
New Cities - dwaxe
http://blog.ycombinator.com/new-cities
======
davidw
I think "old cities" are pretty good too: the kind where they were built for
people, rather than cars, and where you could build things without a dense
thicket of regulations almost entirely unrelated to safety. Another thing that
seems to work well is limiting the amount of up-front large scale projects and
growing incrementally. No one can plan for everything (
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_calculation_problem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_calculation_problem)
) .

Recommended reading:

[http://www.strongtowns.org/](http://www.strongtowns.org/)

[http://marketurbanism.com/](http://marketurbanism.com/)

The Rent Is Too Damn High: What To Do About It, And Why It Matters More Than
You Think: [http://amzn.to/28W6et9](http://amzn.to/28W6et9)

 _Edit_ \- I'll add that I think it's great that YC is spending some money to
look into this, as it's a huge issue for many desirable, productive cities
these days. Huge as in billions of dollars:

[http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-05-07/here-s-
how...](http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-05-07/here-s-how-much-new-
york-and-san-francisco-s-tight-housing-markets-are-hurting-the-economy)

~~~
sama
Cars have a place in cities but maybe they should be in tunnels underground or
something.

I view money locked up in real estate as money in a very suboptimal place. We
pay too much 'rent' in general; it'd be far better to try to make
housing/office space cheap and have people invest the extra money in
productive assets.

~~~
simonswords82
Cars underground is a great idea but you'd need to find a way to make GPS
work, especially since GPS is necessary for autonomous cars which are
obviously a thing of the future.

~~~
Jtsummers
GPS is helpful, and key, to autonomous cars. But let's not forget the various
ways GPS can be hacked. We need multiple methods of navigation
(visual/radar/lidar to stay within lines and avoid obstacles, inertial/GPS
like aircraft use to sanity check your inputs, ground-based authenticated
systems to identify current location (imagine being able to poll an
intersection for its identity, we already have computers at every intersection
with traffic lights)).

If we rely too strongly on GPS, we eliminate many existing roadways with
tunnels, and many convenient constructs like parking decks, or new tunnels
where they make sense.

~~~
rtkwe
GPS is more key for long term navigation and knowing when the car should look
for a turn. Simple road following through LIDAR and other local sensors is
enough for 90-99% of tunnels today since they are mostly just single roads
from point A to B without required turns.

------
zephjc
Look to how Tokyo does things. A few takeaways:

\- mixed use zoning: reduce requirement for long trips by mixing many
compatible types of commercial with residential, and remove single housing
type developments. Also, allow many smaller apartment complexes mixed with
single family houses, instead of segregating housing types.

\- street design: No more hierarchical/dendritic street layouts. That is, no
more dead-end streets, which lead to collectors, which lead to arterials -
you're bottlenecking a huge population through a very small, fast, and unsafe
road system. Instead, make the streets highly connected, and narrower to
encourage slower but steadier car traffic, and blocks shorter. Porous streets
networks can route around bottlenecks and can have many more concurrent cars
than even crazy-huge Texas-style freeways.

\- no big street setback requirements: encourage density by removing crazy
suburban-style setbacks.

Edit: I wanted to make a plug for form-based zoning, which is zoning where the
form (building type) is zoned, not its use. This doesn't necessarily refer to
its _style_ (Neoclassical, Modernist, etc) but how it interacts with the
surrounding buildings on the street. E.g. buildings above a certain size might
not be allowed in an area, and not be allowed to take more than N number of
yards of street frontage. Setbacks of a certain size might be prohibited, or
allowed. This allows of a reasonable number of mixed uses like restaurants,
shops, and other day to day commercial uses to coexist with residential. This
does not mean that heavy/noxious industry can be built up there. This was the
error the Euclid v. Ambler decision made 100 years ago: they threw the baby
out with the bathwater by restricting zoning by type; there is not a small
amount of racism that came with Euclidean/exclusive zoning, e.g. removing a
formerly viable way for immigrants to start a business with a house above (a
la Bob's Burgers) and thereby increasing the barrier for success.

~~~
nostrademons
> No more hierarchical/dendritic street layouts.

It's worth playing some Cities:Skylines (which has a fairly accurate traffic
simulator, particularly with the Traffic++ mod) to understand how the road
hierarchy came into being. Or, for that matter, trying to drive through a
grid-based city like Manhattan or SF.

You get very large traffic jams. The problem is intersections, and
particularly intersections where traffic backs up to the previous
intersection. When this happens, a traffic jam tends to spread across the
whole city; incoming traffic can't clear the bottleneck fast enough, so the
bottleneck just grows like a cancer until it envelopes a whole neighborhood.

Oftentimes, the solution to a traffic problem is simply to bulldoze a few
intersections. By doing this, you give cars a buffer. It increases the median
trip length but it also increases vehicle speed and road throughput by more.
It turns out that the major contributor to traffic jams is the acceleration of
having to start/stop at traffic lights and when turning.

Self-driving cars (or just ubiquitous turn-by-turn navigation) could change
this equation by intelligently routing cars around bottlenecks and avoiding
the neighborhood entirely, but as long as drivers have imperfect information
about traffic conditions and tend to take the shortest route to their
destination, this will remain a problem.

(I've had great success with using pedestrian paths to provide cut-throughs
between dead-ends and nearby intersections, though. And with providing
pedestrian paths under or over those intersections so that people don't have
to wait for stoplights to cross the street and don't stop traffic with their
jaywalking. The game unfortunately has pretty terrible pathfinding for
pedestrians and won't let you build compact staircases, so this limits their
usefulness to real problem intersections, but in real life I think many
suburban cities could drastically improve their walkability/bikeability just
by building raised pedestrian footbridges over their major arterials.)

~~~
zephjc
I gotta agree with thescriptkiddie, C:S is an imperfect model of how traffic
behaves.

> Self-driving cars (or just ubiquitous turn-by-turn navigation) could change
> this equation by intelligently routing cars around bottlenecks and avoiding
> the neighborhood entirely, but as long as drivers have imperfect information
> about traffic conditions and tend to take the shortest route to their
> destination, this will remain a problem.

Self-driving cars or drivers with good mapping are still limited where they
can go when they have a street hierarchy to deal with, forcing all cars onto
the same few arterials.

> Oftentimes, the solution to a traffic problem is simply to bulldoze a few
> intersections. By doing this, you give cars a buffer. It increases the
> median trip length but it also increases vehicle speed and road throughput
> by more.

This is all well and fine in a game, but increasing street speeds kills the
street life (figuratively, and sometimes literally). Slower but more constant
speeds are better for everyone involved. For walkers, bikers, and even
drivers. Ask yourself this: would drivers flip their shit more often when
going slow but steady down 15-20 mph hour streets with stop signs (or
roundabouts), or when they're stuck at long traffic lights regardless of how
many lanes they have?

~~~
nostrademons
The benefit of faster speeds isn't driver convenience, it's that you get cars
off the road quicker for a given travel distance. Each city has a carrying
capacity for the number of cars that may be on its roads at once, which is
determined by the length of the road network and number of lanes. They also
have a certain number of trips generated, which is determined by population.
The number of cars on the road = trips generated * average travel time per
trip. When that exceeds the carrying capacity of the city, average travel time
increases, which causes a cascading effect that eventually results in
gridlock.

The same effect plays out locally, on each individual stretch of road. When
integral(# of incoming cars - # of outgoing cars, time) > carrying capacity of
road, the road backs up, which increases the time required to traverse it,
which further exacerbates the backup. This is why multi-lane arterials can
reduce congestion; they can move a lot of cars _off_ a given stretch in a
short period of time, and provide a linear buffer where momentary oversupplies
can collect without backing up the _previous_ intersection.

You can also see this effect by looking at traffic maps of say, SF (grid
layout) vs. Sunnyvale (arterial/collector):

[https://www.google.com/maps/@37.7811106,-122.4106957,16z/dat...](https://www.google.com/maps/@37.7811106,-122.4106957,16z/data=!5m1!1e1)

[https://www.google.com/maps/@37.3724565,-122.0375532,15z/dat...](https://www.google.com/maps/@37.3724565,-122.0375532,15z/data=!5m1!1e1)

Both of them have shitty traffic, but in SF the traffic spills away from
Market street onto many of the side streets, such that no matter where you go
it'll be gridlock. In Sunnyvale, much of the traffic is confined to major
arterials like El Camino or Matilda, which are slow but still move, and side-
streets that parallel them are often relatively clear.

~~~
zephjc
> The benefit of faster speeds isn't driver convenience, it's that you get
> cars off the road quicker for a given travel distance.

Yes but that isn't actually what happens because the use of a street or road
isn't by one car from A to B but by the continuous use over time across a
section of the street.

Say you had a single 1 mile arterial in a city, and it's the only way of
getting from one half of the city to the other half. There are few points when
a cars are "off" of it (except maybe late at night) - the rest of the time it
is a near constant high speed flow.

You're not wrong to say that it gets any given car off the road quicker, but
that is if you're focusing on the one driver's trip, as opposed to focusing on
the use of and experience of being at that section of road. If it was an old
town which had its main street become a high speed arterial, you now have an
experience for any pedestrians who might want to use the (probably few
remaining) stores along that road be not unlike walking along side a freeway -
unfun and dangerous.

By focusing on any one driver's trip experience, and not the street
experience, you're essentially damning the street experience for the potential
sake of some extra time saved (if its across a city, perhaps on the order of
10 or so minutes).

Of course when you have nothing _on_ the street worth being around (like most
of El Camino Real), you want to get passed it ASAP. (SF problems are a whole
other hairball of outside commuters plus residents who insist on using cars.)

------
adamgravitis
Cities are largely about people, and people are largely about the difficult-
to-describe sense of 'opportunity'.

Cities reflect networks effects as strongly as anything, which is why the same
cities that were important 100 years ago are, by-and-large, the same cities
that are important today: there has been no doubling of exciting, the-place-
to-be kind of cities in at least North America despite huge increases in
population.

Because of this, our generation is stuck on the wrong side of the
supply/demand bit for property. Property in uninteresting cities is very
cheap, because nobody wants to be there. Property in Silicon Valley or Toronto
is on fire because it's the place to be.

I think there's a critical mass kind of problem. In many ways, my quality of
life in a smaller (or even very small) city could be several times higher than
it currently is -- except for the people. And, for better or worse, it's the
people that matter. I don't have any real desire to be the best educated, or
most creative, or most entrepreneurial person in a city: I want to be
surrounded by them and call them my friends.

So perhaps there's some kind of Kickstarter-like critical mass sort of system
that could be put into place to kickstart small cities whereby 50 or 100
mutually interesting people committed to moving to a more remote city iff
their compatriots did as well.

Of course, to make that work, there would be have to be some kind of
"opportunity", which is why I'm happy to see yC-folks looking into the
problem.

~~~
samvj
Basic income and the freedom to pursue things without having to worry about
money, could be that opportunity.

~~~
RussianCow
You don't even need to go that far; wider adoption of remote work would create
enough opportunity for a lot of people.

------
massysett
"How can we make rules and regulations that are comprehensive while also being
easily understandable? Can we fit all rules for the city in 100 pages of
text?"

If you give arbitrary power to those who enforce the rules, sure, they can fit
in 100 pages. If you don't value predictability and consistency of
enforcement, sure, they can fit in 100 pages. In fact, the rules can fit onto
one page. The Ten Commandments are pretty short.

However, if you want to have a predictable body of law administered fairly,
it's going to take a lot more than 100 pages. Even the Ten Commandments aren't
that simple when it's time for practical application. You can simply decide on
a case-by-case basis and not write down what you do, and then it will fit in
100 pages. But if you give notice to others about what your decisions are, and
you are bound by previous decisions...well, that sounds a lot like a common-
law system. Decisions in such a system are going to exceed 100 pages.

These things aren't as simple as it seems...there are good reasons why the
Supreme Court once considered what it meant to "use" a firearm.

~~~
nickff
I am of the opposite view; if the people do not know and understand the rules,
then then they cannot be expected to abide by them. There are so many
criminal, civil, and regulatory laws that the people could not possibly be
expected to know, that the system is unfair. Lawyers will often say that
ignorance of the law is no excuse, but that is a manifestly unreasonable
doctrine when even the regulators, legislators, and prosecutors have no idea
of how many laws there are, and what is illegal.

My view is that there should be two classes in grade 10; one on criminal law,
and one on civil, and the laws should never be more complex or more numerous
than can be explained to a 15 year-old in those two semesters.

I think most people would agree that using a firearm is shooting it, but that
problem would easily be solved by changing the word to "discharging" it.

~~~
maxerickson
So pointing a loaded pistol at a clerk while robbing a store is then not using
the firearm?

~~~
nickff
No, pointing any firearm at a clerk would be assault (with a weapon), whether
or not it was loaded. If I told you that I went to a shooting range and used
my gun, what would you think? That I'd pointed it at stuff? If I said that I
went out onto the street and used my rifle, you would not surmise that I had
looked over the iron sights.

note: I do not own a firearm

~~~
massysett
What if you take your rifle and use it to beat someone upside the head? Is
that using it?

The case in question concerned someone who used the firearm to exchange it for
drugs. Is that "use"? The Court said yes, with dissenters.

The point is that these sorts of questions crop up all the time even with
well-drafted rules and regulations. So courts have decisions...and they write
them down. So legislators make the statutes more detailed...and they write
them down. So administrators make regulations and interpretations...and they
write them down. The only way to cut it to "100 pages" is to stop writing
things down, which leads to law that is arbitrary and inequitable.

~~~
nickff
Those are mostly cases of the courts trying to interpret laws in creative ways
to reach conclusions they like. Cases like Bond and Yates prove that many
prosecutors are willing to stretch laws, and get many courts to agree with
those broad interpretations of the law.[1][2] My view is that they should read
the laws more strictly.

Do you expect the average citizen to have read all the civil and criminal laws
of your state and country, in addition to all the opinions by appelate courts?
If the answer to that is no, then you should not expect that citizen to abide
by a body of law of which they are unaware. You might as well write the laws
in secret and hide them from the people, because the current volume of law is
equivalent to obfuscation.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bond_v._United_States_(2014)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bond_v._United_States_\(2014\))

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yates_v._United_States](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yates_v._United_States)

------
devinhelton
The list of high-level questions is missing the most important question: how
do you bootstrap the economy? There are plenty of awesome locations in the
United States that have cheap land with great geography, but that have no
jobs. The reason people flock to cities with such insane real estate prices is
because that is where the jobs are.

This is where Y Combinator could play an interesting role though. Could you
imagine two or three San Francisco tech companies all uprooting at once to a
brand new city, where costs might be half the cost in San Francisco? And at
the same time, maybe you could convince a couple other big tech companies to
open satellite offices in the new city. To get more economic diversity,
perhaps the startup-city could also buy up established, small-scale
manufactures and move them to the city. Still -- these kind of moves would be
very, very hard, as it would be very difficult and risky to try to uproot
enough employees to actually make the move successful.

Any other ideas for how the economy could be bootstrapped?

~~~
sama
It would be better to move a few hundred startups. Startups sometimes grow up
to be big tech companies, and it's much easier to move tiny companies.

We could, uh, help with that.

~~~
kapitza
I thought this wasn't a "libertarian utopia for techies?"

When you look at how ordinary people choose a city to live in, the most
important variable is _who else gets to live there_. Everything else is a
rounding error.

Boulder, Colorado is a beautiful little city. Its population is roughly the
same as that of West Point, Liberia. Compare a city with the legislation and
architecture of West Point, but the population of Boulder, to a city with the
legislation and architecture of Boulder, and the population of West Point.
Which would you rather live in?

When you treat human beings as generic, interchangeable parts, you're missing
the first lesson of Christopher Alexander's approach: design real solutions
for real people. You probably wouldn't fund a YC company that assumed the
world consisted of 6 billion interchangeable customers.

~~~
jessaustin
This is a key insight. So many want to talk about rules and architecture, but
habits outweigh everything else. When I lived in Singapore a long time ago, it
was impossible to get off the subway during busy times, because of the solid
mass of humanity who were trying to get in the door before anyone else got
out. When I visited later, it was easy, because in the interim they had passed
a law about where you have to stand while waiting. I've lived in lots of other
cities with subways, and none of them needed that law, because the people
there were not in the _habit_ of being morons on the subway.

------
gioele
I hope the winner of this call get all sent to live for 2 years in small (and
not so small) unknown towns in Europe that have been growing organically for
thousands of years and offer a great quality of life.

Places where rich and poor, kids, young adults, adults and elderly all live
happily together (modulo the usual father-and-son generational problems).

