterthought... it's nothing we evolved to cope with. And it's unlikely any other intelligent species would be all that much difference either.

*Your personal world, the place you know and love, not necessarily the entire planet you happen to live on.

Historically, after four years of prosecuting (for example) World War One, most of the combatants' social structures were starting to come apart at the seams. You had army mutinies in France in 1917, soldiers and workers revolting and forming soviets in Russia in 1917, mass famine and naval mutinies in Germany in 1918, breakup of the Austro-Hungarian Empire along ethnic lines in 1918...

It wasn't just the military defeats on the front that caused nations to collapse in that war. It was the sheer strategic exhaustion, the volume of blood and treasure sacrificed. Many nations simply no longer had the social capital to hold themselves together in the face of domestic challenges to their authority, and were forced to admit defeat or drastically reorganize just to keep their heads above water.

If you try to maintain society in a state of permanent wartime mobilization (as opposed to 'could have a war at any moment, but haven't had one in decades'), that's a problem. If you satisfy yourself with a lower standard of preparedness, people start cutting corners to ease the burdens of constantly being expected to contribute to the common defense.

[Purple]

The defense angle was scraped a page ago. Consider this proposal a complete reversal of the last idea. I just want to keep the population happy while giving them the feeling of a community and combating urban isolation.

[Cykeisme]

The process of examining this thought experiment is actually becoming quite educational in showing why modern civilization works the way it does, and explaining both social factors and factors like economies of scale in production of food, industrial manufacturing, and power generation.

[Simon_Jester]

The defense angle was scraped a page ago. Consider this proposal a complete reversal of the last idea. I just want to keep the population happy while giving them the feeling of a community and combating urban isolation.

In that respect, I think it's quite clever, though I'm not really qualified to say how well it works.

It's worth remembering that the goal of creating a sense of 'small communities closely spaced' rather than 'I am a faceless denizen of a megalopolis' can be achieved without making each little housing block totally self-contained. The autonomy may well be as much a matter of propaganda and culture as it is economic fact.

Thus, you can still get a certain degree of economy of scale and such without compromising the real objective of this kind of setup.

[Purple]

Another thing I forgot to say is the scale of these buildings. This thing won't be smallish, I am talking about buildings 5-15 stories high and wide like 4 - 5 apartment blocks, maybe more glued together in each direction. A good rule of thumb is that it should be at least 2 - 3 times its height in each direction. I think that there would be hundreds if not a couple of thousand people living in said block.

[Rossum]

Have you read the origional Time Machine story by H.G. Wells? It has what is effectivly self-sustaining cities (albeit different from what one might expect).

Basically, it takes place on Earth thousands of years in the future. All weeds, diseases, pests, and unwanted life forms have been exterminated and there are plenty of fruit-bearing plants. Also, all the unpleasant-looking factories and buildings have been moved underground with only chimneys and little access tunnels reaching the surface.

The Eloi are the beautiful people who live on the surface and enjoy the fresh air and fruits and such while the Morlocks are stuck below in the underground tunnels and factories performing all the industrial work. The Morlocks tendancy to eat the Eloi is basically a result of rich people (the Elois ancestors) refusing to interbreed with the lower class (the Morlocks ancestors) and thus resulting in humanity splitting between rich idiots who got where they are through inheritance and the working class who do all the work and pretty much had every scrap of mercy beaten out of them in the factories for generations. The Morlocks started eating the Eloi because they ran out of their regular source of meat and sort of realized that their horrible excuse for a civilization didn't use money anymore so the only thing the Eloi had to offer was to get eaten. Keep in mind this was written around the time Upton Sinclare wrote The Jungle and exposed all the corruption and exploitation in the meat packing industry only to find that people cared more about their sausages than about the unsafe conditions of the workers.


Anyway, if you are going to have people tending gardens on their rooftops to grow their food then you could also move some of the cities infrastructure underground. Having stuff underground might help with heating/cooling costs and means that an area of land has less industrial clutter on the surface. If you put all the unpleasant stuff underground (out of sight and out of mind) then the surface could be clean and tidy where people go to relax and grow fresh fruits and veggies. Plus, if the factories and stuff an underground then the soil could dampen the noise to reduce noise, air, and light pollution. There could be chimneys and such poking out of the ground and releasing stuff into the air, but if every square foot of factory underground is accompanied by the square foot of forest, grass, or whatever above it then nature has a better chance to counteract the damage.

Ideally, your 'cities' would look like they are small building on the surface with farms and parks spread about but the majority of the apartments and stuff is underground. There might be geothermal power plants and nuclear generators to create power, and hydroponics and yeast vats creating cheap mass-produced food. Maybe fish ponds fed food scraps to provide meat. Anyway, the underground parts would have the ability to grow mass-produced food that might not be that tasty while the surface grows tasty fresh produce. The 'goal' of the society is to keep the surface of the planet as natural as possible while moving infrastructure below the ground. If the city gets bombed or attacked... then a good deal of its stuff is securely below ground (there may be missile silos or whatever, point is having a tough, industrialized and hard-to-hurt infrastructure below ground while the nice, fragile, and natural surface is exposed).


Unlike the Morlocks and Eloi, it would be best to allow social movement so that the whole thing doesn't stagnate. Expanding the city would be tough (moving earth away to expand tunnels unless you want to build more structures on the surface) but if there are underground tunnels linking the various cities together then they could ship dug-out dirt from one city to the next before dumping it in the ocean to expand the coast (or whatever). Plus, with a city where only the top part is visible and the rest is hidden, there could be all sorts of unpleasant stuff that just isn't talked about. It would be like the beutiful surface is the best part and all the inhabitants can go up there on their days off to relax (but can't live there permanantly) before heading down to the labyrinthine tunnels and structures where everything gets done.

