New U.S. masterplanned city.

[George_Apley]

Re: New us masterplanned city.

Idk somewhere along the coast is obviously preferable. Probably somewhere with generally good weather as well but doesnt need to be florida or anything. Id think maybe like maryland or virginia maybe. It would be a mega city so probably along the east coast where the major cities are and within transit distance. I know from living in the nc area there is tons of land where weirdly the worst towns are by the ocean and it gets better inland. I think this could be a cool solution to our mega population and all our cities being very old.

So right in the floodplain? Hmmm... the NEC is NOT where the US needs to innovate a new city.

Why not invest in the Mormon Metropolis in the valleys of Vermont?

 

[tangent]

Re: New us masterplanned city.

And I sure wouldn't strive to emulate corrupt, authoritarian regimes like Egypt, the Emirates, or China just to get a fantasy city.

Basically, the new Egyptian city is for the "elect" chosen by the regime to escape Cairo, the new capital is for the rulers to get the hell out of Cairo so they don't get overthrown again by a popular uprising, and Cairo is for everyone else and a few of those left behind to shoot and torture people that get out of line or don't pay taxes... brilliantly evil. If I was an evil overlord... totally going with this plan.

I am sure it will end well.

Edit: Wow looking at the Egyptian plan again... it even has the nice wide open areas for the tanks and machine gunners to line up and kill the protestors who try marching to the capital from Cairo.

 

[stick n move]

Re: New us masterplanned city.

Yea I didnt say whether the reasoning for it was for good or bad, I just presented what theyre building. Regardless of the reason, its interesting to be able to watch a mega city be masterplanned and then built from scratch. This is starting to happen more and more in other countries. Other countries with their different reasons can learn from all of these. Apparently China is helping them build this.

Theres lots of documents you can read about the ways that they are trying to adress the separation between poor and rich here. From what Ive read theyre doing a lot of mixed income neighborhoods designed that way from the onset. How it will work we will see, but remember its a city for 6.5 million people. There arent enough upper class to fill all of those units. So there will be a mix of people here just by the numbers alone. Its going to be interesting to watch the way this plays out and how the city adapts and changes with the population because people living somewhere always add things that you can never plan for. Also well see if the mixed income neighborhoods pan out or if there ends up being massive segregation. My bet is segregation, but thats pretty natural even Boston is extremely segregated.

The good part though is the old Cairo will still be here and 6.5 million new units in the new city should open up room for people in old Cairo. The people luckily arent getting their old homes bulldozed to make way for a new city where they already are.

Either way its going to allow people another chance to learn how to do this and learn from the mistakes, while also learning from what works too. In a world that is expanding by billions, this is something thats going to have to be perfected and expanded upon in other places.

 

[HenryAlan]

Re: New us masterplanned city.

It's not between Cairo and the Nile. It's between Cairo and the Red Sea.

And I sure wouldn't strive to emulate corrupt, authoritarian regimes like Egypt, the Emirates, or China just to get a fantasy city.

Yeah, this entire concept strikes me as either a vanity project, a means of transferring the treasury to private hands, or perhaps (and this is the only slightly positive reading), a jobs program. If there is a reason for a city to exist somewhere, the city will happen. This new Cairo plan looks interesting but we have to keep in mind that it's basically just an expansion of the existing city, being built right next to the original.

What is the value proposition in building a city on the Carolina coast or in the middle of Midwest farm land, for example? Now I can see an interesting idea around the concept of fixing Detroit, but even that, where there is a population and an economy in place, it's not an easy task at all.

 

[stick n move]

Re: New us masterplanned city.

Sorry yea Suez Canal, not Nile. Saudi Arabia is also building some new mega cities on the Red Sea as well. Lots of mega projects going on in the area.

 

[tangent]

Re: New us masterplanned city.

When LBJ was President, I remember a program that was floated by his administration to build completely new cities in the US. It obviously never happened, but I distinctly remember it being proposed. I was a young teenager at the time.

The compromise was to demolish wide swaths of existing urban areas that were considered "blighted". Thus new planned cities within cities. West End style.... which only took half a century to just about recover from the idiocy.

Or the seemingly deliberate cleansing of Detroit. Which has been the subject of much speculation about how deliberate has been the "blighting" in order to clear out poor people and make room for an eventually resurgence and gentrification... give it another 30 years.

The equivalent today is the post industrial areas where all the industries were exported to China and what has been left are areas like the Seaport that can be consolidated, subsidized with tax dollars and rebuilt largely from scratch.

 

[stick n move]

Re: New us masterplanned city.

It's not between Cairo and the Nile. It's between Cairo and the Red Sea.

And I sure wouldn't strive to emulate corrupt, authoritarian regimes like Egypt, the Emirates, or China just to get a fantasy city.

