h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I've read a lot of books over the last couple of decades about urban planning, mostly about where it went wrong. Isn't hindsight a wonderful thing?

I've also managed to get hold of a few books that were published at the time of the mass urban growths of the New Towns in the UK, and been able to see what the architects and planners actually were trying to do.

There's so much that we'd need to keep in mind when even starting to think about how to plan a city from scratch, and I'm sure I've possibly overlooked something. However, it is something that I think about regularly. It's one of those "If I had billions of pounds, how would I spend it?" ideas for me, I doodle ideas about how to build a small town, one that people would love to live in.

Now it seems, there's a competition to do just that, design a city. The beeb have an article on it here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-24928082 with more details here: http://www.policyexchange.org.uk/wolfsonprize

Now, this competition is almost certainly going to appeal to design or planning students. But I've got an idea, let's put in our own entry. Surely the great minds of h2g2 can make sure we cover all the aspects that need to be considered, and come up with some seriously cool and innovative ideas. I think that we could put together, purely for (probably masochistic) fun, an entry that'd hold its own against the experts. And hey, if we happen to win any money we can have a free bar at the next meet afterwards!

So folks, the question here really is: How To Design A City?

This site covers some really good ideas of how technology could be used: http://spectrum.ieee.org/

Somewhere in the archives it looks at vertical farms. The people have to eat remember.

Well out city will need to have plenty of space for badgers for a start

Pastey if this is to be seerious we need a project plan with intermediary deadlines so that we meat the submission deadline. Does the city have to in the UK - could it not be in space or in the moon or in the ocean floating or sunk or somethink?

South Korea and China have built planned cities. China is said to be planning more, mostly on offshore islands.

Vertical farms have been in the news recently. The latest trend is toward urban rooftop gardens. A new supermarket in the Boston suburbs will sell vegetables that are grown on the roof. I would like to see farms on the roofs of parking garages. Too much valuable farmland is lost to make parking spaces. Why not regain some of it above the cars?

One thing I'd suggest, is that all planting, trees and flowers etc, is edible. I can't see the point in all these trees that may look pretty but serve no purpose, or all these roadsides full of daffodils or other pointless plants (can you tell I grew up in an agricultural area?) when they could easily be apple or pear trees, and the roadside plants could easily be herbs, cabbages, strawberries and other easy growing, useful plants.

The submission deadline is the start of March 2014, and yes it's UK centric I'm afraid, but that doesn't stop ideas coming forward.

I think, if we can get enough ideas for this, we can definitely put something together, perhaps aim to get all ideas in by the end of the year? And then take January to put together the initial plan/proposal, and February to write it up.

The initial submission doesn't call for in-depth details, but seems to be mostly about ideas. And it's limited to 10k words.

It does mention things like service corridors, sustainable transport, etc, etc. So it's worth reading to get the idea of what they're after, but all ideas of what would make a sustainable, economically viable, and visionary garden city are worth hearing and debating/contemplating. You never know, we might learn something

Didn't you already design one, Pastey?

http://www.h2g2.com/dna/h2g2/alabaster/C572

Nowt to do with me, that, Icy

'One thing I'd suggest, is that all planting, trees and flowers etc, is edible. I can't see the point in all these trees that may look pretty but serve no purpose, or all these roadsides full of daffodils or other pointless plants '

that's not true. Plants are very important for the micro climate. They help to for instance keep a town cooler in summer or collect humidity which they emit again when the weather is dry.

"The submission deadline is the start of March 2014, and yes it's UK centric I'm afraid, but that doesn't stop ideas coming forward"[Pastey]

History shows that great ideas move from place to place. There's a scene in the film "Elizabeth" where Sir Francis Drake presents a potato to Queen Elizabeth I. Potatoes were developed on the slopes of the Andes, but now they're grown across vast swaths of Europe, Asia, and other continents. If something can be learned from Songdo or Sim City
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Songdo_International_Business_District , that's less work for the UK. I note that the planned skyscraper in the picture looks a lot like New York's new World Trade Center. If it works in South Korea and New York, maybe you'll someday see it in the UK.