Seriously, planners in "new" countries should be forced to spend some time in
"old" countries, if not to learn the good things, at least to learn their
mistakes.

And another compulsory thing should be listening to James Howard Kunstler
talking about Suburbia:
[https://www.ted.com/talks/james_howard_kunstler_dissects_sub...](https://www.ted.com/talks/james_howard_kunstler_dissects_suburbia)

~~~
rm_-rf_slash
Sometimes I wonder if Americans fucked themselves by creating cities with
roads and cars in mind, thereby ruining the organic walkability of naturally
sense cities which were historically limited by the distance one could
reasonably walk in a given day for their regular necessities.

The only old American city that I think stands a chance is Philadelphia, which
has a great number of single-lane one-way streets, which allow emergency
services to get to where they need quickly enough while providing a decent
amount of walkability. But then again, the original plan for Philadelphia is a
hilarious testament to the utter failures of centralized city planning.

" Penn planned a city on the Delaware River to serve as a port and place for
government. Hoping that Philadelphia would become more like an English rural
town instead of a city, Penn laid out roads on a grid plan to keep houses and
businesses spread far apart, with areas for gardens and orchards. The city's
inhabitants did not follow Penn's plans, as they crowded by the Delaware
River, the port, and subdivided and resold their lots"
-[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philadelphia](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philadelphia)

~~~
jsprogrammer
If you have single lane streets, what does an emergency vehicle do when the
lane is blocked by vehicles, people, or debris?

Wouldn't wider streets be better in every case?

~~~
rm_-rf_slash
Wider streets are good for getting a lot of stuff through - up to a limit. Los
Angeles and Atlanta are full of massive highways of cars that barely move.

Larger streets also hurt street side commerce. Nothing chokes off wakability
and storefront business vitality like multi-lane one-way streets.

EDIT: I feel compelled to mention from my experience that in Rome, the most
active streets with the most vibrant businesses were not the arterial roadways
- those seemed to mainly serve large businesses, government buildings, and
tourist traps - but rather the tiny twisted streets in place for many
centuries.

~~~
zardo
I think open straight streets don't fire up our spacial memory in the same
way, and as a result aren't really "places" in our minds in the same way as
more intricate and varied environments.

------
eslaught
Perhaps this is just me, but I _just don 't like_ cities.

I agree that the things listed in this article need fixing, but I also feel
like they're missing the point.

I grew up in a small college town (in a house), but have spent most of my
adult life living in cities (in appartments). Somehow, those cities have never
felt like home to me. I've always felt like I was missing something. Privacy
is not quite the right word. Perhaps solitude.

Growing up, I could easily find space to be alone (and I mean, truly alone) .
In my current city, there is literally no way to do that. My appartment is
cramped, and low sound isolation means I can hear the neighbors. If I go
outside to the park, there is approximately a person per couple thousand
square meters (and the noise carries further). If I go to a coffee shop or
other public place, it's even more crowded. I can go to the mountains, but
it's about an hour by car to get there, and even then there are people around.
(Unsurprisingly, the further I have to go, the less likely I am to do it on a
regular basis.) This inability to have space has lead to a sort of mild
chronic anxiety. Suffice it to say, I don't like cities, but I'm stuck where I
am for other reasons.

So I can't exactly say I'm eager for even more population density. Some of the
problems above could possibly be mitigated (e.g. better sound isolation), but
the broader issues of _how much personal space is really necessary_ just seems
like it's not on people's radars. Is this just not an issue for other people?
Am I crazy?

I hope that any discussion of better cities includes this as a component.

~~~
hx87
Think about it this way: in an area with a given population, raising the
population density of a subset of that area lowers it somewhere else, and you
can live in that somewhere else.

That being said, better sound insulation in walls, windows, ceilings and
floors is absolutely necessary in most cities, and that is where regulations
should focus on (with limited or no grandfathering), not setbacks and heights.

~~~
cfreeman
Good luck on getting a rule like that implemented with little or no
grandfathering. The economics of that are just too extreme.

------
kome
I like how Y Combinator takes classical sociological questions, and they
pretend to look for _the_ solution. They seem to have a "final boss" approach
to social science...

Aren't urbanists, sociologists and architects working exactly on the same
questions since forever? The idea that a new study can find a new “disruptive”
solution is naive at best, or dangerous at worst. But, of course, I welcome
more money to social science. Those questions are well worth study...

~~~
dwaltrip
Yeah, I would think that the first step would be to do a survey of existing
literature. Might take a while. It's a worthwhile endeavor, but definitely a
difficult one.

------
baybal2
Things that The West can learn from The East:

Russia/Eastern Europe:

1\. Free-for-all, mixed zoning. You own the land, build whatever you want as
long as it's not a munitions factory (Most of Russia, Kazakhstan)

2\. Market driven, privatized public transit (Most of Eastern Europe)

3\. Small city blocks that let throught traffic.

4\. Market controlled access to distric heating/cooling (Yakutsk an extreme
example of privatized district level utilities)

5\. Higher standards for building's energy efficiency (adopted across the
former Soviet block)

6\. Learn how to build decent "serially produced" housing for cheap
(Ekaterinburg)

7\. More traffic light controlled "turn right on red" signals - an easy way to
increase traffic thoughtput by double digits (former Soviet block countries)

Asia:

1\. learn how to build cities that are dense, but still livable (Hongkong,
Singapore, Macau, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Tokyo)

2\. Better construction technology and materials. MgO board, light/cellular
concretes, thermal stops in slabs, automated, computerized armature
prefabrication, etc (Most of People Republic if China, South Korea, Russian
Far East)

3\. Bus rapid transit, and how to make cheap public transport really work
(Guangzhou)

4\. Traffic laws that are two-wheeler friendly (Taipei, whole of Japan)

5\. Public daycare and early primary education (Tokyo)

6\. "Public housing for regular people" (Hongkong, Singapore)

7\. Incentivize people to buy smaller cars, or use transit (Tokyo)

8\. Double deck, or multi leve streets (Shenzhen, Guangzhou, Chicago)

~~~
fudged71
What are "green arrows"? And why do they significantly improve throughput?

~~~
baybal2
Green arrow is an additional traffic light signal that lets right turn on red.
It is usually computer controlled in big Russian cities

~~~
maxerickson
Being able to turn right on a red is the default in the US.

(many intersections are posted as no right turn on red though)

~~~
jtuente
In the majority of intersections that I've driven (in the midwest) with no
right turn on red, there is an obvious obstruction to see fast moving cars
passing through the intersection.

Also, in some areas with many one-way streets it is legal to make a left-turn
on red from one one-way street to another.

------
rm_-rf_slash
There is an example of a player of SimCity creating the optimal city which
consisted of a reusable grid of components ensuring everyone had access to
work and services within a reasonable distance from their homes [1]. There
were a lot of assumptions that went into it - including perpetual access to
water and a completely flat layout - but it at least seemed to validate the
belief I have had that a city at heart simply needs to fulfil a certain set of
needs within a reasonable radius and the people can take it from there.

When I lived in Rome briefly I was astounded at how livable it was. Throw a
dart at a map of Rome and as long as you don't hit a major park, ruin,
government building or the Vatican, you can reasonably assume that within a
walkable radius, you will find grocers, restaurants, convenience stores, bars,
hairdressers, gelato shops (there is a LOT of gelato in Rome), and everything
else you need in your daily life. The tiny twisted streets barely offer enough
room for a single car at a time - and my hat is off to the brave individuals
who choose to drive through them - but because everything is so dense, you
really don't need a car. You barely need public transit either, unless your
place of work is too far to walk most days. It is also worth noting the
majority of buildings in Rome are within 3-6 stories high, much unlike the
American expectation that city centers feature enormous skyscrapers that pack
people like sardines. Ultra-dense Manhattanized city centers may be efficient,
but they lack the ancient and livable simplicity of old European cities.

Exception: Australia manages brilliantly to merge dense city centers with far-
flung suburbs with an excellent mix of trains, light rail, and busses, which
allow residents of large cities to get around easily without needing a car at
all.

[1] [http://www.vice.com/read/the-totalitarian-buddhist-who-
beat-...](http://www.vice.com/read/the-totalitarian-buddhist-who-beat-sim-
city)

~~~
Nav_Panel
I agree with your point but I have one nitpick.

> unlike the American expectation that city centers feature enormous
> skyscrapers that pack people like sardines

Most skyscrapers in Manhattan at least are either for commercial use or
feature large apartments/luxury condos (designed to solicit foreign
investment). Average urban joe working a nebulous media job does not live in a
skyscraper, although they may work in one.

People in NYC are "packed like sardines" into similar 3-6 story low-rise row
houses just like in many European cities. This is because NYC was built up
prior to many now-standard zoning regulations, so it follows a more similar
pattern to older European cities.

The issue is affordability -- apartments near my office would cost 3x or more
per month than where I currently live. How does Rome handle this?

~~~
rtpg
Mass transit making distances more manageable without a car, mixed zoning
means that there aren't as many areas that are just offices, and areas that
are just apartments

If all offices are spread around the city , then there's nothing special about
the apartment next to the office. Of course the area could just generally be
nicer...

------
BinaryIdiot
> We now have major technologies such as smart grids, autonomous vehicles, etc

Not really. Autonomous vehicles are still coming. We don't know what
infrastructure we'll need to support them just yet. Will there be a
standardized way of powering / recharging them? What non-autonomous needs will
they have and how to we handle them (because there will be some e.g.
mechanical repair, rescue, etc)? Sure we can "guess" based on trends but we
won't know for sure for probably another 10+ years what a brand new city will
really need in this regards.

Same with smart grids especially with solar power becoming more efficient they
may almost be unnecessary in 10-20 years (unlikely maybe but it's
theoretically possible).

> There are many high-level questions we want to think through[...]And there
> are tactical questions we want to dig into

So there is a bit of reason to why most cities come up sorta "organically".
Like NYC there was planning, sure, but that planning came from trends or
requirements from the populous which happened over time. Engineering a _full
city_ from the group up sounds good but the majority of the people using the
city are, well, people. People change. Technology changes. Political opinion
changes.

Maybe you'll succeed in having a solid plan agreed upon by a majority but by
the time the plan is taken and put into action and built a large amount of
time will pass and I _do not_ believe that original plan will still be as
optimal or valid by the time it is completed. Then you'll have to do what
every city does: improve, change laws, build stuff here and there that you
originally thought you wouldn't do.

Ultimately it seems like a very interesting exercise but I do not believe in
its practicality.

> \- Adora Cheung, Sam Altman

Wait, Adora is part of YC? I thought after all of the drama around HomeJoy and
the people it may or may not have sold to she had just basically disappeared.
I had no idea she was part of YC.

Edit: just to clarify (because I'm not sure it came off correctly) I just
didn't know Adora was part of YC and am curious as to her role, etc not to
bring up any drama or other bs. I had just assumed she went on to found
another company as that seems to be the norm for many founders.

~~~
apendleton
> Autonomous vehicles are still coming.

Autonomous privately owned vehicles on shared rights of way are still coming.
Centrally managed autonomous vehicles on dedicated rights of way are here
already -- think inter-terminal trains at airports. If private car ownership
is up for discussion (and it's explicitly called out here), you could imagine,
for example, an urban plan where people got around on a macro level on
automated elevated light rail, and on a micro level by foot or bike.

~~~
BinaryIdiot
That would be pretty awesome and is very doable today. Good idea! You wouldn't
even need roads really just stations everywhere to get on some sort of train
type of vehicle that you can hop on and get to any part of the city. Hell make
them smaller and more frequent and when you get in you put where you want to
stop so it can skip stops, etc.

~~~
Jtsummers
Trollies. They leave the roads open for other forms of transportation. They
can be made to move slow enough that people can embark/disembark while it's in
motion. Some level of automation can allow them to realize they're full and
skip stops unless requested by a passenger. Hell, you could put a button or
offer a phone app so people can request it to stop at a particular stop
instead of flagging it down like a bus.

Automation is easy, they follow tracks. Put them on various, intersecting
loops. They could probably be more self-contained, rather than using the grid
constantly. If personal vehicles are banned, you only have to contend with
pedestrians, cyclists, emergency, maintenance, and perhaps delivery vehicles.

~~~
BinaryIdiot
Hmm not bad. Embarking / disembarking sounds difficult for the handicapped but
I'm sure that's work-around-able. I'd be interested in seeing more cities
adopt quick transportation like this even if it's in a different but similar
form.

~~~
Jtsummers
Regular stops for them. You'd have them frequently enough. Everyone else can
use those or get off between stops.

------
CuriouslyC
It is a mistake to assume that because cities were the most efficient way to
organize people in the past, they will continue to be so in the future. Given
the trend towards remote work, socialization and shopping, there is a lot less
of a need for density.

Instead of asking "how can we make the city of the future" we should instead
be asking "how can we create a habitats for humans that promote happiness,
health, harmony, and do so in a way that is economically and ecologically
sustainable."

I believe that people are happier when they have a sense of connection and
belonging in their community. Cities discourage this.

I believe people are happier in environments that feel more natural and alive.
Cities discourage this too.

I believe people are happier when they have a sense of personal space and
privacy. Another mark against cities.

Cities make efficient use of space, density lets you produce buildings cheaply
in terms of living units/dollar, and they are more efficient in terms of
distributing goods and services. I believe that alternative building
techniques can mitigate much of the cost of reduced density. I also believe
that by integrating permaculture based agriculture into the landscape design
you can mitigate some of the efficiency losses in terms of distributing the
most important good - food. You could further reduce the distributional
inefficiency using a system of neighborhood based co-ops - I'm sure people
would adapt to quite easily to the reduced selection of snacks and processed
food.

~~~
TillE
> environments

I live about three minutes away from a large park near the center of a large
city. It's a great place to walk around.

When I lived in American suburbia, it was nothing but houses unless you drove
a few miles down a main road.

~~~
zardo
This commentor is definitely not proposing traditional suburbs. Integrated
permaculture would mean living in an edible garden for one.

I agree that we need more local control of food, the American diet is killing
and sickening more people than tobacco ever did.

The incentive is to hack our brains with foods that activate reward centers,
rather than helping people to live healthy lives through nutritious food.

------
robertelder
Something that I've always wondered in relation to city design is why it isn't
standard for high-rise buildings to be 50% office space and 50% living space.
It's one of those things where I assume there must be a good reason why it
isn't done, but I've never been able to find one. It seems like such a huge
waste of human resources to force people to commute for hours each day,
spending money, wasting gas, lost productivity etc.

Zoning regulations that separated hazardous or noisy manufacturing from
housing make sense, but for office work, I can't see why there is a need to
keep it separate.

~~~
twelvechairs
A few core reasons (im an urban designer and deal with this sort of thing
fairly regularly)

Residential and modern office typically have very different floorplate
requirements. So often dont sit comforatably over each other.

Mixing residential and commercial tends to make building operation an issue -
who pays or chooses what to spend on when there are building wide issues
(leaks, structure, lifts, noise complaints, etc)? What happens when the office
owner wants a complete refurb? Office owners traditionally have liked to
retain ownership to allow demolition and reconstruction in after 40 years or
so.

Many high grade offices tend to be picky and not like looking out the window
at peoples laundry in the opposite building. Nor have the lobby of low cost
apartment housing in the side of the same building.

Adding more levels isnt always an economic thing to do for developers since
time in construction (and hence time the developer has borrowed money but not
recieved payments) is a key issue.

At a strategic level often true 'office cores' can be constrained and need to
be protected from erosion.

------
camikazeg
I've spent too many hours day dreaming about building a city from scratch in
the middle of the country. An ideal spot would be around Wilson Lake in
Kansas. It is almost equidistant from Denver, Oklahoma City (with a straight
shot to Dallas) and Kansas City right in that sweet spot where high speed rail
is more attractive than air travel. Bonus: there isn't an existing city there
with existing governance.

I've always thought that if you are building a city from scratch, founding a
University would be a great way to start. If you found it with strong programs
in any or all of "architecture, ecology, economics, politics, technology,
urban planning" then you get a major draw in that people studying these areas
would be able to be instrumental in implementing them in a real way. When
people are going to University is also one of the major pivot points in
people's lives when they are willing to relocate.

~~~
jessaustin
Kansas State University isn't far from Wilson Lake, and it hasn't happened
there. I'm hoping that rail technology will keep improving until the Great
Plains as they actually exist will be in the "sweet spot". It wouldn't have to
be as fast as air travel, but if travelling from KC to Denver were 3 hours
rather than over 8, we'd live in a different country.

I'm _not_ suggesting that TSA should just get worse and worse until air travel
takes as long as train travel.