[Simon_Jester]

That's not really what he wants, though, because he doesn't want to move the bulk of the work force underground.

Though it raises a relevant question: if you want to build the city out of modular self-sustaining apartment complexes, where do you put the factories and offices that those people work in? Do they use mass transit to go the distance? Do they mingle with people from other apartment blocks during office hours? Do non-office hours actually offer them enough time to have a substantial social life with the people in their own block at the same time that they do their job?

[Purple]

Well to answer by what I meant a point at a time. I have no problems with moving factories under ground. These things will be highly automated like modern automobile plants anyway and I don't expect to see much manual labor. But moving them under ground and planting forests over them would not only reduce pollution and ugliness but would actually hide them from enemy spies. I like that.

This said, in a modern society of that level most jobs will actually be in the service industry. The massive bureaucracy alone that controls my society (they are a bureaucratic nightmare because they believe that this is the only way to stop corruption) takes up a large part of the population. And than there are those that work to keep the people supplied and healthy and entertained etc.

Mass transit is limited to only one mode of transportation, the subways. But these subways are a massive network like nothing seen on our earth. It's sort of the ideal mass transit system.

This said, I have read the original Time Machine and quite honestly it was disturbing. That is not something I want to recreate any time soon. Hence apartments have to be above the ground and so do all non polluting services like schools or hospitals.

Now to the points:

Though it raises a relevant question: if you want to build the city out of modular self-sustaining apartment complexes, where do you put the factories and offices that those people work in?

Close to the office blocks. Preferably each larger factory complex (since it's a waste to distribute these around) will have its own habitation blocks. But I want to concentrate my industry. This means that the iron mine has a steel mill right next to it and right next to that is a foundry and than it goes from there...

Do they use mass transit to go the distance?

Yes.

Do they mingle with people from other apartment blocks during office hours?

In theory, but I am considering putting a school and kindergarten and maybe even a doctor and shops inside the housing block (and expanding it to house some 5 kilopeople) to make this a no.

Do non-office hours actually offer them enough time to have a substantial social life with the people in their own block at the same time that they do their job?

Well ideally I would not make them work more than 8 - 10 hours a day. So that should be a yes.

[Broomstick]

You want SOME interaction between the blocks just to prevent inbreeding. Probably a tradition of marrying outside of one's block. Then you'd have some traffic back and forth to visit people.

[Purple]

I newer really thought about that. But I think my job culture should solve that one. Tell me if this would work:

People are not free to chose their own job. They can chose their education and what job they want to do but once that is done the state assigns them to any free spot anywhere on the planet that needs that job. And each job spot has its own attached apartment. So if you want to be a doctor you can. But you will probably end up a doctor on the opposite side of the planet.

[Broomstick]

For agriculture you actually want to keep the locals in place, as they'll be most familiar with local conditions. It would probably be a good idea for them to serve an internship elsewhere to keep them from getting too insular.

However, I think ALL of you are looking at this as far too regimented and full of gloom. In order for a society of this sort to work you MUST keep morale up, and you don't do that by subjecting people to needlessly grim circumstances.

As an example, you don't subject people to eating nothing but gruel. It's bad both mentally and physically. Certain staples are, it is true, best produced on an industrial scale - that's why gristmills have such a long history, it's more efficient for the grain to be ground in a mill than at individual households. So for certain things, such as grains and the foods produced from them like bread, pasta and so forth the state would produce it and either issue the actual foodstuff or issue ration stamps of some sort so households could collect it, or if you're looking at cafeteria eating it would simply be offered as a part of the food selection. But you allow people to grow and utilize fresh local produce as that is part of what makes food healthy both mentally and physically.

For jobs, don't just mechanically assign it. Do something like what is done for doctors right now - everyone submits their top 3-5 choices. If society can accommodate it, they get one of those (and most of the time you'll have a split between stay at homes and those wanting to go elsewhere) and thus feel they have some control over their own destiny. Allow people to apply to go elsewhere, with the understanding there is guarantee they'll get the request but allowing some voluntary migration. That way your society will feel less like a massive prison and your citizens will be happier even if worked long hard hours and without many creature comforts.

Likewise, you'll want some interaction between these little "villages". That can take the form of sports competitions, social events, "market days" (this is a way for your craftspeople to make a little extra money and gain a wider reputation), and so on. You don't really want completely isolated communities, even if they somewhat self-sustaining.

By giving people some power in their lives there is likely to be less discontent. This will make controlling the population much easier.

[Simon_Jester]

Mass transit is limited to only one mode of transportation, the subways. But these subways are a massive network like nothing seen on our earth. It's sort of the ideal mass transit system.

What happens if the elevators/escalators at a subway station break down? What if a station needs to be closed for maintenance, or due to some kind of accident such as flooding? Is there any backup mode of transportation that allows people to move around the city with tolerable efficiency?

For that matter, can people just walk around on the streets aboveground? Or are they spending all their time cooped up indoors, except when they're in the walled garden-enclosures of their hab block?

This said, I have read the original Time Machine and quite honestly it was disturbing. That is not something I want to recreate any time soon. Hence apartments have to be above the ground and so do all non polluting services like schools or hospitals.

Well, that kind of misses the point.

What makes the Morlocks horrible is not "oh my god they live UNDERGROUND!" What makes them horrible is that they've been brutalized and oppressed until all the light and beauty and creative spark have been driven out of their culture. They're the ultimate extreme of the proletariat, an industrial working class taken to its endpoint.

That is what you need to avoid: making your people so broken-down socially and psychologically that they turn into animals.