Me either. If your saying this to me please dont put words in my mouth. I posted this just to show a masterplanned city being built. Didnt say if it was good or bad.

 

[tangent]

Re: New us masterplanned city.

How it will work we will see, but remember its a city for 6.5 million people. There arent enough upper class to fill all of those units. So there will be a mix of people here just by the numbers alone. Its going to be interesting to watch the way this plays out and how the city adapts and changes with the population because people living somewhere always add things that you can never plan for. Also well see if the mixed income neighborhoods pan out or if there ends up being massive segregation. My bet is segregation, but thats pretty natural even Boston is extremely segregated.

Ah... but it isn't about poor and rich. It is about loyal, disloyal and suspect. There will be poor loyal people that will be allowed to live near the rich loyal subjects. Of course, else who would do all the work?

The disloyal poor or suspect poor will be relegated to slums of course and if there is demand for labor then there might be some way for the suspect poor to prove their loyalty to the regime and better themselves. Otherwise, there will be housing for imported slave labor .. oh I mean "contracted" foreign labor. And being rich means you are loyal or else you are going to go and live in some other country. I mean the actively disloyal who are engaged in disruptive anti regime activities will be tortured and/or killed, so that is just about where you locate your prisons and torture facilities and not so much about housing policy.

Yes, we can learn a lot from Egypt and China about how to control, manipulate and kill people and otherwise violate and destroy the human spirit using architecture and city planning.

 

[HenryAlan]

Re: New us masterplanned city.

This whole new Cairo thing reminds me of a lot of distopian literature. It's quite common to envision a modern, beautiful, planned city as the capital in some horribly decadent society wherein everybody else lives in squalor and out of site. Think Panem, think Coruscant. It already happens organically (just compare some of the gleaming 21st century power houses in the US with the rust belt).

Planning for it is even worse, though I'd agree that it's an interesting thought exercise. What would make the most sense? I picture a series of concentric rings, bisected by various straight lines. Sort of an Amsterdam that completes the circle. Inner and outer belt ring transit lines to go with the spider map that focuses more on the center. The bullseye region would be where we would find all the great civic institutions, commerce would run mostly along the cross pieces, etc. Such a city would probably be in the middle of nowhere.

 

[George_Apley]

Re: New us masterplanned city.

Me either. If your saying this to me please dont put words in my mouth. I posted this just to show a masterplanned city being built. Didnt say if it was good or bad.

More of a general statement on the only places where these sorts of megaprojects happen. Democracies aren't good at megaprojects like this. When they've happened in the US they were either public works projects during the Great Depression (Hoover Dam, TVA, etc.) or urban renewal post-war, which bulldozed over the objections of those most directly affected.

Building a new city needs to have a reason to exist where it does. If it's going to be on the coast it needs navigable waterways, links to the broader economic drivers in the region, etc. There are no major cities developed in eastern NC, for example, because the waters aren't easily navigable to shipping anywhere between Norfolk, VA and Wilmington, NC.

I guess a new city somewhere around Hampton Roads would be conceivable, but a deep-water harbor would have to be *engineered*. All the deep-water harbors on the Chesapeake are spoken for.

A new city inland would make the most sense being sited on a major river or lake.

Granted this thought experiment is waving away private property concerns, regulatory concerns, environmental concerns, etc., but there's definitely an entropy problem in any civilization with regard to infrastructure. The longer time goes on and the more a city/region/country is developed, the more difficult and costly it becomes to engineer broad solutions to infrastructure problems. Building from scratch seems an attractive alternative because, on the surface, it avoids existing problems, but the tie-ins still need to be made if the new construction is going to be relevant to the society and economy rather than a playground for developers and the top ranks of society.

 

[stick n move]

Re: New us masterplanned city.

DC was a masterplanned city in the US. NYC, Chicago, and the grid cities werent masterplanned but were planned cities. I like DC and its worked out fairly well as a capital... not as great as a city with the massive poverty and segregation- which happens with all of these places, but overall I dont like masterplanned cities. Planned cities are okay though where a grid is layed out and the general idea of the city but then individual architects are free to fill it in. In my opinion thats the best approach.

For a capital city like they are doing in Egypt it would make sense to build all of the gov buildings in a masterplan and then some mixed income govt housing projects like the us, and then layout the plan and let it be filled in. At the same time with expensive land that can lead right back to segregated parts of the city. Its a complicated issue. If you guys would like they have gone into great detail on how they are trying to keep this city integrated and where the low income housing is going to be located. They compare and contrast it with how it happened naturally in Cairo.

That being said if nothing else this is just a good learning experience for more cities of the future. We like “organic” cities more, but thats because were used to them and masterplanned cities need time to mature. The cities we have now that grew organically have pretty big problems with transit, congestion, segregation, income equality, so its good to try to work towards solving these issues. I think this is just one step of many that are going to happen all over the world. This is definitely something that isnt going away so I think its going to be good to learn from each of these that are built.