------
balls187
I'm skeptical.

I want to believe in this, but I can't help feeling cynical--likening the
results with that of privatization of prisons in the US.

Red-Light Cameras that infest my city were sold to public by claiming they
would increase public safety, but instead are just another way for the city to
generate revenue, much of which likely goes back to the camera builders.

It's hard to imagine a very for-profit entity like YC having an impact on city
planning without ultimately driving towards a monetary return on investment.

------
tmaly
For me cities with great public transportation are key. New York still has a
lot of cars, but the subway system is quite extensive. Portland, OR has one of
the best bus systems I have seen. I wish they had more light rails than they
do. When I was last there they were just completing the second one.

Paris has a great subway system that is very clean, and their roads are very
walk able.

Montreal and Toronto have great systems.

I think a cities climate is always important to consider. If you want to have
bike paths, but you get a ton of snow in the winter, how do you deal with
that? At my university up in Rochester NY we had tunnels under ground
connecting the buildings. This helped a lot with the brutal winters.

~~~
elsurudo
IMO Toronto's system is not so great, especially for a city its size. A city
that size (especially one with as much congestion!) should have a
comprehensive subway system (see Barcelona for a great example), not a measly
2.5 lines.

Sure, downtown the transit is pretty good, but move outside of that, and
things aren't all there.

~~~
G43nm45ji
I love streetcars, but since there are too many cars on the road, trying to
get around downtown is a joke. That said I take the King which is known for
being one of the worst I think. It's faster for me to walk a lot of the time.

~~~
elsurudo
Yeah, streetcars in such a congested city only really work when they have
their own rights-of-way. Is the Spadina streetcar done yet?

~~~
joshlemer
Yep

------
niels_olson
If you're serious about this, you need Geoffrey West,

[http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/19/magazine/19Urban_West-t.ht...](http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/19/magazine/19Urban_West-t.html)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoffrey_West](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoffrey_West)

[http://www.santafe.edu/about/people/directory/](http://www.santafe.edu/about/people/directory/)

Alberto Hernando de Castro, and

[https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=S_ad8ycAAAAJ&hl=en](https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=S_ad8ycAAAAJ&hl=en)

maybe Franz-Josef Ulm

[http://www.citymetric.com/%E2%80%9Curban-
physicists%E2%80%9D...](http://www.citymetric.com/%E2%80%9Curban-
physicists%E2%80%9D-are-claiming-cities-are-molecules)

[https://cee.mit.edu/ulm](https://cee.mit.edu/ulm)

And I don't know who's been doing Chinese planning, but they've obviously had
some experience building cities that never became populated.

~~~
astrange
Those "unpopulated Chinese ghost towns" are all populated now, a few years
after they were built. The government just builds them a while before forcing
the nearest subsistence farmers to move into them.

It's like Spike Japan, the blog that visits towns on holidays and claims
they've been abandoned for years, because all the residents are gone on
holiday.

------
pasbesoin
Soundproofing. It's a small fraction of building cost, but one that is most
often omitted because short term profit is disconnected from long-term utility
and benefit.

I've experienced several absolutely miserably loud neighbors. Talk about
destroying my potential.

I moved to a house -- way more space than I need -- to get away from it. To
end up with neighbors who blasted their car stereos -- think SUB-woofers --
all day long. In an unincorporated community where there was no noise
ordinance and the county sheriff left it up to the individuals to sort things
out.

Another necessary component: All you "libertarian", laissez faire people need
to decide whether you are really, fully behind that idea. In which case, I
would have no problem going across the street and putting a slug in each of
their heads.

If I'm going to solve a problem, then once and for all.

Otherwise, come up with some effective noise control ordinances -- AND
EFFECTIVE, PRO-ACTIVE ENFORCEMENT AND PENALTIES.

So... if you want "new cities" including "denser" living, fix your fucking
noise problems.

~~~
gre
Light pollution is big for me too. I want to be able to see the stars and the
Milky Way at night, why not? It's tangential to noise pollution.

~~~
zephjc
I think the trick to that is to get rid of sprawl. You have a lot of people
thinly spread out but still emitting light pollution. Move people in closer to
city/town/village centers, out of meandering suburbs, you move the light
pollution to centralized locations, and are able to leave more surrounding
land for rural uses with little to no light pollution.

------
jkaunisv1
Make internet a basic utility, paid through taxes, that requires no
activation. I've never had to explicitly pay for water or have it turned
on/off when I switch apartments, it would be amazing for internet to be the
same.

See Pattern Language/Christopher Alexander for ideas on how to design the
physical spaces to work for the people who will be using them, including
random passersby.

Put cars lowest on the priority list. To me it feels like you should only need
a car to travel between neighborhoods, though there would need to be a
solution for elderly/less mobile folks.

Build the city near some beautiful nature, and then put a free public transit
line that gets people from the city center to there, fast. I live about a 10
minute drive/30 minute bike ride from a beautiful national park, but I rarely
go there because it's not fast and easy to get there.

Subsidize a good amount of small office/storefront space for new businesses.
Let people try out ideas for shops and businesses without going into crazy
debt just to sign a lease.

Make efficiency/sustainability requirements for building WAY higher than the
norm. In many climates, AC/heating isn't actually needed if you invest a bit
more in building materials upfront and build intelligently.

~~~
mmalone
Interesting that you mentioned pattern language. My brother is an architecht,
I'm into tech. I remember asking him about Alexander / pattern language after
reading GoF, et. al. and he hadn't heard of him. He looked into it and was
kind of like _shrug_. Seems Alexander isnt't super mainstream in the
architecture community, and his ideas weren't that revolutionary. My read is
that he's better know to software engineers than actual architects?

~~~
elihu
Part of the point of A Pattern Language is that it wasn't revolutionary. The
premise is that people have been building buildings for thousands of years,
and certain common patterns appear without anyone calling them out
specifically. So, Alexander set out to compile a list of all those patterns,
and hypothesize about the problems they solve and why that particular solution
is preferable to the alternatives.

To someone who is trying to make an artistic statement with their buildings, A
Pattern Language might be uninteresting, since his advice is essentially the
architectural equivalent of composing music in a major key according to
traditional rules of harmony. If that's what you want to do, that's great, but
if you want to make something deliberately dissonant or challenge traditional
notions, it's not so helpful.

It's also worth noting that Alexander has some very strong opinions about
things, and (just like any other area of human endeavor) there are architects
who disagree with him.

------
sgentle
Understandably, I'm sure there will be a lot of focus on physical and
transport infrastructure. I think it would be worth also looking into ways to
transform the social infrastructure of a city.

I'm sure most people would agree that cities tend to bring a certain degree of
isolation. Once upon a time people would know everyone in their town, but in a
large city today it's pretty rare to even know your neighbours.

Of course, in the year 20x6 we have lots of social infrastructure, but mostly
it starts with an assumption that you want to choose who you interact with.
But what if you shouldn't always choose? In the wake of the Brexit some
commentators have rightly asked "how didn't I know anybody voting leave?"

For better or worse, we are stuck in proximity to a certain number of people,
maybe people quite different to us. In cities, we tend to ignore that as much
as we can, and our social tools follow suit. Could we build new ones that
instead embrace this restriction and turn it into a good thing? Could we bring
a sense of local community back to our cities? Could we build slightly-out-of-
your-comfort-zone-as-a-service and pierce the filter bubble at least a little?

I'm not sure, but I think it's worth finding out!

~~~
rm_-rf_slash
I'm rather dismal on the ability for city planning to positively affect
communities - or to even work as planned in the first place. Look at the
original grid plan for Philadelphia to see what I mean.

I think the "know your neighbors" problem is a lot bigger than city planning.
It has a lot to do with our society itself. For example, it is assumed in
America that one must eventually own their own home to achieve the "American
Dream." The implication is that if one just has a house, a car, and a job that
pays well, that person doesn't even need other people. They can get all their
entertainment from the Internet and all of their food and other goods
delivered. It is an efficient system, but it lacks heart. A change in city
design will only scratch the surface of the isolating world we live in.

~~~
brett40324
Yes, thank you. I moved from Chicagoish midwest to central Kentucky two years
ago, and everyday I still experience cultural shock at the overall compassion
and friendliness of most people here. True community-based values and
socioeconomic success start with human goodness toward one another, not
statistical or engineering research.

------
rwhitman
One thing that really needs to be addressed is how to retrofit the glut of
car-centric developments designed in the late 20th century, to better conform
with the growing sense of value we have in walkable communities today.
Navigating the minefield of local zoning politics to try and convert car-
centric stripmall mcmansion suburbs into tighter village-like communities will
be an enduring puzzle in America at least.

There's also an interesting question in what happens when we cluster too many
people into one city based around talent markets for knowledge work.

The Brexit vote in England may well be partially the result of the fact that
the younger workforce in the UK was all stuffed into London due to the high
concentration of knowledge work employers there, preventing newer ideas and
values from being evenly applied across more of the country. You see the same
thing happening in the USA, with near total dominance of one political
ideology in the larger coastal cities and dominance of the other in places
further afield. We're seeing a reversion to city-states in this regard, and
with the distributed nature of knowledge work, you'd expect to see the
opposite happening...

~~~
zanny
With distributed knowledge work and freedom of movement people want to be
around their peers and like minded than the opposite. Thus they flood liberal
cities.

------
dasil003
I don't want to be too negative since it's an admirable goal, but I can't help
but feel like Gall's Law applies here. I suspect it's not really possible to
design a great city.

Consider Brasília for instance, it was designed from the top down, and it
certainly some interesting properties. Being able to walk in a mostly straight
line from arbitrary point A to point B is something I enjoyed about living
there. And the traffic flow control is pretty interesting and worked pretty
well for a long time. However today the congestion is bad, and the design of
the major landmarks is pedestrian hostile.

Obviously we can improve on all the shortcomings of a city designed 60 years
ago, but in designing a city today I suspect we would just create an entirely
new rash of problems that were difficult to solve. Also consider that Brasília
had a raison d'etre that can't be matched without political buy-in at the
highest level. Again, I don't mean to entirely dismiss the idea, but I suspect
that solving problems of existing cities will probably lead to better long-
term results than trying to go off to a literal green field.

~~~
dcosson
> but I suspect that solving problems of existing cities will probably lead to
> better long-term results

Isn't this what local governments are all perpetually trying to do in every
city?

The cool thing about this YC initiative is that it is considering such a
drastic green-field approach. It may turn out not to work, but it seems worth
trying when you look at how poorly the alternative often works (e.g. the
gridlock in SF over housing).

------
rubidium
Recommended reading:

Jane Jacobs "The Death and Life of Great American Cities"

Ray Oldenburg "great good place"

Booker T Washington: Up from Slavery

I'd skip figuring out cities. Start with how to create neighborhoods that
work? Where citizens can be educated, participate in their local government,
and find work at the neighborhood level.

------
greggman
I'm sure people have different opinions on this but one thing I like is
variety and grunge. I don't really know how to explain it. I want more SF's
Valencia between 16th and 18th and less Westfield foodcourt's. I want more
Golden Gai in Tokyo and less Roppongi Hills.

I used to want the Jetson's or Disney's Epcot. Now I want 150 tiny bars and
restaurants each one holding no more than 20-30 people at best (generally).
Less big box stores and less chains (not zero just less) and more boutiques /
specialty shops and restaurants

Of course arguably the general public doesn't want that though. If they did
the USA wouldn't be 95% big box shopping centers and 95% giant chain
restaurants.

I've wondered how to build for that. Tokyo, where I spent most of my time, is
having lots of older interesting neighborhoods torn down and replaced by tall
glass buildings with at best a generic shopping center at the bottom. The
architecture might be ok but the feel is gone and ends up feeling cold and
sterile. I get the old places are often fire traps or earthquake hazards but I
just wonder if there's a way to design the new places to some how capture the
essence of what it was before the change.

~~~
Ericson2314
> grunge > Valencia

Classic

\---------------------------

In all seriousness, both density, various older styles of architecture, and
grime/decay/gunge/whatever make for more salient visually-surroundings. Why
have upper-class europians flocked to Venice for hundreds of years[1]?

[1]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Tour](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Tour)

------
zw123456
This is a fantastic idea, I would expect no less from YC. A couple of thoughts
I have off the top of my head:

1\. Design with hyper-loop in mind from day one.

2\. Easy access right of way for utilities, most cities bury everything which
is silly, there should be an easily accessed common right of way so that
fiber, water sewer etc. can be easily accessed for upgrades or repair without
having to dig up the streets.

3\. Consider driverless cars only, and electric only. Include bicycle or non-
car personal vehicle pass ways that are safe.

4\. Plan for green spaces with point source food production in mind.

5\. Design in space for point source energy production, solar etc.

Most of these are pretty obvious. The other thing that I have thought about is
the parallels to networks, if you had a high speed low energy use hyper-loop
that could function like a ring topology with small low rise communities
around the ring. For quality of life a lot of people enjoy the small community
feel (think palo alto) I live in Seattle in a small sub-community (Kirkland)
that has that walk around the neighborhood to all services feel to it and I
feel that it adds a lot to my quality of life.

~~~
dragonwriter
> Easy access right of way for utilities, most cities bury everything which is
> silly, there should be an easily accessed common right of way so that fiber,
> water sewer etc. can be easily accessed for upgrades or repair without
> having to dig up the streets.

For cable/fiber/telephone/power, overhead was common, though burying is
replacing it.

But what's the alternative to burying for water and sewer? I suppose in
principle you could go overhead with that, too, but that seems...unappealing
in a wide number of reasons.

~~~
zw123456
Some municipalities have put in sidewalks that have removable slabs at each
corner or more often.

~~~
dragonwriter
That's a way of making buying more convenient, it's still burying.

------
deadowl
This is a shoot-yourself-in-the-foot idea. First of all, it legitimizes the
kind of BS Mormon Utopia plan that [the NewVistas project is trying to
accomplish in VT and Provo,
UT]([http://vtdigger.org/2016/06/19/residents/](http://vtdigger.org/2016/06/19/residents/)).
It also involves massive reappropriation of the existing value populations
have invested in the land. There's also no good metric for land service value
other than feedback from existing stakeholders, which can be volatile in
changing circumstances. I won't support a project that will have victims.

People have competing value systems. Communities grow around those value
systems as they are constantly negotiated and re-negotiated over time.
Asserting that one system of values is better than another is nothing short of
authoritarianism.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8-EEgmEWJw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8-EEgmEWJw)

------
Animats
Britain tried this after WWII, building about 20 "new towns".[1] China is
doing it in a big way right now. Building isn't the hard part. The usual
problem is a lack of jobs.

Check out the US census population projection for the next 50 years.[2]
Population is leveling off, and if immigration is restricted, it will decline.
Most of the EU countries, and Japan, are already in population decline. Also
see Fig. 6, "Dependency ratios". The US is headed for a situation where 75% of
the population is either too old or too young to work. Retirees increase from
23% now to 43% in 2060.

We will need more retirement communities to warehouse old people until they
die.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_towns_in_the_United_Kingdo...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_towns_in_the_United_Kingdom)
[2]
[https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publicatio...](https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publications/2015/demo/p25-1143.pdf)

~~~
huherto
This whole thread has been awesome. One of the things I learned is that
Massachusetts just changed its laws to allow grandparents houses to be built
within your lot. So grand parents get to live with their family, enjoy the
grand kids ,etc. A byproduct is that they may free a lot of houses to be used
for younger families.

------
Bromskloss
I want an old-fashioned city, with cobblestone and stuff, thank you. I'm sure
it's not the most efficient according to one measure or another, but it's for
living in, not for being a machine in. Actually, it might be the most
efficient at making me happy.

~~~
trgn
Yes please! I feel like the perfect cities already exist, they're just older
cities or neighborhoods from before the car existed. That's the key. The icing
on the cake is that the buildings and streets in those times were build using
natural materials, with delightful human touches in ornamentation and design.
Just looks good.

It's the horrible car sprawl of the US, and the dominance of the machine
aesthetic that makes most new cities and neighborhoods totally suck. Now,
people's crotches start to tingle when they smell freshly poured asphalt, but
that is the triumph of modernism, a perversion of our human impulses, the
result of a sick fetish for utility, while appreciation for durability and
beauty is completely stunted. Now, cobblestones, cobblestones are much more
tactile, sensual if you will (I'm only halfway kidding). Plus, they last
forever, needs to be leveled every half century or so, that's nothing.

I too want the cobblestones and stuff thank you.

------
ocdtrekkie
If you're going to have a dense, intercity area, I suppose I'd argue that the
question isn't about "human-driven cars", which brings up the largely
unrealistic consideration of self-driving cars on ordinary roads, but simply:
Build the city center entirely around public transit. Rail is incredibly
efficient, and in a system where you are designing the city first, I'd forgo
roads entirely. Why bother with buses if you have free reign where to put your
rails? And as a Chicagoan, I can say that nobody in their right mind drives a
car into the intercity to begin with.

Modern subway systems are automated with barrier walls and doors making it
near impossible for a human to end up on the tracks. If built like this from
the get-go, collisions between transit and pedestrian could be virtually zero.
Plan your stations based on the distance needed to reach EVERYWHERE in a
reasonable walking distance, make sure your system has the capacity to meet
the daily working population, and you really don't need direct A-to-B
transportation.

