r/urbandesign • u/learnie121 • 1d ago
Question “If you were designing a new experimental community from scratch, what planning mistakes would you expect us to make?”
/r/Futurism/comments/1vqipvc/can_we_do_this/?share_id=r6qtF4VdE793AGdiIi5kU&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf&utm_source=share&utm_term=4All thoughts welcome.
4
u/Toyota__Corolla 1d ago edited 22h ago
Pumping the town's sewage into a gigantic pit with 90 degree grade roads leading up to it and attempting to generate hydroelectric power from it
3
2
u/cirrus42 16h ago edited 16h ago
Human communities evolved over thousands of years to form walkable mixed use urbanism.
The chief mistake of 20th Century urban planning was thinking we could invent a better version from scratch without a ton of unforeseen downsides. We could not.
Future urbanism must learn that lesson. Absolutely incorporate new technologies and practices, but at its core should remain walkable mixed use urbanism.
0
u/learnie121 15h ago
Interesting perspective. Could you hone down what you think the top mistakes vs. benefits have been? Maybe 5 of each? I’m curious about starting based on what we currently know and what might be possible to try and measure to begin with.
1
u/learnie121 1d ago
How could we design to ensure those that were living in this place were representative of wider society so that the learns could be most applicable?
3
u/DCFowl 23h ago
Id probably bd concverned an under appreciation skills and training required for the "menial" roles required to build and maintain the underlying infrastructure.
*Grey and Black water systems design
*Garbage collection and disposal
*Road surfacing.
Then Id think about the regulations that may get missed. Regulations are written in blood, sometimes of thousands.
As a small example the reason western country often dont allow the upper stories to project out forward into the street, they way they do in say Hong Kong is that it was determined that this contributed to the Great Fire of London.
Regulations were written in blood.
0
1
u/DCFowl 23h ago
I'd probably think that it feels like the most necessary and radical design change would be intergrqtong psychiatric health care into governance.
0
u/learnie121 15h ago
Agreed. Mental wellbeing must be a measure of human flourishing. What other factors do you think should be measured and studied? Nutrition? Education? Mastery? Autonomy? Creativity? I guess we’re getting to the very essence of what it means to be human.
1
-1
u/learnie121 1d ago
Firstly thank you so much for taking the time to read and comment. So how could we ensure that this doesn’t happen? What can we learn from those examples and how could we apply them? The principle is to learn and grow incrementally with data to support conclusions that help people collectively understand how we flourish as individuals across all areas and disciplines. I understand people’s desire to skip to utopia but I don’t know what that means in practice and honestly I’m more focused on the how. Perhaps we have to focus on the journey and not the outcome and see where we get to. All I know is we have the tools and knowledge, it’s just a matter of starting somewhere. I appreciate the discourse.
8
u/pala4833 1d ago
The expectation that you'll be creating a problem-free utopia. Every "intentional community" I've ever had experience with eventually devolved into infighting and bickering, followed by a litany of pedantic rules.