Though it raises a relevant question: if you want to build the city out of modular self-sustaining apartment complexes, where do you put the factories and offices that those people work in?

Close to the office blocks. Preferably each larger factory complex (since it's a waste to distribute these around) will have its own habitation blocks. But I want to concentrate my industry. This means that the iron mine has a steel mill right next to it and right next to that is a foundry and than it goes from there...

Concentrated industry has drawbacks- the best site for a steel mill is almost never right next to the best site for an iron mine, and the odds are good that the best site for an iron mine is halfway up a mountain in an area no sane person would put a city (because there's no water supply). You'd do better to have railroad systems shuttling industrial goods around the country, moving the ore from the mine to the refinery, and the metal from the refinery to the factory.

Do they mingle with people from other apartment blocks during office hours?

In theory, but I am considering putting a school and kindergarten and maybe even a doctor and shops inside the housing block (and expanding it to house some 5 kilopeople) to make this a no.

Um... that answer doesn't make any sense. "During office hours" means during the workday. If they work in an office building two kilometers from their habitat block, they're probably meeting and interacting with people from other blocks who work in the same office building.

And this is a good thing; trying to artificially lock people down so they can't move from their habitat block and can't find anyone else to talk to is bad. It's both needlessly cruel and a recipe for creating popular discontent. Like Broomstick said.

It's all very well to create a sense of community within the block, but that doesn't mean interaction with people from other blocks can or should be banned. No one profits from that, not the citizenry and not the government.

However, I think ALL of you are looking at this as far too regimented and full of gloom. In order for a society of this sort to work you MUST keep morale up, and you don't do that by subjecting people to needlessly grim circumstances.

YES. Absolutely, I totally agree. As a literary device, having the people of a society be beaten down and regimented to the point where every moment of their lives is determined by a timetable and every major decision in their lives is made by a file clerk can be very compelling.

The reason it's compelling is that the idea is horrible to contemplate, certainly for people living in Western societies, but also (I think) for people living anywhere else in the world. One very important human freedom, arguably more important than all others, is the freedom to simply leave if life wherever you happen to be becomes intolerable for some reason. Maybe you hate the weather, maybe the people keep making fun of you because of an incident that happened when you were twelve, maybe you fell in love with someone from the next village. Whatever your motive, you want to be able to leave your old life behind, make some kind of change. At the very least, you want to know that if you really wanted to, you could leave town and never come back, because that presents a psychological escape valve.

When the society is so full of gray oppression that there's no room for an escape valve, no way to get out of an intolerable local situation, you've got a problem. At that point, the system is constantly interfering with the basic human desires and needs of its citizens- hitting them right on the gut level; I could talk about Maslow's hierarchy of needs here, but that would be cliche.

Now, you may say "Oh, but if anyone rebels they will be crushed!" That's a rather naive approach, because it doesn't work like that. In real life, when regimes collapse it's almost never just because X% of the loyal population suddenly turns round and says "screw you, we are now rebels!" It's because of divisions in the high command structure, new policies that create resistance and discontent among the citizenry and the bureaucracy, external crises forcing local communities to look to their own survival first and the interests of the state second, charismatic officials within the state using popular discontent as a support base for their own campaign to take over, and so on.

Eventually, the situation winds up beyond the government's control- not so much because they lack the resources to suppress popular revolts in theory, as because in practice the human beings on the ground aren't willing to commit murder for the sake of a government that's out of touch with their problems. Especially one that actively seems to be making things worse with constant austerity and pervasive oppression.

Remember Ceaușescu.

For jobs, don't just mechanically assign it. Do something like what is done for doctors right now - everyone submits their top 3-5 choices. If society can accommodate it, they get one of those (and most of the time you'll have a split between stay at homes and those wanting to go elsewhere) and thus feel they have some control over their own destiny. Allow people to apply to go elsewhere, with the understanding there is guarantee they'll get the request but allowing some voluntary migration. That way your society will feel less like a massive prison and your citizens will be happier even if worked long hard hours and without many creature comforts.

Likewise, you'll want some interaction between these little "villages". That can take the form of sports competitions, social events, "market days" (this is a way for your craftspeople to make a little extra money and gain a wider reputation), and so on. You don't really want completely isolated communities, even if they somewhat self-sustaining.

By giving people some power in their lives there is likely to be less discontent. This will make controlling the population much easier.

Absolutely. As I said earlier, even in dictatorships life has to go on, people have to be able to function on a day to day level without feeling the hand of the regime shaping their actions. The best possible state of affairs for a dictator is one where the average citizen does not think about politics. Or policy, either- the dictatorship wants people to sit still and be governed quietly.

Every time the average person notices that the state is making them do something they don't want to do, that goal gets farther away. So yes, you want to limit the intrusiveness of the government in routine life, and you want to avoid creating a situation where people feel like they're in a prison- even if they don't have a word for the sense of being imprisoned by their society, you can be quite sure they're unhappy about it.

[Purple]

Mass transit is limited to only one mode of transportation, the subways. But these subways are a massive network like nothing seen on our earth. It's sort of the ideal mass transit system.

What happens if the elevators/escalators at a subway station break down? What if a station needs to be closed for maintenance, or due to some kind of accident such as flooding? Is there any backup mode of transportation that allows people to move around the city with tolerable efficiency?

For that matter, can people just walk around on the streets aboveground? Or are they spending all their time cooped up indoors, except when they're in the walled garden-enclosures of their hab block?

Well of course they can walk. But no, the city has no alternate means of transportation. But to make up for it the subway system is extremely redundant. So if one train breaks down you just have to walk to the next city block and catch the alternate train line.