~~~
BorgHunter
> Light rail is incredibly efficient, and in a system where you are designing
> the city first, I'd forgo roads entirely.

While I'm a firm believer that private cars (at least at a scale seen in the
U.S.) and dense cities are fundamentally incompatible, I'm not quite onboard
with getting rid of roads altogether. What about bicycles? Emergency vehicles?
Construction equipment? Furniture deliveries? Deliveries of merchandise to
stores? None of these things are going to be able to get around without a road
network of some description, albeit hopefully one significantly reduced in
scope from a typical American city.

~~~
Swizec
You can build things that can function as roads but aren't roads. Look at most
European cities' inner pedestrian zones.

There are roads of old, but closed to traffic and heavily modified. In case of
emergency, fire engines can get in. Bicycles and pedestrians can comingle
happily on a normal day.

My hometown's (Ljubljana) pedestrian zone is more than a kilometer across.
It's quite awesome.

~~~
Shengbo
I agree. Pedestrian zones that are closed off to regular traffic are very
common in Europe and they're awesome.

They also boost the traffic the surrounding businesses get and make it easier
for cafés and restaurants to add a terrace area.

Well-executed pedestrian zones are one of the easiest and most effective ways
of making a street more liveable in my opinion.

Edit: Also, (preferably one-way)streets where the sidewalk-to-road ratio is a
lot higher than usual. Case in point[1]

[1]:
[https://www.google.com/maps/@47.5003418,19.0510879,3a,75y,17...](https://www.google.com/maps/@47.5003418,19.0510879,3a,75y,176.35h,78.4t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sTtOYZqBhyHyQeZyRb3Cb7Q!2e0!7i13312!8i6656)

------
gopher2
Public transit infrastructure and especially rail/subway seems like a huge
common denominator for 21st century cities that people are really attracted to
living in: See the Bay Area, Boston, NYC, DC

So I think, "how do you build legitimate rail transit into an existing city
without it currently" is an interesting question for people researching and
thinking about this topic.

Good luck!

------
20years
Have you considered revitalizing depressed cities rather than building new
ones? There are a lot of once thriving cities that became depressed due to
lost industries/jobs. Building out a tech hub and bringing in tech
jobs/workers into these cities could bring new life to them.

~~~
HillaryBriss
It's a good idea.

Maybe YC should talk with the founder of Zappos, Tony Hsieh. (They probably
have already for all I know.)

He's investing millions into the old Downtown area of Las Vegas in an effort
to transform that part of the city's economy. Not sure how it's turning out.
Maybe YC should just add themselves to that effort.

[http://www.forbes.com/sites/freeenterprise/2015/08/03/tony-h...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/freeenterprise/2015/08/03/tony-
hsiehs-350-million-gamble-on-las-vegas/#318463146184)

------
mc32
First, let's not go the Brasilia route and construct without human scale in
mind. Second, learn from the Chinese megacity projects.

My unproven and likely bad idea would be to promote medium sized cities of
medium density which are interconnected but have enough wilderness/farmland to
feel separate (in many countries the city and country have abrupt
demarcations).

Within each satellite you'd have self sustaining public transit to connect all
areas within and a great majority of the built up area is within half mile as
the crow flies from a metro station. Encourage mixed use, with the exception
of heavy industry which should be segregated. Build with a pedestrian first,
assisted mobility second and automobiles last --not that cars would be
penalized, just make it easy for walking and transit to be people's first
consideration. Build high speed links between the satellites (rail and car).

Don't build these things in flood zones or desert areas which require more
costs.

------
greggman
I have a feeling these ideas won't be popular but ...

On top of wanting an exciting city with affordable housing and good public
transportation. I want to live in a city where I feel safe. Safe from physical
harm, safe from theft, safe from bad police, safe from being spied on, safe to
participate in "quirky" things.

Tokyo is partly that city. I can go to strange fetish clubs, burlesque, punk
rock, cosplay, etc and no one bats an eye. But I'm unlikely to get stabbed,
unlikely to be pick pocketed, if I drop my wallet I'm likely to get it back
with all my money. If I go to a cafe/coffee-shop I can leave my
wallet/computer on a table for 10-15 minutes and expect to to be there when I
get back.

Why does it feel like every other city outside Japan except maybe Singapore I
can't do that?

I'm in Berlin right now and I love the variety of things going on but I hate
that a high percentage of people destroy the commons. Street Art Yay! Tagging
Boo! Broken glass everywhere where people threw their beer bottles. Pick
pockets all over. People trying to steal your bags right out from under you.

In LA/SF/NYC and Berlin almost all public restrooms for men are some level of
destroyed.

How do you get people to care about the commons and stop destroying things
just to be dicks?

Please figure out how to design that kind of city.

~~~
xkcd-sucks
On the other hand, Japan and Singapore are not good places to be if you want
to be "safe from bad police."

~~~
greggman
Compared to which countries?

------
anon4711
Since they make it so clear that they're '[..] not interested in building
“crazy libertarian utopias for techies.”', I wonder:

Who is? And where can I sign up for that?

~~~
pythia__
Good question. Quite a few people seem to be, actually. Mark Lutter is one at
[http://freecitiesinitiative.com/](http://freecitiesinitiative.com/). Patri
Friedman, perhaps the most famous supporter of idea, attempted to start a
charter city in Honduras but the Honduran government changed its mind
([https://athousandnations.com/2012/10/31/future-cities-
develo...](https://athousandnations.com/2012/10/31/future-cities-development-
ceasing-operations/)). The Seasteading Institute, cofounded by Friedman, was
once backed by Peter Thiel.

------
rjett
With many people having the ability now to work remotely, I've seen a big
influx into small to mid-sized cities in the last decade. Anecdotally, I moved
to Charleston, SC five years ago and since I've been here, I've seen a huge
influx of people moving here for quality of life reasons. Charleston is one of
the fastest growing cities in the US for this reason. There are opportunities
here as well, with larger companies like Boeing shifting a lot of their
operations here as well, but more than anything, I think people want to be
here because it's a place that offers an incredible food and beverage scene,
access to beaches, and a city bathed in history and architectural
significance. It's bikeable, walkable, and practically every address could be
copied onto a postcard. Most importantly, in my opinion, the influx of people
here are younger, optimistic, entrepreneurial types and it's so easy to get to
know others in town and to feed off that energy. Roll in cheap, fast direct
flights ($100-200 round trip) to almost any northern city (DC, NYC, Boston)
and that really adds to accessibility from other cities. I've been doorstep to
doorstep from Charleston to my friend's apartment in Brooklyn Heights in under
3 hours. </advertisement>

That said, I've lived in quite a few cities and the most important aspect of
anywhere I've lived is the type of people I'm comfortable surrounding myself
with. I think that's fairly true for anyone who has job mobility. After that
everyone places different weight on a host of other factors (access to
fast/efficient transport, culture, outdoors activities, sustainable utility
supplies, weather, food, demographics, proximity to family, local school
quality, etc, etc).

~~~
convoisofftopic
"I've been doorstep to doorstep from Charleston to my friend's apartment in
Brooklyn Heights in under 3 hours"

How? Flight is 1 hour 50 minutes (according to Google), and a cab from JFK to
BK heights is still 30 minutes if you hit zero traffic. Plus there is a
security line to get through at the Charleston end of things.

Even if the universe aligns in your favor I'd be surprised if you hit under 3
hours door to door.

------
Tiktaalik
I think a lot of these questions posed have already been answered
comprehensively by urban planners. Urban planners understand how to make well
crafted urban spaces that work well and make people happy.

The larger issue is that many of these known solutions aren't being
implemented due to established NIMBY interests that create an intractable
political situation that prevents anything but the status quo.

For example I'd point to how NYC has been transformed for the better by the
shift of road space usage from exclusive car use to being more inclusive of
cyclists and pedestrians. This was incredibly difficult to implement due to
extreme push back from just about everyone. Eventually once people realized it
was working for the better opposition started to melt away. Even with this
positive example to cite, for many cities basic safety improvements such as
separated bike lanes remain incredibly hard to implement due to local and
business opposition.

Additionally there are funding issues. This isn't the same country by country,
but in Canada at least municipalities don't have a lot of tools to raise
revenue and are very poor.

Metro Vancouver had a 10 year plan to dramatically expand rapid transit but it
didn't have the money to implement it. The vaguely transit-hostile provincial
government wasn't about to help out. The province forced Metro Vancouver into
a referendum on a new 0.5 cent sales tax to raise revenue but it was defeated.

Here we have an example where the region's planners completely understand that
they need to expand rapid transit to the region to better move people around
the region and increase housing affordability, but there aren't the funds
available to execute on the idea due to political ideology.

------
Dwolb
Oh man this is such a hard problem. There are many 'smart cities' built in
EMEA region e.g. [1] that just haven't lived up to their hype.

It's tough because we don't yet know what to solve for. We don't understand
the nature of city creation, what attracts people, how culture gets formed,
how businesses and leisure activities pop-up. We don't know if things we
perceive as problems are constraints that make the city thrive in unknown
ways. We don't know if there's a significant amount of path dependency and
sequencing that's appropriate.

To me, cities feel man-made because they're made of concrete, steel, and other
metals. But they're a lot like an organism, competing against other cities and
only keeping features which make them continue to thrive.

Super cool topic though and great on YC for opening research on the topic
rather than proposing solutions. Best of luck to the team.

[1]
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Songdo_International_Busines...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Songdo_International_Business_District)

------
sheriff
I think one of the big problems with cities is how static their layouts can
be. Many years from now, I like to imagine that cities will be made of movable
parts that can be rearranged throughout the day to take match the changing
needs of the people.

For instance -- there's no need for me to sleep in an expensive part of town,
but there's also no need for me to be awake while my bedroom is shifted out
into the outskirts. This would be something like Bruce Willis' character's
apartment in The Fifth Element, but I don't think we have to wait until we're
building cities in space to start working on this.

Similarly, if there's a diner that closes after 3PM, why should I ever have to
walk past its empty storefront later in the day? The popularity of food trucks
is evidence that there is value in being able to move supply around to find
the demand and that we _can_ reorganize our cities on a short time-scale. We
don't even need to wait for the parts to be self-driving, as nice as that
would be.

------
gwbas1c
I think the thing to realize is that there are certain advantages to suburban
living: The modern suburban home is what many people consider a mansion in
other contexts. A lot of people take a lot of pride in their home's interior
and exterior work.

Thus, perhaps the city of the future needs to figure out how to give people
space and personality in their dwellings. Living in a shoebox apartment where
all one gets to do is pick the wall coverings does not appeal to everyone.

Instead, perhaps it might be better to think about how someone can buy
property in 3D? Large empty 3D grid-like structures where someone can build
and have a high degree of control over their interior and exterior?

Perhaps even elevated walkways and trains, so people can get around without
needing to venture down?

Might sound like something out of sci-fi, but cities really need broader
appeal. A lot of people just don't want to move into a building where someone
chose everything else for them.

------
mjmahone17
Some options for doing this: 1\. Bootstrap an existing "small town" with
access to lots of resources. This has advantages, such as potentially existing
highway connections, water infrastructure, sewage, school districts, etc. The
downside here is that the existing community would have to buy-in, and agree
to be part of your experiment. This is not a small feat. Additionally, you
need to convince a large group of people to move there.

2\. Build from scratch. Here, the biggest problem will likely be building out
the infrastructure (such as roads, water treatment, schools, etc.), convincing
people to move to the "middle of nowhere", and finding an affordable area that
has access to enough clean water, that isn't already somewhat built up. I'm
from Arizona, and have driven through much of the state: even as a large
Western state with lots of available land, I have a pretty hard time thinking
of potential areas that aren't already semi-developed, unless you want to
constantly fight surrounding municipalities for water rights.

3\. "City within a City". Basically, find an under-developed suburb or area of
a major city. In Phoenix, this might be the town of Queen Creek, or if you
were OK displacing a multi-generation, poor community in the heart of the
metro, Guadalupe. Here, you get all the advantages of the small-town takeover,
with the added bonus that your community is still close to a central hub of
employment and existing options. The disadvantage is that you now have to deal
with regional politics, and face backlash (potentially) for displacing
existing residents. You also don't get to define your main roads and police
system much (due to county-level planning). But, depending on what you mean by
"city", you might be able to grab 2-4 square-mile-blocks that are not yet
incorporated into a large city, and start developing almost immediately (as
there's already water/electricity access nearby, and there is likely latent
local demand for the kind of development you want to build).

------
riprowan
Most cities succeed or fail based on their governance. Great ideas are awesome
- I love them - but governance is where the rubber meets the road.

Solve governance, solve everything.

------
jballanc
Assuming that you can avoid the problems of "old" cities by simply starting
out with the right "new" city is like assuming that you can avoid scaling a
web application by starting from the very beginning building micro-services.
The "new" city that plans for being big will never attract enough people to
grow much like businesses that _start_ with micro-services will never be agile
enough to find market fit and grow to actually _need_ micro-services.

Money and effort would be better spent looking at and solving the plight of
cities that have seen hockey-stick growth. Then you could take those lessons
and watch for the next city at the start of a population boom and ensure that
it grows in the "right" way.

~~~
elsurudo
Good thoughts. Riffing off of this, you can view successful-but-dysfnuctional
cities as having what is an analogue of technical debt.

------
rhapsodic
This is hubris, writ large. A small group of people think they can compile the
knowledge and wisdom necessary to build a utopian city that will be all things
to all of its inhabitants. Traffic congestion is bad, so let's outlaw cars!
Unless they're self-driving! Public transit is awesome! Yay, public transit!
Yay, bike paths!

Didn't they try something like this in China already?

------
roymurdock
I'm not sure if anyone has mentioned the South Korean city of Songdo yet, but
it's a good example of a built-from-scratch "smart city". Last I heard, the
Korean govt was having trouble getting people to move in. Here's an NPR story
on it from 2015:
[http://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2015/10/01/444749534/a...](http://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2015/10/01/444749534/a-south-
korean-city-designed-for-the-future-takes-on-a-life-of-its-own)

~~~
HillaryBriss
Thanks for that. I'd heard of it a while back but that's a nice update.

I love the final lines of that article:

 _Brent Ryan, who teaches urban design at MIT, says Songdo proves a universal
principle. "There have been a lot of utopian cities in history. And the reason
we don't know about a lot of them is that a lot of them have vanished
entirely."_

------
Erwin
The Monocle is a cosmopolitan magazine with short features on just this sort
of thing.

Their journalists constantly travel around the world and evaluate schools,
public services, transportation etc., publish a yearly top lists of cities
etc. They've collected some of their features in books: here's their latest,
"How to make a nation": [https://monocle.com/film/affairs/monocle-preview-how-
to-make...](https://monocle.com/film/affairs/monocle-preview-how-to-make-a-
nation/)

------
hydandata
I have always really liked stuff from
[https://www.thevenusproject.com/](https://www.thevenusproject.com/) some of
their ideas might seem crazyish but overall I think anybody thinking about
designing new cities ought to at least take a look.

~~~
PCMcGee
Fresco was unique in that all of his designs were based on testable,
quantifiable evidence based assessments of reality. His designs for cities
ended up looking like "utopias" because he started at the evidence based
engineering level and built up from there, not because he imagined a utopia
and worked backwards from his "vision". Most of the issues facing engineers
when designing a city are issues with the way in which monetary economics
works against efficient design, implementation of best practices, and sharing
of resources. As cities and neighborhoods with attractive qualities of
socialabilty become scarcer, gentrification leads to their destruction through
over-valuation from increased market demand. It is nigh impossible to build a
"shining city on the hill", where there is opportunity and abundance and
happiness, and expect that the rest of the world will sit idly by in their
squalor and applaud the achievement.

------
sktrdie
What's important in a generation where technology is everywhere, is to find
the ingredient that actually makes humans intellectually satisfied, happy and
productive. The economy and politics of this "system" is secondary to building
it in such a way that it nurtures humans' actual well being.