Remember Masterplanned cities are nothing new, Paris is another example.

Washington DC

 

[George_Apley]

Re: New us masterplanned city.

Not sure if you're responding to me.

DC was a masterplanned city in the US. NYC, Chicago, and the grid cities werent masterplanned but were planned cities. I like DC and its worked out fairly well as a capital... not as great as a city with the massive poverty and segregation- which happens with all of these places, but overall I dont like masterplanned cities. Planned cities are okay though where a grid is layed out and the general idea of the city but then individual architects are free to fill it in. In my opinion thats the best approach.

It's a fine approach when you have a lot of mostly open land to expand into. Again, masterplanning is easier when there's no existing infrastructure getting in the way, and no residents with wants and needs gumming up the works. And my point is that it's difficult to find that sort of terrain that is both undeveloped and geographically desirable for a city.

That being said if nothing else this is just a good learning experience for more cities of the future. We like “organic” cities more, but thats because were used to them and masterplanned cities need time to mature. The cities we have now that grew organically have pretty big problems with transit, congestion, segregation, income equality, so its good to try to work towards solving these issues. I think this is just one step of many that are going to happen all over the world. This is definitely something that isnt going away so I think its going to be good to learn from each of these that are built.

I guess I just don't see how master-planning new cities solves these problems. Egypt isn't going to solve any problems by shipping the government and wealthy out of Old Cairo and into New Cairo, it's going to exacerbate them. Especially in a country that has high levels of public and private corruption.

Remember Masterplanned cities are nothing new, Paris is another example.

Absolutely. Remember too that Hausmannized Paris was an authoritarian imperial project.

 

[JohnAKeith]

Re: New us masterplanned city.

Didn't we have a master-planned "city" - the Seaport?

 

[stick n move]

Re: New us masterplanned city.

Didn't we have a master-planned "city" - the Seaport?

Definitely a masterplanned neighborhood. Northpoint, Assembly as well.

Heres one plan for moving people out of the horrible slums. Doesnt look great, although better than what they had, but its essentially the exact same model as our public housing in the US that failed.

They do have some good plans on how to integrate mixed income neighborhoods into the city that look well thought out. This though looks like a quick fix that Im not sure is the right answer. When its this vs true 3rd world squalor slums... this is muuuch better and the culture is much different where theyre not going to have crack dealers or crips outside the public housing, but Im not sure of the community interaction or upward mobility something like this provides. Again better than what they had though, so well see.

https://youtu.be/bZ4wX82_qYY

 

[George_Apley]

Re: New us masterplanned city.

Definitely a masterplanned neighborhood. Northpoint, Assembly as well.

Yup. Master Planning is most successful when there's a lot of land that can be redeveloped at minimal cost to existing infrastructure and residents. Post-industrial reclamation projects, like the three examples above, are very common.

Heres one plan for moving people out of the horrible slums. Doesnt look great, although better than what they had, but its essentially the exact same model as our public housing in the US that failed.

They do have some good plans on how to integrate mixed income neighborhoods into the city that look well thought out. This though looks like a quick fix that Im not sure is the right answer. When its this vs true 3rd world squalor slums... this is muuuch better and the culture is much different where theyre not going to have crack dealers or crips outside the public housing, but Im not sure of the community interaction or upward mobility something like this provides. Again better than what they had though, so well see.

https://youtu.be/bZ4wX82_qYY

*emphasis mine*

Drugs and gangs are not things more endemic to US culture compared to others... US public housing attracted those elements because of the socio-economic stagnation and societal sequestration that came with those developments.

 

[stick n move]

I know its not that the US is predisposed to it more than anyone else, but because Columbia was the biggest producer of cocaine in the world and they had a land route to the wealthy US who had these public housing projects with people that took the opportunity for quick cash when given the chance over other crappy options it led to an epidemic. With a gateway through Mexico giving rise to the crack epidemic along with the south of France funnelling Turkish heroin through US ports on ships with the massive help from the recent immigrant populations with ties to the Mafia in Europe it lead to huge amounts of supply available and lots of users. These days most opiates are fentanyl shipped in from China but this is to feed existing supply chains.

Anyways my point was just that there are different problems in poor areas of different countries that are all different. Due to lack of supply chains mentioned I dont see Egyptian slums having the same problems... with drugs, each country has their own problems. Their slums seeem more to have problems with sanitation and theft. Hopefully the model they use gives them a better life and this new city is going to need lots of workers in the buildings, with the roads, trains...etc hopefully offering lots more jobs to lift many more people up. This whole new city will need to be staffed with millions of jobs hopefully raising the gdp of the country along with the rise of the new city.

 

[stick n move]

Australia has Canberra, US has DC, its not unusual for a city to move its countries govt seat to its own city and in quite a few places these govt districts were planned.