This is because I am using trains not as we use them (few huge static lines of great importance) but as a replacement for all other modes of transportation.

Well, that kind of misses the point.

What makes the Morlocks horrible is not "oh my god they live UNDERGROUND!" What makes them horrible is that they've been brutalized and oppressed until all the light and beauty and creative spark have been driven out of their culture. They're the ultimate extreme of the proletariat, an industrial working class taken to its endpoint.

And I don't want to even take the first step along that line. My people should have windows to look at the sun. End of story.

That is what you need to avoid: making your people so broken-down socially and psychologically that they turn into animals.

And why is that so bad?

Concentrated industry has drawbacks- the best site for a steel mill is almost never right next to the best site for an iron mine, and the odds are good that the best site for an iron mine is halfway up a mountain in an area no sane person would put a city (because there's no water supply). You'd do better to have railroad systems shuttling industrial goods around the country, moving the ore from the mine to the refinery, and the metal from the refinery to the factory.

I understand, but I was being metaphorical. The mill won't be at the door to the mine but it also will most certainly not be in a city across 2000km of land from it.

Um... that answer doesn't make any sense. "During office hours" means during the workday. If they work in an office building two kilometers from their habitat block, they're probably meeting and interacting with people from other blocks who work in the same office building.

Well, the idea would be that people spend their childhood and youth in the same block only meeting others at work. It's not like work takes up most of the day. And when they need to relax all they need should be close at hand.

And this is a good thing; trying to artificially lock people down so they can't move from their habitat block and can't find anyone else to talk to is bad. It's both needlessly cruel and a recipe for creating popular discontent. Like Broomstick said.

It's all very well to create a sense of community within the block, but that doesn't mean interaction with people from other blocks can or should be banned. No one profits from that, not the citizenry and not the government.

Well of course not baned. I newer said that. There just would not be any real need to interact with others except personal wish.

Also, I am going to go the way Broomstick said. It's just that I want to create a culture where personal freedom is seen as the absolute last priority. Freedom is not even considered a right but a privilege to be earned. It's all extremely Confucian.

Plus, when it comes to that they have that sort of mentality where what matters is being fed and clothed and having a home and being happy in life. As for freedom, they simply do not care.

[Broomstick]

In other words, this society's motto might be "Choice is a Privilege That Has to Be Earned".

What a better place to live? You have to earn it. Want better food? You have to grow it. Want to travel on vacation? You better put in some extra effort.

[Simon_Jester]

Well of course they can walk. But no, the city has no alternate means of transportation. But to make up for it the subway system is extremely redundant. So if one train breaks down you just have to walk to the next city block and catch the alternate train line.

This is because I am using trains not as we use them (few huge static lines of great importance) but as a replacement for all other modes of transportation.

The chief trouble with this is that there are certain requirements for any rail-based transportation system, regardless of how redundant and complex it is. For example:

-Certain stations will be in high demand- they must be able to pick up and drop off large numbers of people every minute during peak hours. Since you can't have tiny trains dropping off loads of people every five seconds (people take longer than that to disembark), that means having certain key routes in the subway with large trains that people board and leave from long station platforms. Otherwise you get congestion, with crowds of people being unable to get off the train at the station... which is also a safety hazard; I have rather vivid memories of a moment during the Obama inauguration when I was afraid I'd be pushed onto the subway tracks by the pressure of the crowd.

-Passenger and freight traffic must be segregated. They don't enter buildings by the same routes, they don't use the same kind of transportation- freight will usually be offloaded onto a truck or into a freight elevator, while people will go up escalators to street level. It may be logical to use delivery vans for freight and subway/bus combinations for people... which wouldn't be a surprise, since that's how real cities do it.

-Switching complexity imposes practical limits on how many trains you can keep moving around on a complex network of tracks. There are good reasons why normal urban subways are limited to a small number of interconnected lines; that is not a purely aesthetic decision.

-Placing subway stations very close together means the subway trains can't pick up much speed between stops, which slows them down and causes all trips to take longer.

-In some areas, you will not be able to dig subway tunnels easily or cheaply; moving people around by bus or surface railways may be much cheaper. For example, digging the tunnels will be very expensive if your city is built on the swampy mouth of a river delta (like New Orleans or Alexandria). It will also be expensive if your city is placed in earthquake country; California has this problem and subway systems were only added to those areas recently.

As always, the devil's in the details.

---

Well, that kind of misses the point.
What makes the Morlocks horrible is not "oh my god they live UNDERGROUND!" What makes them horrible is that they've been brutalized and oppressed until all the light and beauty and creative spark have been driven out of their culture. They're the ultimate extreme of the proletariat, an industrial working class taken to its endpoint.

And I don't want to even take the first step along that line. My people should have windows to look at the sun. End of story.

That is what you need to avoid: making your people so broken-down socially and psychologically that they turn into animals.

And why is that so bad?

...Because then they're apt to turn into Morlocks?

Wells' decision to put the Morlocks underground was a sideshow. He had a different point about the big part of what made the Morlocks horrid, and you have to know a bit about Victorian society to really grasp it: he was making social commentary. He was starting from the brutalized, dehumanized, oppressed state of the Victorian industrial worker (as seen by the Victorian middle class, who had their own crazy little issues). He was projecting that forward.

And the idea that this industrial-slave population might gradually devolve into vicious, antisocial marauders who would one day come to terrorize their oppressors wasn't all that farfetched in Victorian times. It was an era when there was already an enormous crime problem, particularly among the poor, with many criminals robbing and brutalizing both their fellow working-class citizens and the richer types 'above' them.