I'd like to see out-of-the-box thinking when it comes to building a system for
optimal well being. For instance, are we sure that our common model for a
city, where people own housing, and are almost always surrounded by strangers
apart from their small group of family/friends, is actually an ingredient for
optimal quality of life?

Why not experiment with humans living in structures resembling tribes, which
is really what our human intellect evolved into for thousands of years?

Again, in a world where we don't have to worry about issues that we had to
worry about in the past (food, shelter, security) and instead we're looking
for ways of being intellectually stimulated, I envision group sized sections
where people actually live together. The model of european hostels really
resonates with me, where strangers actually get to live with one another.

Of course current cities have hostels and have ways for us to live in
structures resembling tribes, but the important bit is that we make it part of
the culture so that newborns consider this way of living the normality -
rather than the normality being to own a house just for you and your family.

~~~
VLM
> "Why not experiment with humans living in structures resembling tribes,
> which is really what our human intellect evolved into for thousands of
> years?"

Most of my waking hours are spent at work, my department is the size of a
small tribe, full of small tribe politics. Also the middle managers force the
tribes to fight each other gladiator style. This does nothing for the
customers or investors, but obviously the leaders get a high out of it because
practically all middle managers across the country act that way.

My kids live most of the time in a separate tribe called school. That is one
screwed up tribe where they're all the same age and ability and demographic,
mostly. Unlike every other tribe they'll ever be a member of. There they are
instructed in the fine art of being interchangeable cog laborers on the
assembly lines that closed back in my grandpas generation, in other words its
pretty much useless other than as extremely expensive babysitting. So yeah
Prussian style public school is pretty much designed to maximally suck. But
its their legally required tribal membership until they're 18.

The question isn't why can't we LARP artificial pretend clubs and fraternal
organizations, but why did they decline in the first place and if the root
cause hasn't been fixed why would LARPing bootstrap anything? If the root
impediment is eliminated shouldn't those social organizations grow
organically, in fact at unpreventable rates?

------
bluthru
Are you intentionally talking past urban planners? They are literally the
expert on this topic.

~~~
tonyarkles
And yet, there's virtually nothing within reasonable walking distance from my
house, and there is no commercially-zoned land nearby that would allow someone
to open up a coffee shop/corner store/restaurant/pub/whatever. Literally no
community-oriented locations anywhere nearby.

In the summer, it's possible to bike to Safeway, but summer doesn't last all
that long and then there's a pile of snow on the ground again.

If they want a seat at the table, they've got to get better at what they do.

~~~
rtkwe
It's disingenuous to lay that fully at the feet of urban planners though
there's only so much they can do via the tools that local governments provide
budget and political support are both limited in a lot of cases. Also just
because there's the space provided for commercial spaces to open doesn't
guarantee you'd have the coffee shop/corner store/restaurant/pub/whatever
you're asking for.

------
justsaysmthng
> The world is full of people who aren’t realizing their potential in large
> part because their cities don't provide the opportunities and living
> conditions necessary for success.

> A high leverage way to improve our world is to unleash this massive
> potential by making better cities.

I don't think cities make it even into the top 10 reasons why people don't
realize their full potential.

Here's a small list, out the top of my head:

Depending on were you live, corruption is probably in the top 3 reasons why
"people don't realize their potential". Most people don't have the "guts" (or
low moral standards) to participate in the corruption games that are required
to climb the social ladder.

Then there's the thing called "competition". Once a person realizes his full
potential (s)he will want to stay at the top as much as possible and that
includes fighting others who try to challenge their dominant position.

Racism, xenophobia and other types of discrimination. Maybe not as evident in
the "western" world, but still a very powerful reason in many parts of the
world.

Other reasons include things like politics, poor laws and stupid fiscal
policies. In general, these go hand in hand with corruption and everything
else.

In my view we don't need more large cities, rather I think the solution is de-
centralization and de-urbanization.

Many small high-tech independent "village-sized" cities, self contained and
self-sufficient, interconnected with high-speed transport services is the way
to go.

------
galfarragem
Architect here.

New cities normally don't work as expected: cities are like a living organism,
they need time to mature. Lots of research was already made on these subjects
(most people are not aware of it) and even if some ideas are really good,
status quo makes any change very difficult.

By the other hand the knowledge fronteer is still near on building cities in
different environments/planets, so IMO, YC should go on that direction
instead.

------
stcredzero
Cities need to be optimized for serendipitous social, intellectual, and
cultural encounters between people. Maximize these, and you will have the best
of cities.

This means public squares and pedestrian-friendly landscapes, as everyone well
knows. This also means housing the homeless. The smell of urine and the
general feeling of squalor comprises the bulk of the burden of negative
feeling for me in SF.

------
koolba
From the footnotes:

> [1] Two out of three people will live in cities by 2050 - an influx of 2.5
> billion new urbanites.

How much of that is by choice? I know quite a few people that wouldn't give up
their rural lives willingly.

~~~
robohamburger
Reluctantly moved away from the city to a rural college town while my wife is
going to vet school and I have come to appreciate the benefits from living in
a smaller town and teleworking.

It does seem like a lot of thinking about cities is very one sided. People
clearly have an axe to grind with car culture, suburbs and endless commutes
which I don't blame them for.

I think to fix how live we have to think beyond cities.

------
bllguo
Something I've always thought about is smart traffic. If nobody else is at the
intersection I shouldn't have to wait at the red light. On a large scale the
economic benefits would be amazing - faster transport, higher car mileages
across the board (fewer hard stops for cars), increased efficiency, happier
people.

------
pjmorris
It might be instructive to look at past examples of planned cities that
haven't worked out. I'm thinking of the original intent of what became the
EPCOT theme park [1], and of the less-than-hoped-for success of Alexander's
pattern langauge(s) represented by The Oregon Experiment [2] and its long-term
lack of impact on Eugene, OR and architecture in general.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPCOT_%28concept%29](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPCOT_%28concept%29)
[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Oregon_Experiment](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Oregon_Experiment)

------
BenoitEssiambre
This is a great idea and has potential to help with the problem of overcrowded
urban centers.

It is impossible to keep adding people to the same space while giving
everybody much room for their money. Trying to cram a generation of
millennials into the same area as a wealthy cohort of boomers and rich
immigrants predictably makes home prices go up.

All the ways of lowering property prices usually imply killing the economy and
putting people out of work. Home prices usually end up going down only because
people are made not to be able to afford them. This is incredibly destructive
and it only allows more people to live in the same space when they are forced
to move in with their parents.

Increasing supply or nudging the new generation to go in areas with more
potential for spacial growth not only allows the new community to be built to
the image of its own people but building and growing the infrastructure of a
new neighborhood or revitalizing a dying town creates jobs for the people that
go there. These jobs would be filled by people who can actually afford to live
where they work and potentially profit from property value growth with less
chance of a bubble pop because prices would not be starting from so high

The best thing governments could do to help with this situation would be to
encourage some of the institutions and jobs relevant to new generations to
move out of overpriced, overcrowded centers. They could foster jobs creation
in centers with more low cost space and less chance of spacial overload. They
could maybe move some public jobs there to help jump start the migration. This
would also put some downward pressure on the prices in overcrowded places
until we reach some kind of equilibrium.

I say stop trying to cram everyone in the same volume. Let the older rich
generation keep the expensive quarters they've spent their life building and
allow new generations to create our own communities, in our own space, from
choices guided guided our own tastes.

Any solution that doesn't help spread jobs out to cheaper less overcrowded
regions are going to hit the volumetric limits of the laws of physics
eventually.

------
baron816
I have long had a vision for building a new city-state in a relatively
unpopulated part of the world and just allowing millions of immigrants to move
there (the tough part would obviously be getting the government that owns that
territory to go along with it).

Hopefully in 15-20 years, when energy (from solar?) is abundant and cheap,
making stuff like water desalination and vertical farming cheap, a place like
Western Australia would be inhabitable. That way, you could open the
floodgates for ten or hundreds of millions of immigrants to escape oppressive
and corrupt regimes and start anew within a liberal democracy. All that cheap
labor would make it easy to build out extensive subway lines and high rises.

~~~
rtkwe
The biggest problem is making the place sustainable AFTER it's constructed and
preventing the sheer emptiness that's plagued China's planned and constructed
cities.

------
legel
The most profound thing I know about cities + public policy:

Google hosted a talk in 2014 by MIT Professor Sandy Pentland called "Social
Physics: How Good Ideas Spread". His research concludes that our connectivity
- free and fast flow of data on networks, people on roads, goods and services,
etc. - is our greatest economic and social virtue. His models show - "like a
law" \- that the more connected we are, the wealthier we are as a society.

Check it out: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMBl0ttu-
Ow](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMBl0ttu-Ow)

And good luck to everyone behind this.

------
fudged71
Every time I travel to silicon valley I'm amazed how difficult it can be to
find electricity. It may seem like a small thing, but I think accessible
electrical outlets should be as important as public water fountains.
Similarly, water fountains and bathrooms should be accessible!

I'm really fascinated by the way that Dubai is designed in terms of industry-
specific districts, it gives you scalability but also network effects and
serendipity. They also have overground driverless trains. Masdar city nearby
has an underground driverless car system and sustainable architecture, a very
attractive model.

------
bagels
This has been tried before.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_City,_California](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_City,_California)

~~~
soVeryTired
Also here:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden_city_movement](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden_city_movement)

~~~
handelaar
(Anyone who's seen The World's End with Simon Pegg et al has seen what the UK
'Garden Cities' look like -- the big rectangular drag with all the pubs on it
is Welwyn Garden City's town centre)

------
narrator
I think the main thing that a city needs to be special is to have strong
opinions on city related things, like the design of public spaces and what the
cultural identity of the place is. Otherwise, things end up as a generic strip
mall sprawl. When a city takes an interest in art and design and a community
focuses on expressing the cultural identity of its inhabitants, it can gain an
identity and become more than just a collection of people who just happen to
live there for economic reasons.

------
brianbreslin
How much money is YC committing to this project?

~~~
sama
The research phase won't be that expensive.

If we built one it would require $tens of billions of capital, but we have
some interesting ideas about how you might finance it.

~~~
brianbreslin
Sam, I meant how much is YC funding on the research side? Shoot me an email, I
know some people in Miami working on some related topics, happy to connect
you.

------
inglondon
These are some of the things that come to mind:

\- Prioritise streets for walking / light autonomous electric vehicle use

\- Build underground streets or lanes that are designed for an autonomous
delivery network. Getting rid of trucks and other large vehicles from the
ground level road network will greatly easy congestion

\- Zone for indoor / vertical farms for delivery to local stores

\- Mix residential and commercial zones to allow for short commute times for
residents

\- Metro to speed up longer trips within the city

Utopian, yes. Impossible, no. [Edited for formatting]

------
dba7dba
Few years ago I visited someone in a suburb of Seoul. He lived in a new,
massive apartment complex with dozens of 25-story high rise buildings. What
really struck me was the parking situation.

The entire complex does not allow any cars on the surface within the complex.
All cars are kept in underground parking lot. This allow more efficient use of
land, keeps noise away from residents and real useable green space for
residents.

I did not feel like I was in stuck in a concrete jungle at all.

------
Houshalter
I've been thinking about the transportation issue. Self driving cars may or
may not be widely available by the time they are finished. But they could
bypass it all just by building sensors into the roads, or just tracks.

You could then have a system of self driving busses that people could order
with a smartphone, and then find the most efficient route to get everyone
where they want to go. And then you have minimally congested streets that are
very pedestrian friendly.

In fact you don't need self driving vehicles to accomplish this even. A human
pilot following instructions from a computer that calculates the optimal
route. The point is you can get public transportation without the downside of
fixed routes.

Anyway, along other recommendations people have given, look at this site. I've
always been fascinated with it:
[http://www.newworldeconomics.com/](http://www.newworldeconomics.com/)
Especially this article on Toledo, Ohio vs Toledo, Spain:
[http://www.newworldeconomics.com/archives/2010/022110.html](http://www.newworldeconomics.com/archives/2010/022110.html)

------
DorintheFlora
The world would be better served if you studied how to tweak existing cities
to make them more pedestrian-friendly and people focused. They are too car
focused.

You should start by reading "How buildings learn." Old buildings that work
extremely well typically did not start off as superior. They typically gained
value over time as residents added improvements that worked well because they
lived there and understood the problem space.

------
Practicality
Well, if we're going pie-in-the-sky, my perfect city: 1\. Scales traffic by
distance from downtown, IE: a. Autobahn type speeds outside of city limits
(90+mph) b. Expressway speeds connecting major sections of the city with
dedicated public transport (45-80mph) c. Bicycle/small car speeds connecting
(15-30mph) local districts d. Walking to specific destinations within an area
2\. Automated solutions for each speed (examples) a. Dedicated city to city
rail. Hyperloop. b. Express vehicles stopping at major sections running on a
loop. Subway, Monorail, Taxi Service. c. Small, single-person vehicles. d.
Walking or people-mover type vehicles

All moving of people/products would be a matter of scaling up and down within
your range. Each range would _only_ allow that class of transport (so, no
cars/taxis in a walking area, no walking in an expressway area)

I could probably spend days listing the problems this would solve, but some
examples:

1\. Practically eliminate pedestrain->traffic interactions that lead to
accidents and annoyances 2\. Eliminate parking problems 3\. Improve general
health (walking in local areas) and much less (if any) road-rage type issues
4\. Improve product delivery times (assuming we could get distribution
networks to work together) 5\. Improve the appearance of the city (no roads
in/by your parks) 6\. Improve the appearance of homes (only sidewalks go to
homes!) 7\. Improve the mobility/freedom of individuals (no need to buy a
car/get a license, simply find the right public transport) 8\. Instant tourist
attraction as everyone will want to come see/experience this new type of
living

Again, I could go on. It seems to me that designing transportation is the
primary issue, branching out into all others.

~~~
rtpg
Sounds like banning cars in the city center would get most of what you want

------
sandworm101
Every time I see someone planning for a greater/better city they always forgot
to include room for poor, or at least the not-wealthy people. There is never
enough room, resulting in the majority of the population having to live
outside the planing bubble and commute in (brasilia). Housing is like chopping
firewood in winter: Make however much you think you need, then do that
again... twice.

------
gorkemyurt
Location suggestions anyone?

my 3 priorities would be;

\- close to Silicon Valley and California High Speed Rail

\- no one should really be living there (no status quo)

\- has to be close to a body of water (better climate)

I think I found the perfect location! Link to Google Maps:
[http://tinyurl.com/gnzquv3](http://tinyurl.com/gnzquv3)

The exact point where the couple is drinking wine in the picture can be the
Dolares park of the new city :)

~~~
elihu
Your spot looks really good, but according to Google it's a "Wildlife area",
so politically it's not likely to be easy to get approval to turn into a city.

For me, proximity to Silicon Valley is not a priority. My suggestion is to use
land in NW Oregon in the coast range. Most of it is very rugged, but there's
some sort-of-flat land in the general vicinity of Saddle Mountain that's
currently used to grow lumber. It's close to the beach but far enough not to
be in the tsunami zone, and close to highway 26. Water is unlikely to be an
issue, and it's close enough to Portland that it's not totally isolated, yet
far enough away not be be a suburb.

I think one of the downsides of trying to establish a tech-hub city in the
middle of nowhere is that tech hubs tend to have a symbiotic relationship with
universities, and the latter are hard to create artificially.

~~~
gorkemyurt
Another good option! I've always wondered why NW Pacific US coast is very
underutilized. How is the climate like there? Pretty much the same as
Portland?

