City of the Future?

[[OMENRPG]Ben]

[MENTION=177]Umbran[/MENTION] good points, and I understand and agree with everything you're saying. I don't want to derail this thread any further, but I appreciate the responses.

Just one suggestion if people wanted an explanation that was more than vague hand-wavery, but of course, still a quite fallible explanation.

 

[thedungeondelver]

If I may recommend, the book THE WORLD INSIDE by Robert Silverberg has much to offer in terms of "city of the future".

It is neither a utopia, nor a dystopia; it has several interesting aspects; some of the social mores are not for discussion here (grandma rule).

 

[WayneLigon]

Your city of the future will want to feature the following:

• An ability to manage it's own waste, including sound and heat. You should be able to walk through a shaded parkland beside a river and never know you're in a city of 18 million people.
• Efficient, quiet transportation within and to the outside.
• Amenities: easy and cheap access to art, culture, food and information.
• Minimize opportunities for crime
• Balance it's population to minimize poverty and maximize opportunity.
• It must care for those who cannot care for themselves.
• It manages sprawl, and balances what businesses open, and where.
• It provides recreational opportunities - sports, parkland, waterways, open spaces.
• It recycles materials and re-uses what earlier cities would waste. It turns the waste into new land, new buildings, food, etc.

The arcology is still a good idea: a huge number of people living and working in a massive building that occupies about 1% of the footprint of a sprawled-out city, leaving the countryside free for recreational opportunities. Put in some super-efficient bioreactors to create meat and vegetable material, and you could have a city where good nutritious food and clean water is practically free. If you're going for a superhero setting, all you need is a Reed Richards to donate some of his time and knowledge to these problems.

For my own superhero setting, I postulated that most of the population of Southern California moves to the San Francisco Bay Area due to a Nazi terror weapon that wipes out the LA basin and the Imperial Valley. San Diego is on an island and is 10% of it's real-world size (but it still has the best zoo in the nation). The entire 'move west' movement in the 50's and 60's transformed the Bay Area into a 'western New York' dominated by massive quasi-arcology buildings.

Disney rebuilt Disneyland and also lived long enough to implement his vision of urban planning. San Jose in my world is the ultimate extension of his visions and it has the highest standard of living of any city on Earth by a significant margin. It's the first city with a computer-controlled traffic grid, a rapid-transit system of individual pods at the second-story-level that can move family groups to any part of the city in under 20 minutes, no traffic lights, no congestion, little to no pollution from buildings or vehicles. Free FOIS-quality wi-fi city-wide, etc.

 

[Mark CMG]

(. . .) wide boulevards, lots of trees, and it's next ot an ocean. However, after I wrote that I realized those are economic factors: wouldn't they just have a large series of bio domes instead? Would biodomes be next to an ocean?

At a river mouth or up the river and not near the ocean or on a major lake, would be some options.

 

[Jack7]

The Venus Project


It's a nice idea but it won't work. Umbran said it best. People are interested in building and shaping the world for themselves, not living in a world others have designed for them.

Which is why I think that future cites will not only have real physical spaces, but also cyber and related spaces of immense imaginary proportions. Because then everyone can reconstruct where they live in their "own Image."

If anything I see the future city and world as far less pre-designed and far more individually altered.

More like if individuals could take molecular fabricators and build their own spaces within cities. And cyberworlds within those individually designed spaces.

 

[Mark CMG]

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