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

Reducing commuting and providing *good* provision for cycles and public transport would have to be a must.

Also the public transport should be owned by the city and payed for with taxes so it is free for all inhabitants to encourage them using it.

Definitely!

The garden city (population 32,000) has to be innovative & future looking - that means electric / hydrogen vehicles (or maybe hybrid with fuel crops) with infrastructure to supply power to fuel cells (charging points).

Is that a quote from somewhere SA?

"Pollution from car fumes isn't anywhere near as bad as it used to be, although it's still not ideal. But yes, perhaps what's needed is to have plants on the verges that help absorb pollutions, and plants on the path sides that provide food?" [Pastey]

The options might not be as numerous as one might think in an urban environment. Some trees and plants do poorly in polluted air. Cities have tended to plant trees that clean the air and don't die prematurely.
I read a book called "$20.00 a gallon," which explored possibilities for the future time when gasoline has become prohibitively expensive. Railroads and barges will always be with us, because they haul things four or five times more efficiently than trucks do. Laying out cities where grocery stors, churches, schools and shops are mixed in with residential areas. Children get to walk to school, adults get to walk their dogs or jog, and [ideally] nothing is so far away that you can't walk or bicycle to it. The city I live in plans to have at least 300 miles of bicycle paths within 15 years.

"The second Wolfson Economics Prize, launched on 14th November 2013, will be awarded to the entrant who offers the best answer to the question “How would you deliver a new Garden City which is visionary, economically viable, and popular?”

The case for garden cities is overwhelming with the current housing situation in the UK creating hardship and inequality for millions of people. But finding an innovative way to build communities that truly provide for and support their residents is not simple to achieve. The 2014 Wolfson Economics Prize therefore seeks to develop an answer to the question of how to bring about a new garden city."

Taken from your 2nd link in OP: visionary I took to mean innovative & future looking

ps this competition will be won by some academic group or expert think tank or a town planning agency.

Trees and greenery don't just absorb pollutants, they breathe out oxygen.
Handy to have oxygen.

~jwf~

There is no way I could fit all the weekly shopping for five people into two bicycle panniers. Even with 4 out of 5 of us having school dinners. So please include delivery facilities.

I once designed a city on ... oh, what was it called. Might have been the original Sims. SimCity, that was it. I didn't have any roads at all, just railways. The population hated me

Don't forget basements, to make buildings bigger without making them higher.

Mol

I'm wondering whether "designing a city" is a good idea at all. Perhaps the "city" model is something which suited the needs of the industrial revolution, and which we are now accustomed to because it has become a habit.

Should we even be thinking of making a "city"? Would another form of habitation be better?

Mol

Why weekly?

If local shops act as supply pick up points you would only need to carry a day or two at a time in your cycle panniers.

and I agree home delivery for the big stuff.

SA, if you don't want to join in because you think we don't stand a chance, that's fine. Feel free to unsubscribe

jwf, we're pretty much all agreed that plants are needed, it's just making the choice that they all produce food too. Believe it or not, apple trees have leaves.

Mol, the problem with delivery as I see it (and until recently I was getting my shopping delivered) is that it's become an option/need, because the local shops are usually a couple of miles away. If you had a good shop at the end of the road, would you perhaps shop more often for smaller amounts?

And basements? Definitely. Building underground has many advantages.

KB, the idea of an organically grown form of habitation is one that I've personally looked at too. I'm not convinced that cities are the way forward, I think there's a lot to be gained from the idea of smaller, collective communes that share the larger facilities. Perhaps this idea itself could be something that is adapted to make sure that the city idea is one that is capable of growth?

KB

I agree, I haven't seen a planned city that works.
Planned villages seem ok but once it gets bigger it doesn't seem to work as well.

Besides those of us that live in real cities just treat them as a collection of Villages / Parishes which happen to be close together.
Today I walked between the villages of Merton, Colliers Wood, Earlsfield, and lower Wimbledon, and that was just doing my shopping.

A lot of the new towns are collections of villages that had estates built onto.them until they joined up.

I don't know what you mean by an organically-grown habitation. I don't think any town/city/village/new-type-settlement could be described as "organically grown" if you design it from scratch. I'm not too keen on the word "communes", either, as it has hippy connotations which I am not really thinking about.

At this stage I'm thinking about asking the right question, more than getting the right answer: What is our aim? While it would be good to create a place where everyone is happy and nobody is hungry, town planning is probably a bad way to try to get there.

But I do think we need to think outside the box on this one.

In addition to asking the right questions I think we should also start with finding out what the problems of cities and other settlements in the UK currently are. We have to know all the problems before we solve them.

Exactly, that's sort of what I meant: when we say things like "towns like that don't work", we need to know what our goal is. What can we consider a success?

So, which problems are there? I don't live there, so I don't know.

The main problem I think is that there just aren't enough houses.

Now, this isn't strictly true but it's trotted out a lot. To make it true it needs to be reworded: There aren't enough houses available to buy at a cost that people who aren't rich or lucky can afford.

A lot of this was due to the "wonderful" idea of the buy to let mortgage. Basically, people were able to get a mortgage on a property that they intended to then let out. Wouldn't normally be too bad, but it was possible to also get these mortgages with no deposit. And, even if you had another mortgage on your own home. As long as you were able to prove to a degree (ie: not at all) that you'd be able to rent the house out to cover the repayments. What then happened was a lot of the cheaper/affordable houses were immediately snapped up and rented out. This had two main impacts, the first was it meant that there were less houses available to buy, so the prices went up. The second was that more people were having to rent, demand was high, the prices went up.

So, there are quite a lot of houses in the UK, but they're rented out rather than for sale.
There still is a need for new houses though, because there's still a lot of people living at home because they can't afford to move out, and while there's still a lot of people renting, house prices will remain at an inflated level.

What will probably happen though is if a new town is created, or rather if a few new towns are created, property prices in the areas people move out from will fall and people will be able to afford to live there.
This is what happened with the creation of Peterborough. Several thousand homes were created in just a few years, and a lot of people moved out of the middling to lower areas of London. This then created a vacuum in London, with the prices there falling because a lot of houses became available. So a lot of people were able to move from the lower areas to the middling to lower areas. Which was basically a round about way of clearing what were becoming slums. And with people gone from them, the government was able to do some much needed urban regeneration.