I agree with you that there needs to be a University to create a tech hub, but
I think that's the easiest to take care of if YC and big tech companies are
behind this plan.. You can easily convince big name universities to start
satellite campuses or even better you can start your own! UCSF Medical Center
at Mission Bay is a perfect example that you can build a world class research
center if you pump enough money to it.

~~~
elihu
Weather is similar to Portland, but as you get closer to the coast you get
less temperature extremes. The coastal mountains do get snow in the winter,
though, due to elevation. There's probably more rain.

I think in general people don't build there because it's harder/more expensive
to build on hilly terrain, there aren't many jobs in the area, roads are
relatively sparse, and though the landscape is beautiful in general, the way
it's logged means there's little species diversity and the land always looks
like it has a bad haircut.

I'm sure there are hundreds of other plausible sites we could find by spending
a little time with Google Maps. Most of them will have something wrong with
them, otherwise cities would have been built there already. However, some of
the problems may be features in the right context. For instance, hilly terrain
might deter real-estate developers from trying to build 100-houses-at-a-time
developments and encourage the kind of people who are willing to make the
effort to use the geography to their advantage.

------
famerr
From: [http://timurtatarshaov.me/it-city.html](http://timurtatarshaov.me/it-
city.html) Some period of my life I’ve been traveling many times between two
cities in Russia and was entertaining myself guessing what city my next seat
train travelers are from. And 9 out of 10 I was right.

Explanation is simple if in one city, let’s say fountains are on the every
corner and in another they are not, you would be able to spot the difference
between those two persons from the different cities even though you don’t know
the exact reason(fountains, rocks, rivers, etc.). So every city does have an
energy.

Another thing about the nature is a rivers. Water passing through has a huge
impact on the people living nearby. Water takes and refreshes the energy. I’ve
been living for some time in the city with two small rivers and could spot the
difference compared to the city with the wider river. Water refreshes the
people taking the entry and in ‘small rivers’ city people were more mean
keeping negatives for longer.

Recently I had a conversation with one girl working in the european
conferences organization company and she named several cities where events are
more common. The reason for that was transportation hub, including air
transport connection mostly and roads as well.

So contemporary cities even though they are not tied to goods transportation
along the river are connected to the air lines hubs a lot.

So I would state 3 things: nature, transport, history.

There is one good example of the city made by the power of will of one man,
city is St. Petersburg, it is a really good example for research. Such thing
as a soil was imported to make it possible.

I’m not saying it’s not possible, but saying you should mind milling of things
and the only possible way to have it is to have perfect internal sense.

------
jlynn
Carfree Cities is a book (and website) that I've really enjoyed and explores
the concept of how to design car free cities
[http://carfree.com](http://carfree.com).

It approaches the problem from several levels. From how you lay out a city to
accommodate mass transit, to street layouts that make living more enjoyable.

------
Turing_Machine
Christopher Alexander's _A City is Not a Tree_ is worth reading, for anyone
who hasn't.

[https://isites.harvard.edu/fs/docs/icb.topic1050153.files/A%...](https://isites.harvard.edu/fs/docs/icb.topic1050153.files/A%20City%20is%20not%20a%20Tree.pdf)

------
nekopa
Three words:

Christoper Woflgang Alexander.

~~~
carapace
Yes, thank you! I came to post exactly this. ;-)

"Pattern Language" anyone?

-and-

"Wherever you are in the world, if you are intent on planning and building a
thriving neighborhood, this website is for you." ~
[http://www.livingneighborhoods.org/ht-0/bln-
exp.htm](http://www.livingneighborhoods.org/ht-0/bln-exp.htm)

Please PLEASE integrate this stuff into what you're doing.

------
niftich
This is low-tech, but have we considered surveying a _large_ number of people
with these two questions:

\- Why are you living in this city/metropolitan area, as opposed to some other
city?

\- Why are you living in this particular dwelling, as opposed to a different
dwelling in the same city?

I hypothesize that most people will perceive objectively positive outcomes as
a result of their choice, while objectively negative outcomes as a result of
necessity ie. factors external to their free choice. This would imply that the
most negatively affected population anywhere is also the least mobile to
relocate, for factors that are often, but not solely economical. Many of the
non-economic ideas behind "New Cities" won't help these people, albeit some of
the infrastructure and public transit proposals would enable them to better
participate in the local economy.

------
catwell
I am not sure we can make cities that are great to live in beyond a certain
size. I don't know about the US, but in Europe smaller cities (less than one
million citizen) do not have the systemic problems than larger cities have.

However, economic activity draws people and companies in, which generates more
activity. We end up with over-populated cities like Paris, and the issues that
come with them: ever-increasing housing prices, large suburbs, long commutes.

So I wonder if the main issue is really cities, or how to find a way to go
from large monolithic cities to several reasonably-sized cities that
cooperate. The technologies involved being transportation, remote work tools,
etc.

Also, when I think about cities I like in Europe, an interesting point is that
they are often built on the seashore (Lisbon, Copenhagen, Stockholm, Nice...).

------
brett40324
This research is a waste of resources unless most basic needs of citizens
becomes free as in freedom and price. For that to happen, global retail
franchises, as well as the major players in countless other service industries
are going to have to be rejected by our newly realized cities. They should be
rejected unless they are willing to donate extremely large proceeds and
services to the city. If they comply, they still arent allowed to come to our
city, but we as citizens will purchase from them online. We will purchase the
things we want from them and have them delivered. We wont have to purchase
basic needs. They will be provided to us by the corporations who want us as
customers. One of endless examples: Im definitely ordering my mega awesome
television from walmart, best buy, costco, etc. because they pay for our
electricity and daycare.

This is what they should provide us in order to do business with our city:

Energy, water, trash, recycling, food centers, construction materials, police,
fire, EDUCATION, housing, healthcare, EDUCATION, farm and agriculture
equipment, construction equipment, manufacturing equipment, internet and basic
mobile phone service, and housing for newer citizens who dont yet own their
residence. Note: everyone should own their place, tax free without the
lifelong cruft of mortgage and property value flux. Im serious. If you want us
to buy from you, you buy from us, or you give to us. The people will own and
run such a new city. Not the corporations that are ruining human values,
health, and economies for cities all over this earth. The people will have to
have the best hand, and the buy-in to our game is extremely high.

In addition to this concept, we wouldnt have a mayor, chief of police, or
other forms of a single person running any one show. Even schools shouldnt
have a single Principal, but more like 3 to 5 awesome 'lead educators'.

Totally aside, how do you keep out the drug cartels? How do you instill an
attitude of giving a shit about your neighbor? How do you create resources
that eliminate the need for acts of crime and violence for less privelaged to
'make it'?

~~~
ativzzz
> This research is a waste of resources unless...

Your vision of anti corporatism will be hard to realize in today's developed
world, but this is the exact kind of use of resources that humanity needs.
Would you rather YC reinvest their profits into making more money like most
business do? Or invest their profits into answering questions about humanity
and its potential future that are unanswered?

Also, would you really want our education to be sponsored and paid for by Coca
Cola?

If we take into account science fiction, humans could establish a colony on
another planet. This would be considered a city and the research could answer
some interesting questions. Flying out a bunch of humans in a spaceship that
takes multiple generations to reach its destination would be considered a
traveling space city. This research could answer some interesting questions.

~~~
brett40324
My so called vision is not based on notions of anti corporatism. It is a
method to actually fund such a massive undertaking of a new city, without
turning it into a huge shopping mall dystopia owned by the top 1%.

Im sure the research will confirm that its a bad idea to put walmart,
mcdonalds, and starbucks on a spaceship. The research will also confirm that
if xyz company wants a spot on this (spaceship city?) The price will be the
same as in my vision.

To conclude, it is a waste of resources if they dont realize the need for
distributed power, wealth, and health amongst the people. A huge waste. But
its not wasteful if we colonize space one day..youre kidding me.

------
treeform
Barcelona's block layout comes to mind:
[http://projectivecities.aaschool.ac.uk/portfolio/yuwei-
wang-...](http://projectivecities.aaschool.ac.uk/portfolio/yuwei-wang-
barcelona-block-city/)

------
pattle
This sounds like a interesting project. I've often thought that cities and
towns have struggled to keep pace with lifestyle changes over the years but
that mainly because they are inherently hard things to change. So designing a
city that will work well both for the present and hundreds of years into the
future is a problem that needs solving.

One of the key things you want to achieve is to keep house prices low but this
seems like something which will be very hard to achieve. For example if the
first of these "new cities" does meet all of the objectives (e.g creating a
happy place for people to achieve their potential) won't that raise house
prices as people will want to move there?

------
dirtae
I hope that as part of this, some investigation will be done into pluralistic
representation and better voting systems (e.g., Condorcet method[1]). If there
is a minority viewpoint that can get, say 20% of the vote, but cannot get a
majority in any given district, it would be nice if that minority viewpoint
could still get some representation on city council, etc., as opposed to
"winner take all" type of elections.

(I'd like to see this at the state and national levels too, but that's a big
task, so starting at the city level seems best.)

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condorcet_method](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condorcet_method)

------
panic
_How should we measure the effectiveness of a city (what are its KPIs)?_

Why is measuring a city using "KPIs" a goal of this study? The effectiveness
of an entire city cannot be captured by a few numbers. Chasing metrics can
easily leave you blind to reality.

------
tedmiston
Public transit in Portland is incredible. I hope that's included in part of
the study.

------
naveen99
If you can get a few hundred people to move with you, there are a bunch of
towns with very, very small populations. Can see a list here:
[http://www.city-data.com/smallTowns.html](http://www.city-
data.com/smallTowns.html)

not sure how easy it is for outsiders to buy any land in these tiny population
cities.

I am not sure why they don't list towns with fewer than 200 people. Anybody
know where to get that data ?

There are even some small counties:
[http://www.davickservices.com/america's_100_lonliest_countie...](http://www.davickservices.com/america's_100_lonliest_counties.htm)

------
baron816
Holy crap, I'm so glad YC is thinking about this topic. I have often tried to
start a thread here on this topic. I'd love to be part of this in any way
possible. _Triumph of the City_ by Edward Glaeser should definitely be at the
top of the reading list for all those involved.

Anyway, the last major city to be founded in North America was Las Vegas in
1911. I think it's about time we think about starting a new one.

College campuses are pretty good prototypes of what a modern city should look
like, in my opinion. You should have lots of public space and minimal private
transportation. The only difference would be much more density and vertical
construction.

------
btbuildem
Dear YC, all the conceptual work has already been done:
[https://www.google.ca/search?q=christopher+alexander+books](https://www.google.ca/search?q=christopher+alexander+books)

------
kylec
What about rethinking to what extent large cities are and will still be
necessary? Thanks to the internet, lots of jobs that required going into an
office every day can now be done remotely. As collaboration tools get better,
I'm hoping that companies will become more receptive to allowing this.

The company I work at in SV does not allow remote work, but I've heard from a
few of my teammates that if it did, they would seriously consider moving away
from the area to someplace with a much lower cost of living. I would too.

~~~
rm_-rf_slash
When cars and planes drive themselves and 3D printers are as good as Star Trek
replicators, then maybe cities will be unnecessary. Until then, you will
always need to live near the things you want - including friends.

~~~
kylec
I don't really see what self-driving cars and plans and 3D printers have to do
with it. You can have friends and be near everything you need in a small town
of 20,000 people. They have grocery stores and hospitals and pretty much
anything else you'd need. Amazon will still deliver in 2 days with Prime
shipping.

What I'd like to avoid are the large financial costs associated with living in
a large city. I'd also like to avoid other issues caused by large population
density, like the fact that traffic is always backed up getting to the ocean
on the weekends here. Also, people like me leaving cities would mean that
there would be less demand for housing, less traffic, etc for the people that
want to stay. Everyone wins.

~~~
rm_-rf_slash
If that's what you want and you don't mind shit weather, move to Ithaca, NY. I
saw what the Valley had to offer when I worked at Apple and came away with the
same grumblings you mention.

Upstate New York in general is a great place for the kind of living you
describe. For not much money you could buy - or even better build - a home in
the middle of nowhere with a 30 minute drive into town with very light traffic
most times of the day. Like you say, everything you need is relatively close,
and Amazon Prime still delivers in 2 days.

You just have to put up with the weather.

~~~
kylec
The weather wouldn't bother me, but I wouldn't be able to move out of SV
without giving up my current job and salary. That's the part I'd like to
change - I want to separate the decision of where to work from the decision of
where to live. Once I can do that, there are a lot of places that I would be
interested in moving to.

------
yyyuuu
A large part of today's population already resides in big cities around the
world. Would it be more plausible to research on how we can improve the
situation in the current cities, instead of starting from scratch.

It's like Software, where you come up with a large code base that is ridden
with problems, but somehow works most of the times. You can either dive into
that and improve it or you start writing your own system from scratch.

I am sure YC would have thought about this. Just want to know why they choose
starting from scratch.

~~~
rtkwe
To change an existing city you have a lot of baggage in the form of existing
structures and landowners who you have to either convince that the change is
beneficial to them or force the changes and fight the inevitable legal
battles. That's just assuming that your plan can be implemented with the
existing structures, if not it's going to require purchasing the existing
structures and rebuilding/tearing them down.

That's not to stay starting over is easy. Trying to create a city out of whole
cloth with sufficient jobs and infrastructure to attract and retain people
isn't an easy problem in the slightest. It does avoid the NIMBY fight of
trying to change an existing city though.

------
davidiach
One of the things that I'd love to see you studying would be how to build
cities that can scale to large numbers of people without causing some of the
problems that come with growth. NY had the Grid system which allowed it to
grow to its current size.

But how can we build a city that could grow to 100 million people? Can we
build such a city while avoiding congestion, a city where you can travel fast
and easy from one end of the city to another? How dense should such a city be?
How can you make it livable? And so on.

------
Kinnard
Brings Paul Graham's fantastic essay strongly to mind:
[http://paulgraham.com/cities.html](http://paulgraham.com/cities.html)

------
probably_wrong
I would take two main points from Berlin as a case study:

* Low car ownership: I know exactly one person who owns a car. And everyone I know (including this person) uses the train/subway/bus system. If you really need a car for a couple days, it is cheap to rent one.

* Rent control: while not perfect, the fight to keep berliners in the city center is an interesting example of which policies are put in use to fight rising rent and gentrification.

(Short answer due to browser crash. Firefox developers, your android browser
sucks)

------
dahart
I'd like to live in a city where people assume their neighbors are smart,
where it is assumed that everyone has something legitimate and constructive to
add, where people give each other the benefit of the doubt, where people are
generous with their interpretation of what they say to each other, and where
people always try understand each other rather than try to prove each other
wrong.

------
tmaly
Something else I have thought about on this subject. Look at some of these
post apocalyptic movies where you have scattered people living in these former
cities of glory.

Which cities do the best? Those will access to natural resources and access to
water both fresh and salt. We are always going to need fresh water to drink,
and boats have been the best low tech mode of travel for thousands of years.

------
HillaryBriss
People who give startup founders advice sometimes say things like "Don't limit
yourself. Think big. Try to solve a really hard problem that no one has
tackled before." That advice is relevant here.

Don't think about how to create new cities. That problem has been solved many
times already.

Instead, think about how to create new planets. If you do a good job, the
cities will take care of themselves.

------
cardigan
Largely automated delivery infrastructure - pipes between places, or entry
hatches in roofs to inside offices/homes (drone delivery) and hatches within
buildings to some storage area within the building are required the way other
infrastructure is required, so things can move between people within the city
very quickly. Maybe this is also used for garbage management city wide.

------
11thEarlOfMar
I see two endeavors that may be completely discrete:

1\. Building from-scratch cities that are optimized for quality of life.

2\. Evolving current cities into more nearly optimal.

Which direction will this effort go? Is there a risk of from- scratch cities
being built so fast that and being so desirable that they cause historic
cities to empty out?

And... what if the optimal solution is not cities at all, but, say, small
towns?

------
jakozaur
It is surprise to me, that though a lot of technologies seem to make location
less important (internet, video conferences, online stores, better
transportation), ppl ten to cluster around few hub cities.

Importance of network effect is increasing faster than advantage of tech
allowing distributed work. I wonder if this trend will be permanent or will
shift at some point.

~~~
humanrebar
> Importance of network effect is increasing faster than advantage of tech
> allowing distributed work.

Or wealth is consolidating, and the network effects are about money and
wealth, not about communication and cooperation per se.

------
threecleartones
I'd have loved to see Paolo Soleri's "Arcology" idea take off better than it
has - Arcosanti is a cool place to visit, but you wouldn't want to live there
:-)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arcology](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arcology)

------
caublestone
We asked this question as a case study in interviews. It's interesting to see
what people believe is most important to citizens and how they optimize around
it. We found it takes a quality full stack systems engineer who can
communicate people's needs and a rational large scale solution in 30 minutes.

------
gwbas1c
Optimize for pedestrian traffic or mass transit for most daily activities; but
remember this:

People love cars!

So make sure that something like a zipcar is present when someone feels like
taking a drive to the mountains on the weekend. Or, make sure that rental vans
are available when someone needs to move something too big to carry on the
bus.

------
sytse
This is so exciting! I love that YC is researching this. Personally I hope
that this research would help to design better charter cities that are open to
all
[https://www.ted.com/talks/paul_romer](https://www.ted.com/talks/paul_romer)

------
tomjacobs
That's what we're doing at HomeShare!