Living underground does not turn you into a monster. Being brutalized and oppressed, denied all opportunities to express yourself and live your day-to-day life... that can turn you into a monster.

---

Well, the idea would be that people spend their childhood and youth in the same block only meeting others at work. It's not like work takes up most of the day. And when they need to relax all they need should be close at hand.

And yet you will befriend people at work, if you have any kind of healthy or semi-healthy work environment. Which does mean increased demand of travel, demand that will arise, will be important to the citizens, and that a smart kind of government will plan and provide for.

Also, I am going to go the way Broomstick said. It's just that I want to create a culture where personal freedom is seen as the absolute last priority. Freedom is not even considered a right but a privilege to be earned. It's all extremely Confucian.

Plus, when it comes to that they have that sort of mentality where what matters is being fed and clothed and having a home and being happy in life. As for freedom, they simply do not care.

The key thing to remember is that certain kinds of freedom are part of "being happy in life." These are the ones that people in Western societies often take so much for granted that we don't even think of them as freedoms. Examples include:

-The freedom to associate with your family.
-The freedom to associate with friends you make in the course of normal life.
-The freedom to, if your life becomes intolerable in the place you live now, to move.
-The freedom to choose types of work you are reasonably happy with, and to escape kinds of work you particularly dislike, if nothing else by moving (see above).
-The freedom to 'improve' your life by having a good diet, a bit of light-and-beauty in the artistic sense around yourself, and so on.

These are the basic things that every person wants, regardless of whether they are "free" in the political sense. Many "unfree" societies have lasted a long time by providing these things to the public. Others (remember Ceaușescu!) failed within a generation or two by failing to provide these things to the public.

If the people are routinely terrified, oppressed, and unable to get the things they desire on the list above, the government will always be unstable. Because everyone in the country (except, perhaps, the elite) has unmet needs, and any outside actor who comes in promising to fulfill those needs will have an instant support base.

[Purple]

The chief trouble with this is that there are certain requirements for any rail-based transportation system, regardless of how redundant and complex it is. For example:

-Certain stations will be in high demand- they must be able to pick up and drop off large numbers of people every minute during peak hours. Since you can't have tiny trains dropping off loads of people every five seconds (people take longer than that to disembark), that means having certain key routes in the subway with large trains that people board and leave from long station platforms. Otherwise you get congestion, with crowds of people being unable to get off the train at the station... which is also a safety hazard; I have rather vivid memories of a moment during the Obama inauguration when I was afraid I'd be pushed onto the subway tracks by the pressure of the crowd.

Why would I ever have any sort of central station like that? My idea was to have all the streets be wide parallel streets crossing each other at exactly perpendicular angles and have a railway line that goes under the streets them self some 1-2 blocks apart. In essence the city would be built like a chess board.

See this image:

Black = Building/Housing Block
Red = Rail Line
White = Road without rail line beneath it



With such an abundance of small scale lines the only people entering/exiting at a station would be those coming and going from and too that city block. Consider it literally as an underground bus line but with trains/trams.

-Passenger and freight traffic must be segregated. They don't enter buildings by the same routes, they don't use the same kind of transportation- freight will usually be offloaded onto a truck or into a freight elevator, while people will go up escalators to street level. It may be logical to use delivery vans for freight and subway/bus combinations for people... which wouldn't be a surprise, since that's how real cities do it.

Well I guess but since I get to plan each city from the ground up I can make a separate number of freight only lines to the places I know that I will put stuff that needs them. After all, we do have the whole state planed economy thing going.

-Switching complexity imposes practical limits on how many trains you can keep moving around on a complex network of tracks. There are good reasons why normal urban subways are limited to a small number of interconnected lines; that is not a purely aesthetic decision.

Modern cities have subways built like spaghetti because the city above is also built like spaghetti. If I built a city in perfect form why would the lines ever intersect except on stations? And there would certainly be no physical switching tracks. I would just have separate levels for North-South and East-West traffic.

-Placing subway stations very close together means the subway trains can't pick up much speed between stops, which slows them down and causes all trips to take longer.

How does 0.5 km from one another sound? Also I don't expect them to go more than 30 - 40km/h anyway.

-In some areas, you will not be able to dig subway tunnels easily or cheaply; moving people around by bus or surface railways may be much cheaper. For example, digging the tunnels will be very expensive if your city is built on the swampy mouth of a river delta (like New Orleans or Alexandria). It will also be expensive if your city is placed in earthquake country; California has this problem and subway systems were only added to those areas recently.

That is why I would not chose to settle in such places in the first place. I mean what kind of lunatic knowingly founds a city in earthquake country if he can avoid it. And while I know that there will be few places where I will have to chose bad terrain these will be out layers and not the norm. And for these I would replace the trains with surface going trams and trolleys.

Well, that kind of misses the point.

Yes, but keep in mind that this is supposed to be a narrative tool. And as such nothing says dystopia in one phrase like having a home without windows.

And yet you will befriend people at work, if you have any kind of healthy or semi-healthy work environment. Which does mean increased demand of travel, demand that will arise, will be important to the citizens, and that a smart kind of government will plan and provide for.

Well yes, but I adressed that above.

1-The freedom to associate with your family.
2-The freedom to associate with friends you make in the course of normal life.
3-The freedom to, if your life becomes intolerable in the place you live now, to move.
4-The freedom to choose types of work you are reasonably happy with, and to escape kinds of work you particularly dislike, if nothing else by moving (see above).
5-The freedom to 'improve' your life by having a good diet, a bit of light-and-beauty in the artistic sense around yourself, and so on,

Well my system would only ban #3 so I don't quite see the issue.