Yes, plants are a necessity. But the types of plants could, and should, be ones that bear fruit that's edible by humans.

I can't understand why there are avenues of trees all over the UK that don't do anything that something like an apple tree could, which would also give apples to eat/turn into cider.

Skyscrapers are never a good idea. high houses are fine up to a certain hight, but after that it's cheaper/more eco friendly to build a 2nd house than another storey on the same building. Basically they are just prestige.
Also you can't build them too close together because of the natural light that then doesn't get to the lower storeys of the neighboring building, which means electric light, which means more energy costs. Also the buildings are often too deep, which again means electric lights are on all day and this again means more energy costs. All in all skyscrapers are pretty pointless.

A good city should have work places, shopping and living places close together to reduce the time and distance of travel. This raises the life quality as well as reduces pollution through cars. Best would of course be to have no cars with fuel power anymore at all.
You also need good public transportation and of course parks.

Oh, but lime trees and chestnuts are so nice in spring! And maple is so pretty in autumn!

One other thing, while I remember...

I grew up in a New Town, Peterborough in fact, and experienced some of the problems of them first hand.

One of which was the "squares". The way that the road plan was set out, was that all the traffic went behind the houses, and there were parking spaces that backed onto the rear gardens. The houses themselves faced around communal squares that were linked with paths. The problem was, by removing all the through traffic, and the potential of through traffic, this meant that after dark the communal square became no-go areas even though they were surrounded by people's houses. The kids that lived there became very territorial about their squares, and as a kid you couldn't really move around much, and that then snowballed to make it uncomfortable, and sometimes downright dangerous for adults to walk about in the evenings.

So yes, communal spaces away from traffic are a good thing, but they still need to be safe communal spaces.

"Yes, plants are a necessity. But the types of plants could, and should, be ones that bear fruit that's edible by humans. I can't understand why there are avenues of trees all over the UK that don't do anything that something like an apple tree could, which would also give apples to eat/turn into cider" [Pastey]

I like that idea a lot. With the new research that shows the value of walnuts in preventing heart disease and diabetes, I wonder why walnut trees don't get planted more. If people don't want to eat the nuts, surely the squirrels will. In some parts of the world, squirrel meat is a great delicacy. One of the plazas near the new World Trade Center in new York has been planted with white oak trees. Whole societies have lived on acorns in the past. Four days of soaking in water removes the bitter tannin from the acorns. The tannin can be used for tanning.

One of my neighbors has a pecan tree. Another has a mulberry tree. Some garden flowers are edible: nasturtiums, squash blossoms, etc. Rose hips are used to make tea. Does that count?

Apple trees are pretty. So are pear trees, hazlenut trees, and others that produce something.

We're very likely to start seeing a shortage of food because cities can *not* produce enough to sustain themselves, they're heavily reliant on farms, with the food shipped in. The more that can be grown within the cities themselves, the less need for the farms. Which is something that needs to be addressed sooner rather than later, because as the cities grow, the amount of land for farming is shrinking.

Yes, it does count! I've started to take more of an interest in wild food, but it doesn't need to be wild. It could be deliberately planted and harvested.

One idea that governments have had is to "put unemployed people to work", so, seeing as this competition entry also calls for things like governance and economic viability, we could look at the idea that those not working, or even volunteers, could work for the city itself, in harvesting, planting, tending, the city owned food supply, and in return getting food vouchers to spend? This would certainly work in a small town on a co-operative style structure, but not sure if it's possible for a city.

A good idea, to plant things you can eat, but I would not plant *only* things to eat.
We have more than enough food, the main problems are things like U regulations about the perfect shape of fruits and vegetables, which end in tons and tons of good edible food being thrown away because it has the wrong shape.

We don't have enough food though. Populations are growing, and arable land is shrinking.

Yes, we waste a *lot* of food, and perhaps we should think of a way how the city could cut down on that?
Perhaps a city run food bank that supermarkets and sandwich shops, etc, *have* to give their past its best but still good enough to eat stuff too?