[https://blog.thehomeshare.com/were-on-a-mission-to-make-
citi...](https://blog.thehomeshare.com/were-on-a-mission-to-make-cities-
livable-again-by-providing-attractive-housing-for-
everyone-4254a994b8b9#.v9bv3mnxg)

------
cangencer
I can recommended Danish architect Jan Gehl's book - Cities for People
([https://www.amazon.com/Cities-People-Jan-
Gehl/dp/159726573X](https://www.amazon.com/Cities-People-Jan-
Gehl/dp/159726573X)) for inspiration.

------
ghobs91
I've extensively researched the concepts of hub and spoke models for cities
and town centers for suburbs.

I think a very effective way to design cities is to have the following:

1\. A densely developed urban core that sets quotas on what % of apartments
must fall within whatever's considered middle class pricing, as well as a
quota for a minimum % of apartments that must be for purchase rather than
rent. The former prevents cities from being turned into ghost town banks for
the wealthy to park their money, and the latter gives citizens an opportunity
to build equity if they desire/have the means to.

Also, there should only he height restrictions on buildings if there's a
structural reason for it, not because "it'll ruin the character of the area"
or "my views of Central Park will be blocked".

2\. Suburbs should be a healthy middle ground between densely developed and
suburban sprawl. Living in houses the size of a box isn't appealing, but
neither are mcmansions that are 15-20 minutes to the nearest retail center.
The concept of strip malls and office parks should be completely scrapped in
favor of walkable town centers with multi level parking garages on the
perimeters. These town centers should be mixed use, so that people have plenty
of options to work, shop, entertain themselves, dine, etc within a reasonable
distance from their homes. The town center layout promotes a sense of
community and socializing. Suburban towns should have a size limit, and each
town should have a light rail station that runs alongside the main
road/highway so citizens can easily commute between towns and to the city
center without traffic congestion.

When a town becomes fully developed, rather than progressively building
smaller and smaller houses to increase density, a new town should be built at
the adjacent free land with its own town center. This results in the hub and
spoke model of suburb towns that are mini cities surrounding the main urban
core, rather than sprawled bedroom communities that have no economy of their
own.

3\. Between each city should be a low cost and high speed transit option like
a maglev or Hyperloop, so that citizens have the option to live in neighboring
cities and commute to work in a reasonable amount of time.

4\. Zoning should be designed to quickly and easily adapt to growing cities,
so that what is zoned as suburban can change to urban as a city grows, and the
perimeter of suburbs would grow to account for that. This would occur to a
certain limit, and when a city reaches a max size where sprawl is a problem, a
new planned city must be built in an optimal place in the state to start the
cycle all over again.

In addition to underground subway systems for urban cores and light rail for
suburbs, there should be uber style shared car/bus services to fill in the
gaps.

As for energy, there should be a heavy emphasis on wind, solar, and nuclear.

The role of regulations should be quality of life protection, not special
interests. That means a reasonable minimum square footage for apartments and
houses depending on the number of bedrooms, but not a limit on tower heights.

------
tehabe
> What should a city optimize for?

People. People will have to live and work their, so people should be the
focus.

------
prawn
I think we could see YC or a branch of YC start some sort of enclave with
living and working opportunities for member businesses and eventually
supporting businesses. Could well see a town spring up around it, depending on
how it was done.

------
ForHackernews
Does anyone else think Y Combinator projects have been getting rather
grandiose of late?

------
naveen99
Hacker city ? Put me down for a summer home.

could you have a city that is a mix of private / public and be a public
company listed on a stock exchange.

Would be interesting if one could buy stock in the nyc or San Francisco or
even a Singapore of the future.

~~~
naveen99
There is disney's reedy creek district in Florida. [http://articles.sun-
sentinel.com/1987-02-23/business/8701120...](http://articles.sun-
sentinel.com/1987-02-23/business/8701120154_1_reedy-creek-disney-property-
disney-spokesman)

------
nathan_f77
Sign me up! (Not the research, but I'll probably want to live in one of these
new cities.) I think this research could solve some real problems, and it
might even be a good way to experiment with socialism, or basic income.

------
artur_makly
make sure it's 'human-scale' ala
[http://www.andrewalexanderprice.com/blog20130330.php](http://www.andrewalexanderprice.com/blog20130330.php)

------
ilaksh
See [http://tinyvillages.org](http://tinyvillages.org).

Also, new cities' rules should be automated and software driven. See iot,
decentralization technologies, etc.

------
powera
This is literally Burning Man.

Burning Man creates a 70000 person city in the middle of the desert from
scratch every year. It's exactly what you want to prototype any number of
urban design theories.

~~~
Tossrock
It's interesting to note that Burning Man started out as a much more
freewheeling, libertarian kind of place (shooting guns, driving around
wherever you wanted, etc), and that as it grew, it encountered the natural
outcomes that require restriction of individual rights for the common good.
For example, after a couple in a tent were run over by a car driving around at
night, they had to remove the general right to drive around freely. Now you
have to go through an extensive process to be licensed, strictly follow the 5
MPH rules, etc.

------
wangchow
Instead of paying taxes people should be forced to do mandatory community
service. That will help close the wealth-gap and force wealthy people to
intermix with the working class.

~~~
googletazer
Sounds a lot like sending engineers to potato fields to collect potatoes and
get to know the country side. I don't know a single instance of where
compulsory "mixing" of wealthy and less wealthy yielded a decrease in the
wealth gap.

~~~
Turing_Machine
Yep. Both Mao and Pol Pot thought sending the intellectual class out to do
forced manual labor was a wonderful idea.

It didn't end well.

------
gjkood
Speaking of new cities;

A shoutout to a new video series from WIRED on Shenzhen.

Episode 1 :
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hp6F_ApUq-c](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hp6F_ApUq-c)

Episode 2 :
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C3r4kdHxdcE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C3r4kdHxdcE)

Episode 3 :
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e4wbFdePb-k](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e4wbFdePb-k)

I came upon these videos through Andrew "Bunnie" Huang's blog.
[http://www.bunniestudios.com](http://www.bunniestudios.com)

Enjoy.

------
cyphunk
How about this one: should we have cars at all? Is the tech-topia of self
driving cars going to actually cut down the parking lot landscape of US cities
or increase it?

------
ph0rque
The trend has been people moving to cities. However, I wonder if that will be
reversing any time soon, with people moving out of (large) cities and into
smaller towns?

~~~
ghaff
The supposed "millennials are moving to cities" trend isn't the universal
trend it's often made out to be. The actual trend seems to be more along the
lines of college-educated 25-34 year-olds are moving to a small number of
mostly coastal urban locations.

[http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-millennials-are-
less...](http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-millennials-are-less-urban-
than-you-think/)

------
theideasmith
Parag Khanna: global connectivity and urban meccas:
[http://www.paragkhanna.com/](http://www.paragkhanna.com/)

------
spectrum1234
Reminds me of this:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hy4QjmKzF1c](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hy4QjmKzF1c)

------
nxzero
Cities of the future will be built for machines, not people.

------
anjneymidha
One of the only places in my recent experience that has managed to capture the
opportunity of SF with the quality of life of Singapore, is Shenzhen.

------
adamnemecek
To some extent I feel that if you go all in on education (and I don't mean
schools by that) and access to information, the rest will follow.

------
apatters
Why the cheap shot at libertarianism at the end? As if fewer regulations and
more personal freedoms are only interesting to "crazy techies?" This throwaway
line really damaged the credibility of the post for me because it got me
wondering what kind of creepy social engineering project this person may be
aspiring towards.

Why did she think that the main criticism she had to get ahead of was that
they would make a city where people were too free, as opposed to making an
Orwellian surveillance state, or a company town or something?

------
jmboling
pour all of your money into Mississippi. make it work there. it needs it - and
if you make it work then it will work for real.

------
skybrian
Why start with cities? How about towns that have growth potential? It seems
like more the startup way to do it.

------
j2kun
Can this city please use version control for its laws? I want to be able to
git blame and git diff my laws.

------
dkural
The biggest failure point of economic productivity in the second half of 21st
century will be the production of new people - i.e. babies. Cities are the
biggest contributors to this, where people have extremely low fertility rates.
Many young families move out of the city, because they find it to be
inhospitable (too expensive to have all the resources one needs).

The United States is less aware of this issue due to high rates of migration,
and higher birthrates in certain subpopulations.

The nuclear family is a brand new social experiment of the 20th century, and
one of the primary causes in the decline of the production of people. Without
traditional support networks, women have to choose between 24/7 baby-care and
not having children. Daycare is extremely expensive, and in fact not the ideal
environment for a 3-month-old. The traditional notions of a trust-based larger
family unit (siblings, grandparents, aunts) and community-unit are non-
existent in the modern urban environment.

Even without the issue of children, most people struggle for connection and
meaning in their lives more-so than before. They enjoy fewer intimate
relationships, and spend less time with people they love or trust.

So if you are designing a new city, design it around fostering genuine
communities, and is inclusive to all ages and educational backgrounds. My
ideal city would be composed of mini-villages, each mini-village centered
around communities of a few dozen families, sharing a courtyard "public" to
the community+associates.

It would be an environment where I wouldn't have a bitcoin-based smart
contract to 'enforce' something that my neighbor would do anyways.

In general, the city would aim to minimize total commute / on-the-road time
for as many people as possible.

It would be a city where work is co-located with child-care for young mothers,
who can take 30 minute breaks, walk-over, and breast-feed. This means
completely different things for zoning. This would mean work would also not
happen in a context completely isolated from rest of life: Perhaps the "work
day" would last 10 hours, but with 3 hours of interruption for family, food-
preparation, etc. This doesn't mean people would "work at home", or the
"workplace would be full of kids", there are innovative ways to combine the
two -- which was the natural state of things only a century ago.

Perhaps each person would make less money, but we'd need to spend less as
well, giving each other the things one is now forced to buy in a city. It
would be an environment where one could have 4-day workweek, perhaps taking
two afternoons off, so men would be more present in their families.

------
convoisofftopic
"What should a city optimize for?"

I think a city needs to optimize for random interactions between diverse
groups of people, which often is where that feeling of serendipity or je ne
sais quoi feeling in a city comes from. There's no magic to it, you really
just need to lay out your infrastructure to help allow for it.

In NYC we have it because of our public transit, mixed use/zoned
buildings/neighborhoods, high density, small public parks spread out around
the city, walkability, and a diversity of industries. We're losing some of
that with the creation of bland spaces in the city [1], but I don't fear that
NYC will lose itself anytime soon.

"How should we measure the effectiveness of a city"

It depends on the goal of the city. Are we attempting to make it a cultural
capital of the world, like NYC and LA are, or a business capital like NYC and
SF/SV are, or both? Or do we just care about providing a great place for
people to live and work without much care for the city's perception in the
world? Can it be just a nice second tier city like Boston or Seattle?

Personally, I'd aim for an NYC because there really is nothing like it in the
states.

The effectiveness measures would also include some vague things, like
influence of the exports of its cultural creations (art, music, fashion,
tech). International desire to live or visit the city would be another metric.
Then of course regular things like employment rates, educational standings,
health of citizens, robustness of public transit, retention of citizens,
racial/cultural/age diversity, surveyed happiness of citizens, etc.

Start with the art though. If your city doesn't produce a great diversity of
culture it'll just stay a second or third tier city.

"How should citizens guide and participate in government?"

If you're building this city from the ground up you have an opportunity to
immediately do away with the majority of the bureaucracy that holds most
governments back. That'd encourage citizens to actually want to work with or
for the government.

I'd avoid having armies of contractors and subcontractors. Create city
organizations and workplaces that talented people want to work at, not
stifling bureaucracies. Don't pay a consulting firm $600 million to build a
payroll system that could be built by a small internal team of talented
engineers, designers, and product managers. You probably will still need to
pay an outside firm to, say, bore sewers and subway tunnels, but make sure the
organization designing and overseeing it is staffed by talented people. That'd
mean paying wages that match industry.

[1] [https://aeon.co/essays/why-boring-streets-make-
pedestrians-s...](https://aeon.co/essays/why-boring-streets-make-pedestrians-
stressed-and-unhappy)

------
jacobn
Current planning has a "star-topology": urban office core with rings of
gradually less dense, gradually more residential development. This creates a
natural transportation bottleneck at the center, and creates areas that are
"alive" during only one part of the day, which makes it hard for local
merchants to thrive (standard Jane Jacobs).

We can define a "balanced area" as having roughly balanced proportions of
residential, office, retail, schools, hospitals, (light) industry, etc. The
effect of an area being balanced is that the net flow of people across the
areas boundary at any given time of day should be roughly zero - if you live
there but work elsewhere, then you need to commute out, but someone else needs
to commute in to fill the job in the area that you're not occupying. Same for
other uses. "Area" could be anything from neighborhood, to part of city, to
city, to region, to state - the analysis is roughly the same regardless of
geographical zoom level.

Hypothesis: you can create a scalable city by constructing it around balanced
areas.

Scalable = can expand indefinitely-ish. While not precisely true, it's
probably a lot _more_ true than for the current star topology.

So what about public transit? The reason we have the star is after all (in
part) to make it possible to use public transit. Answer: increase density and
switch from star to grid.

The star is hopelessly plagued by having everyone going in the same direction
at the same time. This means that we're using roughly half (60%?) of our
transportation capacity at any given time.

If we build our cities as dense, balanced cells (= 0.25-0.5-1 mile by 0.25-5-1
mile chunks, depending on density and other design criteria), with grid-
oriented mass transit (buses, light rail, subways, whichever, all of the
above), then we will naturally double our transit capacity (people going in
both directions at all times), and shorten the distance people need to travel
to get where they're going. The relevant metric isn't so much "miles per hour"
as [density of people]*[linear distance per unit time].

Depending on the level of density you're willing to go to, different tiers of
public transit will unlock: at lower densities, you can only really
rationalize buses. Medium density = light rail, high density = subway.

Some additional points:

\- Zero surface parking, but plenty of drop off / pick up spots.

\- Organize the balanced cells around center squares, which are pedestrian
only. Squares are focused around restaurants / retail / commerce; they're not
parks, though they would likely have some trees. Make it the primary public
space. Regulate building heights such that there's limited shading of the
square.

\- Smaller, pedestrian-friendly blocks around the center squares: stop signs
for cars, no thoroughfares to other cells.

\- Variable height zoning: stop making neighborhoods uniform. Allow vastly
different heights within short distances of each other. This will create both
views and natural variation in land and housing value = naturally more
inclusive, and much more interesting.

\- Turn the towers: don't build two 700' towers across the street from each
other. Instead, space them out more, and rotate them so the tower doesn't face
the street, to create longer corridors of views from the tower windows, and an
"airiness" in the city.

\- Between cells: focus more on surface traffic, limit pedestrian use. Yes,
this will create "islands between traffic corridors". That's ok - zone light
industry, gas/recharge stations, parking structures and office towers on these
corridors and zero residential.

\- If you're willing to up-zone and build as of right, you can start lower
density (= buses), then as the city grows, you can up-zone and graduate to
light rail, and then if you go truly dense, retrofit a subway. If it's in the
city charter from the start you might be able to fight off the inevitable
nimbyism.

\- A pragmatic sister project to the study of cities would be the study of how
to make public transit projects not cost so much. Taboo subject, and perhaps
"boring", but super-important. If it cost half as much, would we have four
times as much of it?

~~~
jacobn
Scalable = can expand, both "up" and "out", but you'll need a lot less "out"
if you're willing to go "up".

------
eru
Oh, my pet peeve is coming up. I guess I have no excuse not to apply..

------
landmark3
Starship had solved this ages ago building them on rock and rooooool

------
czzarr
Check up on what Haussmann did in Paris. He got many things right.

------
dandare
Ycombinator is the real Plus Ultra society from Tomorrowland

------
tedmiston
Is this completely independent of the Basic Income project?

------
zkhalique
What about the Venus project

------
VLM
How does one size fits all fit cultural diversity?

So the parents want schools easily reachable on safe side street sidewalks,
the recent grads want those sidewalk accessible zones to be bars and all night
dance clubs. Some people go out every night to drink (probably a bad idea) and
want the local bar. Other people want an enormous plot of parkland to drop the
country fair and other activities on the weekends only for their "going out".
Some regions have a tradition of scarcely larger than one room churches,
others have a tradition of megachurches. Others have mosques or temples, how
do you make the Buddhists, the tiny church Baptists, and the megachurch
prosperity gospel people all happy?

How about history? People who lived in high crime area will prefer a police
station to a public library. People who lived in the country will prefer a
park over a shopping area. People who recreationally shop will want shops for
the sake of shops even in a time of Amazon and UPS delivery. Or worse, they'll
demand the little shops, then not shop there.

