Building a Modern City from the Ground Up

[BrooklynKnight]

The thread on overlooked inventions, and Civilization4 got me thinking.

If i'm not mistaken all of the worlds major cities, New York, LA, Washington, London, Madrid, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Paris, and countless others, have taken hundreds of years to develop their modern infrastructure.

Ideas built upon ideas, upon ideas, and more.

Say someone found a prime location for a city that hasnt already been taken. How easy would it be to build a city with a modern infrastructure from scratch? How big would they start? WHERE would they start? Would you build the homes first? Or the power grid? the water grid? roads?

In your basic fantasy world towns and villages have typically started around a single inn/tavern or building, or collection of buildings, (Silverymoon and Sharn for example), and grew from there.

In the near past, cities and towns grew from small collections of hutts and buildings, some towns died, others prospered (the gold rush is a good example of this I suppose).

For some reason I've been wondering just how a city would rise today, from the very first brick, step or handfull of dirt.

Thoughts?

 

[Umbran]

Thoughts?

I think, in general, trying to do so would be horribly wasteful. One does not really know the needs of a city until the city has already developed - Is it going to have a large tech industry? Or is it going to be a shipping hub? Is it going to be a center for the arts, or have major sports teams?

Until you can asnwer these questions, you can't plan the city intelligently. And even then - what you plan and how the free-willed people use your city are probably two different things.

In essence, this is like saying, what is it like ot build a piece of software, fomr the ground up - but you haven't decided what kind of software - is it a game or a word processor?

So, I think the very first step is defining the city's requirements.

 

[wingsandsword]

Washington DC is a planned city. Now, it was planned in the early 1790's, but that's pretty late for a major world city. The actual city to this day generally follows the original plan).

There is one large city in the world that I can think of that was recently built, Brasilia, the capitol of Brasil. It was planned and built in the late 1950's, and opened in 1960. The urban planning for it was pretty much a disaster, there were no provisions for pedestrians at all (it was assumed everybody would drive everywhere, with no sidewalks), and to give it a futuristic look, the city was intentionally built in the shape of an airplane. It was also very, very structured from the beginning, with a defined Hotel District, and a Bank District, and every aspect of a city was confined specifically to its district (another reason it's bad for pedestrians). They also seriously underestimated population requirements as well, leading to a large amount outlying settlements beyond the urban planning range of the city.

 

[jgbrowning]

Chandigarh in India is another recently planned city (1950's I believe). Albert Mayer and Le corbusier did the planning. It as well, didn't turn out quite like expected.

I think the important part of city planning is flexibility. Design the core, the reason for the city, and then be flexible on the additional developments. Have a plan, but a plan that's mutible.

joe b.