[Mr Bean]

With such an abundance of small scale lines the only people entering/exiting at a station would be those coming and going from and too that city block. Consider it literally as an underground bus line but with trains/trams.

It's going to take forever to get anywhere because with that kind of scale your going to have a stop every 1600 meters plus the required 30 seconds wait at each station unless you want to make stops optional in which case it's not 30 seconds but three minutes at each station because you have to give safe time for people getting on to and off of trains.

If a train travels at 60 miles an hour and has a one mile long track it will take that train one minute to travel that mile. Unless their are stations along the way, each station adds anywhere from six to twenty seconds of speed up/slow down time plus loading passengers time plus fudge room in case the train is full and lots of people are getting off there.

So a train traveling one mile with one station in the middle at 60 mph can expect it to take two minutes to travel the distance not one. The average human moving at a decent pace can walk a mile in twelve minutes which means you don't your stations to be more than two miles apart. So to cross your average ten mile wide mega-city unless your train does 60 mph your talking a fourteen minutes travel time to go that ten miles visiting only five stations and that's with minimum safe 30 stop times and 6 seconds of deceleration/acceleration times at each station. In reality it's closer to twenty seconds per station of slowing down and speeding up with a minute per station meaning a ten mile trip via future subway takes 17 minutes per ten miles traveled or an effective speed of 35 miles per hour.

Faster trains are only so effective because the faster you go the harder it is to slow down, so a 100 mph train might not gain you any better times over short runs when you consider speeding up and slowing down.

[Purple]

But why would I care if it takes them hours to get from one part of the city to the other? It's not like they would get there any faster using modern public transit or worse yet using a car in modern levels of traffic.

I mean, if it takes say 2 hours to get from one end of the city to the other I am quite happy with that. Especially since people will tend to work real close to where they live. They might as well go on foot.

[Mr Bean]

But why would I care if it takes them hours to get from one part of the city to the other? It's not like they would get there any faster using modern public transit or worse yet using a car in modern levels of traffic.

I mean, if it takes say 2 hours to get from one end of the city to the other I am quite happy with that. Especially since people will tend to work real close to where they live. They might as well go on foot.

Ok have you ever lived in a mega city Purple? Because that statement does not sound like you have. These kind of delays add up, even if someone is only traveling a mile in a large city via subway it could take them an hour. Worse megapopulation means it's going to just stress the transit system even more so not one minute per stop but three or five minutes per stop.

Second your going to have to deal with human social dynamics here. Omni-corp's Janitor is not going to live in the same style apartment as Omni-Corp's CEO or their Security Chief, or Data Entry clerk Steve. The more responsibility the position (theoretically) holds the more perks the more the benefits of the job. Omni-Corp's CEO in our self sustaining city is going to want to avoid the subway as much as possible or have a private car of his own for VIP's or something. As well the more time spent between job and work the more time wasted.

Right now your future city is a recipe for a traffic nightmare. While it might be pretty to visit when empty you need to stop thinking in city terms and start thinking in terms of a ninety story space ship that just is not happening to go anywhere if you to keep people that close to work.

[Purple]

Ok have you ever lived in a mega city Purple? Because that statement does not sound like you have. These kind of delays add up, even if someone is only traveling a mile in a large city via subway it could take them an hour. Worse megapopulation means it's going to just stress the transit system even more so not one minute per stop but three or five minutes per stop.

Well, I usually take about a hour to reach my college and a hour go go back. And where I am from that is considered about the normal commuting time you come to expect and treat as nothing to be worried about.

So really I don't think that such speeds are an issue.

Second your going to have to deal with human social dynamics here. Omni-corp's Janitor is not going to live in the same style apartment as Omni-Corp's CEO or their Security Chief, or Data Entry clerk Steve. The more responsibility the position (theoretically) holds the more perks the more the benefits of the job.

Same building different floors. He gets a slightly better apartment and gets to travel more often on holidays but the social difference is not that great. Ideally I am looking at motivating people to be what they want to be and not what pays most.

This is especially true since I am building a society where the higher up you are the less free time and general freedom you have. A CEO will be working all day serving the motherland while the factory worker goes home after his 8H are done.

In fact, I actually want to make higher positions be something taken up out of duty and not personal gain. To become a CEO is a sacrifice you do for the nation and are rewarded for it by respect from your piers. It is not a ticket to a life of luxury.

Omni-Corp's CEO in our self sustaining city is going to want to avoid the subway as much as possible or have a private car of his own for VIP's or something.

Why would I ever allow such blatant elitism?

[Broomstick]

Why would I ever have any sort of central station like that?

Do you have any experience with large cities and/or mass transit? While transportation on the peripheries can be minimal, just the sheer numbers of people criss-crossing through more central areas – not to stop but just to transit the area – will require larger stations.

My idea was to have all the streets be wide parallel streets crossing each other at exactly perpendicular angles and have a railway line that goes under the streets them self some 1-2 blocks apart.

Horribly, horribly, grotesquely inefficient. I like trains and that still makes me vomit just to think about it.

If you're going to do THAT then make moving sidewalks, like in Heinlein's short story ”The Roads Must Roll”. THAT makes more sense on the scale you're proposing. “Slidewalks” for short distances. Rail only makes sense with certain distances and speeds. Size/distance matters when it comes to transportation.

Well I guess but since I get to plan each city from the ground up I can make a separate number of freight only lines to the places I know that I will put stuff that needs them. After all, we do have the whole state planed economy thing going.

Every one of your “village blocks” will need freight service. Heck, even stand alone single family residences in our world sometimes need freight services. While it might make sense to run them in parallel (such as tunnels like the UK to France Chunnel does) you'll still need a LOT of overlap.