Some cultures don't see education and learning as very important or worth
funding... just put a small dumpy school in the giant park reserved for it?
Everyone has to say they love the arts, as a rounding error nobody goes, so do
you build a concert hall for the symphony that no one listens to, or not?

How about hobbies and social clubs. Do you zone the freemasons temple and the
model railroad club like a church? Or force that stuff into the basement of
commercial areas so the sidewalks aren't rolled up and put away at 5:30pm
every night?

How do you handle social signalling vs real life? Like you need XYZ to be
socially acceptable, but real world requires ABC instead. Do you build for XYZ
to get funding but no one lives there, or build ABC and be hated but people
fight to move in? Hardly the first time in the history of humanity where what
people say and what they want diverge.

The midwest has an interesting zoning solution to loud and obnoxious industry
of which we have a lot (although more automation and fewer employees every
year) and lack of parking, and thats taking advantage of border zones and
raised highways. My retired mom lives a block from the border of a shopping
mall, sounds awful according to "I hate cars" people, but its actually
incredibly walkable, calm, quiet almost all the time, perfect for both
pedestrians and car owners.

You can even run into psychological issues. Do you ban introverts by banning
residential border fences to force people to interact even when they just want
to chill? You could zone mandatory front porch onto residential to encourage
porch culture in summer evenings. Or if the locals are the type you don't want
associating, maybe ban porches and decks if they're just going to cause
trouble and crime and noise and get arrested.

------
peterwwillis
It's frightening how completely disconnected from the real world this is.

    
    
      The world is full of people who aren’t realizing their potential in large part
      because their cities don't provide the opportunities and living conditions
      necessary for success.
    

No, the world is full of people not realizing their potential largely because
_most people just don 't._ Whether it's just that someone is not motivated to
do more than is necessary, or the real social problems that affect people all
around the world, in both cities and suburban communities.

• The guy serving you your hamburger isn't realizing his full potential
because he grew up in a lower-middle class family who didn't encourage him to
do well in school or go to college, he grew content with his boring life
hanging out with his friends and working paycheck to paycheck, and he honestly
has no good reason to try to achieve more.

• The single mother with the two kids and a heroin addiction isn't realizing
her potential because when her high-school sweetheart husband left her she had
trouble getting a job, so generations of misogyny & patriarchy convinced her
she can only turn to stripping to pay the bills, got hooked on drugs and
alcohol, and is now locked into a slow circling of the drain.

• The young black man in prison isn't realizing his potential because
generations ago the systemic racism of our country pushed his family into a
tightly impoverished community with no businesses, no access to
transportation, almost no education, no access to family planning, and rampant
drug and alcohol abuse, which the country then took advantage of by creating
for-profit prisons and mandatory minimum sentences to convert most of the
people in his community into a series of bad choices which only result in
debt, incarceration, teen pregnancy, drug addiction, and crime as a survival
tactic.

\--

    
    
      A high leverage way to improve our world is to unleash this massive potential
      by making better cities.
    

I've lived in cities most of my life. Their problems are _not_ engineering
problems, they are _social problems_. You can't "unleash potential" without
first convincing the people who live there to vote for it, work hard for the
change, and of course _pay more tax money for it_.

• Why do we have too much traffic congestion and not enough parking?

○ Because the city - and its residents and taxpayers - refuse to pay for
better public transportation.

• Why do cities not have better transportation?

○ Because politicians [and voters] fight over how to spend what little tax
revenue they collect.

• Why don't the residents pay more tax money to fix the problems in their
city?

○ Because a combination of high unemployment and low wages due to a
concentration of wealth and corporate power refusing to raise wages while
profits have skyrocketed have left citizens with very little left over money.
Food and housing comes before transportation taxes.

• Why do cities not have affordable housing?

○ Because rich white people don't want to live next to poor black people.

• Why isn't there a diverse range of people living and working in cities?

○ Because first you have to create economic and social equality for a diverse
range of people and grow an actual population thereof, rather than pockets of
socioeconomically disadvantaged minority groups.

• Why aren't cities constantly evolving?

○ Because some are able to successfully resist housing price inflation and
gentrification, while others have a stagnant economy, and others are simply
consistent in their status quo.

\--

If you need to make a better city to realize your potential (which is stupid,
since we were still realizing our potential before we had "great" cities), you
first need to solve your social and economic problems before the city can be
better. But this is a boring, depressing, non-"startupy" answer, so never mind
me.

------
dmvaldman
alternate title: mars pre-alpha

------
H0n3sty
> _What should a city optimize for?_

The health and longevity of its citizens.

> _How should we measure the effectiveness of a city (what are its KPIs)?_

Minimizing disease, mortality, poverty, and crime.

> _What values should (or should not) be embedded in a city 's culture?_

Active lifestyle, minimalism… courtesy, respect, appreciation of fellow
citizens. Volunteerism.

> _How can cities help more of their residents be happy and reach their
> potential?_

People get jealous of each other very easily. Cultures that don’t promote the
flaunting of wealth tend to be happier. The two most conspicuous examples of
excessive consumption are large homes and expensive cars. As advanced primates
we’re most comfortable in moderately forested land with ample water. Above all
this, people require a safe place to live so effective means of crime
deterrent are critical. Once the base of Maslow’s hierarchy is met, people
will actualize on their own.

> _How can we encourage a diverse range of people to live and work in the
> city?_

If you build it they will come. It’s really that simple. There’s no magic
formula, a diverse range of people is required to run a city.

> _How should citizens guide and participate in government?_

Citizens should enumerate the authorities of their leadership rather than
allowing leadership all authorities not specifically excluded.

> _How can we make sure a city is constantly evolving and always open to
> change?_

It’s psychologically easier to move away from a rental than an owned unit. I
know there is dogma about the financial security around home ownership, but
leasing a residential unit is really not all that different from renting the
money to buy a unit. So I think severely restricting or eliminating
traditional home “ownership” might keep the population ready for quick
changes.

> _How can we make and keep housing affordable? This is critical to us; the
> cost of housing affects everything else in a city._

By restricting/eliminating outright ownership and zoning out excessively large
units or charging progressively more per square foot for larger constructions
(on a per occupant basis).

> _How can we lay out the public and private spaces (and roads) to make a
> great place to live? Can we figure out better zoning laws?_

Priority should be given first to the natural spaces, followed by living
spaces, then the sidewalks, and bikeways/waterways. The automobile roads
should be relegated to the outskirts of the city in an exterior loop with
limited access to the interior for critical functions. Zoning out excessively
large homes is critical.

> _What is the right role for vehicles in a city? Should we have human-driven
> cars at all?_

Probably shouldn’t have many human-driven cars in the city aside from possibly
emergency responders. The vehicles should be utilized to serve human needs
rather than display status of the owners.

> _How can we have affordable high-speed transit to and from other cities?_

The hyperloop sounds most promising right now. Musk is a modern day Midas.

> _How can we make rules and regulations that are comprehensive while also
> being easily understandable? Can we fit all rules for the city in 100 pages
> of text?_

Arbitration agreements and waivers for all residents. Not sure about the
rules. I suspect that most cities are already subject to enough state/federal
rules to require little in the way of local ordinances. We might look for the
shortest examples on municode.com for inspiration.

> _What effects will the new city have on the surrounding community?_

People who are able to relocate are more likely to be young and depending on
the success of the city it may attract the most talented. Prosperous cities
have a way of draining the brains of surrounding communities. On positive
note, former residents tend to benefit the previous communities when they
return/visit.

------
scottrogowski
This sounds like an interesting project for YC research. Many of these
questions are very open-ended and it will be exciting to see what comes out of
it. However, one question in particular upset me as a Bay Area resident:

How can we make and keep housing affordable?

This question is frustrating not only because the problem is particularly
acute but also because it is completely self-inflicted and solvable using what
we already know.

Take a look at the 7 American cities with the highest rent: SF, NYC, Jersey
City, DC, Boston, San Jose, LA
[https://www.apartmentlist.com/rentonomics/national-rent-
data...](https://www.apartmentlist.com/rentonomics/national-rent-data/)

Then look at the 7 largest American cities that still practice rent control:
NYC, LA, San Diego, San Jose, SF, DC, Oakland, Jersey City
[http://www.landlord.com/rent_control_laws_by_state.htm](http://www.landlord.com/rent_control_laws_by_state.htm)

Why? It's not a coincidence and it is causal. Rent control: A. Disincentivizes
new construction. Simply put, over time, long-term tenants might not be paying
enough to make a keep a building profitable. B. Causes owners to take
recently-vacated, perfectly-habitable units off the market to avoid these same
long-term un-evictable tenants (30,000 units are empty in SF alone. That’s
8.3% of the housing stock! [http://blog.sfgate.com/ontheblock/2011/03/30/why-
so-many-vac...](http://blog.sfgate.com/ontheblock/2011/03/30/why-so-many-
vacant-homes-in-san-francisco/))

These both result in less housing in total. A smaller supply coupled with the
same demand will cause prices to rise as the few apartments that are available
go to the highest bidder.

In a 1992 study, 93% of surveyed economists agreed with the statement "a
ceiling on rents reduces the quantity and quality of housing available."
[http://www.factcheck.org/2009/02/when-economists-
agree/](http://www.factcheck.org/2009/02/when-economists-agree/) For
comparison, the consensus that global warming is anthropogenic among climate
scientists is 97% - just 4% higher. We rightfully ridicule our elected
officials for being skeptical of global warming. Why don’t we also ridicule
elected officials who support rent control?

If the problem is keeping housing affordable, the solution is simple. We need
to phase out rent control laws and remove regulations around the development
of new housing. For now, in the Bay, rent control is not realistically going
to be touched for a few years. For the latter, there is evidence that
Sacramento is starting to understand that we actually need to build housing to
bring down prices [http://www.latimes.com/opinion/editorials/la-ed-brown-
afford...](http://www.latimes.com/opinion/editorials/la-ed-brown-affordable-
housing-20160527-snap-story.html). If we are lucky, they might take this new
insight and apply it to existing housing for a complete solution to this man-
made problem.

A good article on the subject in general:
[http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/RentControl.html](http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/RentControl.html)

------
Finnucane
Why start from scratch? Just send 100,000 nerds and hipsters to Detroit or
Buffalo with some VC funding and see what happens.

~~~
brett40324
I agree with this approach. Whos gonna pay for 100,000 outlandish salaries? If
they all only earned 10 usd an hour....You do the math.

~~~
niels_olson
I think you're missing the point. No one dreams of paying developers $10/hr to
live in Detroit. The salaries are high legitimately. But the quality of life
per $ in SF is questionable. I have a friend who manages 500 engineers and can
afford a 3rd story walk up loft next to an elevated freeway.

~~~
Finnucane
In San Francisco, your friend likely manages a sweatshop. The engineers on the
floor are the high-tech equivalent of the immigrant women working the rows of
sewing machines in a Chinatown clothing factory. The manager is the guy who
sits in the little room on the side watching the floor to make sure no one
takes too long of a pee break. Today's high-tech sweatshops are clean and have
toys in them, but the essential economic relations are the same.

------
internaut
May I say: My intuition is that starting totally from the absolute beginning
won't work. Relatively recently (in city building terms) a black community
that tried to do that, I remember listening to 99% Invisible about it, and it
didn't work out.

[http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/soul-
city/](http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/soul-city/)

It is better to be an adjunct to an existing city near a river or a seaport.
Look at China and how they have Special Economic Zones, they are connected to
existing cities, right?

I know China builds cities from the start but with their scale they're
probably a special case and besides it's thought to be more organic the way
they do it (e.g. they don't build some infrastructure like footpaths until
they see evidence of how real people use the existing environment).

That's a special case though, nobody else apart from India has that kind of
scale.

------
jomamaxx
New?

The best cities are pretty old, and mostly in Europe.

They figured it out 100's of years ago.

'Affordability' has nothing to do with cities - it has do to with regional
economics. The Valley is a singularity.

Other cities with bubbles like Vancouver and London has to do with
unrestricted purchases by foreigners.

Otherwise it's not hard.

Lost in any West Coast discussion of 'cities' will invariably be the most
important thing: culture. Cities revolve around people, activities, and things
that are hard to measure.

The best 'urban planners' fail because they are focused on wide roads, less
traffic etc. - when in reality, cities that form naturally, around people and
their communities, with individuals who act responsibly ... are the best.

There are 1000 100K+ cities in Europe that are pretty spectacular: clean,
interesting, walkable, cultured, local, great for families, low crime,
affordable. Surely there are many in Asia as well, though with differing kinds
of economics given political instability lately.

------
mikerichards
I think its pretty telling that Y-combinator wants to become central planners.

I'd back off these political positions you guys keep on taking.

------
sauceweak
Since the parent felt the need to use an affiliate link, here's a direct link
to The Rent Is Too Damn High -
[https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0078XGJXO/](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0078XGJXO/)

An amazon affiliate link to a 2.5 star book doesn't really establish
confidence in someone's recommended reading list.

~~~
davidw
I earn the equivalent of a few beers a month from affiliate links, but hey, if
you feel that it's better to give that money to Jeff Bezos, that's your
prerogative. I'm always happy to buy a beer or two (the entire proceeds of my
ill-gotten gains!) at 10 Barrel or Crux or someplace for anyone who happens to
visit Bend.

Mostly though, since your account is new, we're ok with capitalism and making
a bit of money here on HN, as long as someone isn't an obvious spammer. I
think you can verify that I'm not via my comment history.

As to why the book has 2.5 stars:

[https://www.amazon.com/review/R32HZILGX1BRRX/ref=cm_cr_rdp_p...](https://www.amazon.com/review/R32HZILGX1BRRX/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm?ie=UTF8&ASIN=B0078XGJXO)

It's a pretty succinct and high level account of what's wrong with cities in
the US.

~~~
underwater
Affiliate links feel spammy because it makes it hard to determine whether your
recommendation is altruistic or financially motivated.

~~~
mikestew
They feel spammy when attached to spammy comments from new accounts, and the
comment/post seems to specifically target a site with decent traffic such as
HN. Standing alone, I don't automatically have a problem with an affiliate
link.

Not that davidw needs my endorsement, but the dude's got 43K in karma, and
I've seen his comments around elsewhere. I'm fine with letting someone like
that slide. As he points out himself, one can expect a little beer money from
affiliate links unless you _really_ go out of your way to spam the link.

------
kafkaesq
The biggest gap in this discussion, thus far -- the elephant in the room, as
it were: there's almost no room left on the planet for building "new" cities
of any significant scale (meaning of course not just the meticulously designed
city core; but the whole meta-city that will grow around it -- with suburbs,
transportation links, etc).

Sure, there might be a few -- a very small few -- bona-fide brown zones here
and there that are virtually depopulated and where one can more or less from
scratch. But by and large, and realistically speaking, the real question is
how to redesign and rethinking _existing_ cities. Which conceptually speaking
is a much harder question.

The other elephant in the room is the inevitability of _massive_ forced
dislocations of existing populations in these "failed" urban areas (or so they
will be declared) -- perhaps on a scale never seen before (that is, outside of
modern China or the early decades of the Soviet Union). And BTW, there's no
getting around the term "forced" here -- no matter how you try to incentivize
it, some people just aren't gonna want to uproot themselves (and destroy the
organic connections they have made with others in their "failed" or "poorly
optimized" communities) for the sake your grand vision, slide decks and TED
talks.

It's either that -- or build out in the jungle somewhere. But of course (with
the earnest suport of a certain very famous YC board member) we've been down
that route already:

    
    
      Honduras Shrugged
      http://www.economist.com/node/21541391

~~~
massysett
New cities aren't going to happen, but it's not a space issue. There's plenty
of space in the middle of Kansas.

~~~
rocky1138
New cities are happening, just not in North America.

Consider Astana (Kazakhstan), Ordos (China), Shenzhen (China).

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astana](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astana)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordos_City](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordos_City)

~~~
kafkaesq
Which is precisely my point -- you might want to look at how the regimes like
those in charge of Kazakhstan and China operate. In particular, as to how they
"leverage" their populations complying with these grand futuristic visions.

Not to mention the... ironic outcomes of some of these spectacular
initiatives:

[http://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-18646243](http://www.bbc.com/news/world-
africa-18646243)

------
woodmaniac
"Most of the founders in each startup we fund (and always the CEO) are
expected to move to the Bay Area for the duration of the three month cycle."
~from about y combinator.

Isn't the reason cities are full the same reason they require this kind of
thing?

Why not solve this first. If I can live anywhere and apply, maybe everyone
else doesn't have to live in the valley as well.