-Switching complexity imposes practical limits on how many trains you can keep moving around on a complex network of tracks. There are good reasons why normal urban subways are limited to a small number of interconnected lines; that is not a purely aesthetic decision.

Modern cities have subways built like spaghetti because the city above is also built like spaghetti. If I built a city in perfect form why would the lines ever intersect except on stations?

After the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 someone had a fit of sanity and the Chicago street grid is, in fact, laid out on a grid system such as you propose. Not quite perfect – certain very old roads still run on the diagonal but they are very much the exception. The downtown/central business district is a nice grid. In fact, even the dumbest, most illiterate Chicagoan frequently gives locations as coordinates - “That's at 400 north, 700 west” or “It's at 3500 south, 200 east”. The streets are, most assuredly, the opposite of spaghetti, except for that one freeway interchange that is, in fact, called “the spaghetti bowl” and is currently slated for re-engineering. The train lines do, in fact, largely follow that grid – because the Great Chicago Fire was so intense it melted the existing rails, they all had to be replaced, and they they were laid out they were put on the same grid. Even the subways follow the grid in the central part of the city.

Even so, tracks do cross. Stations are added and removed as needed. Temporary stations may need to be constructed while major revisions/repairs are made on primary stations. You may need to route trains around accidents, which requires intersections and crossings. No city ever works perfectly all the time, therefore, you must have a means of dealing with emergencies and breakdowns.

If I built a city in perfect form why would the lines ever intersect except on stations? And there would certainly be no physical switching tracks. I would just have separate levels for North-South and East-West traffic.

Because you'll need to route around accidents at some point. You'll need to transport trains either to make repairs, or to deliver new ones.

-Placing subway stations very close together means the subway trains can't pick up much speed between stops, which slows them down and causes all trips to take longer.

How does 0.5 km from one another sound? Also I don't expect them to go more than 30 - 40km/h anyway.

WAY too close. Add in boarding/deboarding procedures and wait times it will be quicker to WALK between stations. Assuming, of course, moderate acceleration as opposed to those that will send unsecured packages flying and knock standees off their feet.

That is why I would not chose to settle in such places in the first place. I mean what kind of lunatic knowingly founds a city in earthquake country if he can avoid it.

Remarkably little terrain on this planet is truly earthquake free.

And, aside from earthquakes, there are flood zones, zones subject to severe weather, and so on. While your basic plan is fine you will always have to adapt it for local conditions. It can be down to details as simple as what sort of lubricating grease you use in the tropics vs. temperature zones (with the added fun of winter and summer differences) vs. arctic zones. As a futher example – the Chicago subway system has a heating system wherever underground tunnels reach the surface so in the winter time moist air from below doesn't result in dangerous ice build ups when meeting cold winter air. A similar system in California that has segments both above and below ground would have no need of such a thing.

And while I know that there will be few places where I will have to chose bad terrain these will be out layers and not the norm. And for these I would replace the trains with surface going trams and trolleys.

What you really need is some redundancy in your transportation networks. Why not both? Have trains for longer distances and bus/trolley between more local stops. You'll need a certain number of actual independent vehicles in order to reach accident areas and areas needing power repairs.

Well, that kind of misses the point.

Yes, but keep in mind that this is supposed to be a narrative tool. And as such nothing says dystopia in one phrase like having a home without windows.

Actually, until quite recently in human history no windows was the norm – you can actually be quite happy in an abode with no windows so long as you are free to go outside of it when you want to. And a house made of windows is nothing more or less than a prison if you can never leave it. See the novel We by Yevgeny Zamyatin for a dystopia composed of nothing BUT windows that makes Brave New World and 1984 look like paragons of freedom in comparison.

[Rossum]

Regarding public transport: Maybe have automated electric cars or something. Maybe the roads have wires built into them that feed electricity into the vehicle so that they don't need to stop to refuel (and there is still a sort of rigid network for them to travel on).

The cars themselves are more or less capable of traveling off-road due to having tires and such. That way if there is damage to the tracks then the vehicles can go off-road for a bit until they can get back onto undamaged bits of track. The main advantage of rails (as far as I knoe) is that it can efficiently move lots of stuff at a time using less fuel. If your society is rigidly enforced (and thus you don't have every person driving around in their own car and are more likely to use the bus) then using buses or other vehicles could work just as well.

If your city is designed to be self-suffecient and localized then I don't think a massive subway system is the best way of doing that. Maybe ahave a network of roads for moving people and heavy stuff around along with plenty of walkways for people to walk on. Then maybe trains and subways if they have to go all the way across town or to different cities.

[Simon_Jester]

Broomstick is right: these kinds of city plans need a LOT of wiggle room for failures and complications. Otherwise, a relatively minor accident makes the city uninhabitable, and even routine things that cause service to stop at a particular site will cause huge annoying problems for people all over the city. That kind of thing undermines your ability to run a stable society: either you're constantly having to make everything work near-perfectly just to get it to work at all, or you're accepting frequent breakdowns and nuisances for the public, which encourages them to support your overthrow in favor of someone who will make the trains run on time.

Omni-Corp's CEO in our self sustaining city is going to want to avoid the subway as much as possible or have a private car of his own for VIP's or something.

Why would I ever allow such blatant elitism?

Remember the USSR? You'll get blatant elitism whether you want it or not. The senior state bureaucrats will make elitism. Moreover, not all jobs within your society will be equally challenging or desirable from the state's perspective: if you don't reward doctors and engineers more highly than janitors, you wind up with a lot more janitors than you need, and a lot fewer doctors and engineers. So the city still winds up with sociopolitical divisions.

Why would I ever have any sort of central station like that? My idea was to have all the streets be wide parallel streets crossing each other at exactly perpendicular angles and have a railway line that goes under the streets them self some 1-2 blocks apart. In essence the city would be built like a chess board.

You don't understand. People will get off of different stations in different numbers. Some places will wind up demanding more workers than others, or being the site of events that draw in large numbers of people for a special event (like a political rally for the Party). You cannot plan a city so that the same number of people are getting on and off at every subway station in the city, and even if you could, you couldn't make the plan keep working for a hundred years after things have changed and been moved around.

With such an abundance of small scale lines the only people entering/exiting at a station would be those coming and going from and too that city block. Consider it literally as an underground bus line but with trains/trams.

The problem with that is the practical differences between buses and trains. Trains are very massive, they take a long time to speed up and slow down. That means placing stops farther apart than you would on a bus. Which means a lot more foot traffic per station, especially during peak hours.

Well I guess but since I get to plan each city from the ground up I can make a separate number of freight only lines to the places I know that I will put stuff that needs them. After all, we do have the whole state planed economy thing going.

Historically, planned economies rarely build whole cities "from the ground up." To do that, you'd have to build a whole new city in the middle of nowhere (i.e., in a place no one ever thought urgently needed a new city before). There are exceptions, but not many and they're usually one-off achievements. Moreover, you have to allow yourself some freedom to change things around after the fact- if a steel mill is closed and razed to make room for more housing, and if thirty years later the housing is converted to an office block while a new factory is built on the edge of town, you need a transportation network that can adapt.

Real centrally planned economies do not involve a guy plunking down some arbitrary sketch on a map and saying "this is how it shall be forever!" They require care and attention, and therefore they require a lot of room for improvised modifications to the plan.

Modern cities have subways built like spaghetti because the city above is also built like spaghetti. If I built a city in perfect form why would the lines ever intersect except on stations? And there would certainly be no physical switching tracks. I would just have separate levels for North-South and East-West traffic.

What will you do if your city is located somewhere where the terrain makes it difficult to stick to this perfect gridiron layout? For that matter, do you have any answer at all to the following question:

-Do you know why real subway systems use single long trunk lines running through the city, and not a grid of numerous lines running all over the city?

That is why I would not chose to settle in such places in the first place. I mean what kind of lunatic knowingly founds a city in earthquake country if he can avoid it.

Someone who happens to know that one of the best natural harbors in the world is located in earthquake country?

Well, that kind of misses the point.

Yes, but keep in mind that this is supposed to be a narrative tool. And as such nothing says dystopia in one phrase like having a home without windows.

If it's a narrative tool, you need to remember that the narrative will be shaped by practical effects of the choices you make. There's a difference, in terms of symbolism, between (say) a whale and an elephant. There's also a practical difference, and for your narrative-heavy story to work as a narrative, it has to work as a practical reality.

Well my system would only ban #3 so I don't quite see the issue.

#3 folds into some of the others. What if I want to move to be closer to someone I love? What if I want to move to get away from someone I hate? Even in a real small-town environment you can do these things when you want. You may have to fill out a form, but it's not banned.

Your society will be a lot less dysfunctional if people can move around it without a bureaucrat deciding they need to. Any paperwork they fill out should be more of a routine matter (like, say, filing a change of address in a real society) and less like a "begging permission you're not likely to get" situation.

[Simon_Jester]

Afterthought:

Purple, one thing to keep in mind is that there are many ways to pitch this narrative device.

You get one kind of society (and narrative) if your society is some kind of brittle, pre-planned thing where no one can really change anything. If buildings have to stay where they were placed generations ago to keep the transport system from being thrown out of order, if people aren't allowed to move from whatever spot the Great Computer assigned them to live, if everything in society is done by timetables and schedules... you get one kind of society. A society that's miserable and likely to fall apart at the first crisis, but one that is also well suited to tell a certain kind of story.

If your system is more flexible, then its solutions to problems will be more complicated. Which, realistically, means that you can't answer all the questions; if urban planning were easy enough for one person to solve all a city's problems, everyone would be doing it. But it also means you're less likely to have the thing fall apart in a crisis, that the population will be more supportive of the government against things that want to change or remove it, and that people are happier. People who live in inflexible societies where every random little thing can cause them to suffer aren't going to be happy, no matter how much the state propagandizes them.

[Sonnenburg]

Historically, planned economies rarely build whole cities "from the ground up." To do that, you'd have to build a whole new city in the middle of nowhere (i.e., in a place no one ever thought urgently needed a new city before). There are exceptions, but not many and they're usually one-off achievements. Moreover, you have to allow yourself some freedom to change things around after the fact- if a steel mill is closed and razed to make room for more housing, and if thirty years later the housing is converted to an office block while a new factory is built on the edge of town, you need a transportation network that can adapt.

Real centrally planned economies do not involve a guy plunking down some arbitrary sketch on a map and saying "this is how it shall be forever!" They require care and attention, and therefore they require a lot of room for improvised modifications to the plan.

It seems to me this is a symptom of the overall problem, that it's a clockwork society. Except that clocks just sit there, built to run smoothly and efficiently, and ever unchanging, while a society is meant to grow, not simply exist. Stability becomes stagnation, and you're left with an urbanized version of the dark ages. Brave New World seems the only viable way this city society could manage to continue, with a caste system to keep people in place and drugs and slogans to make them content, while an intellectual elite can do the important job of advancing things technologically so that in fifty years your enemies can't walk all over you, or that you have the means to cope with an unexpected threat. Or you can simplify everything and have all humans brains removed at birth and replaced with a computer that would do what it was told.