Why do towns have roads?
To allow people to get from one place to another.
What are these places? And isn’t there a more efficient way to do this?
An idea popped into my head fully formed while I was in Tucson last Saturday. 1 It popped into my head fully formed because the design co•op at the Museum of Contemporary Art put it there. The idea is to create a city with a higher density of population than Tucson. (Which isn’t that hard, all you need is an apartment complex every mile. Tucson’s density in mid-town is 3.4 units per acre.) Why higher density? Because suburbia is worse for the environment than urban centers. The spread of humans is what consumes resources. I mean, would you really drive across town for a meal if you could walk down the street for one? A city with more concentrated resources would be much better for the environment than a suburb.
So I’ve designed my own city. (This is one of the oldest drafts on here. Everything before this was written in 2008, everything after this I just strung together right now.)
Originally, I’d wanted to sketch my ideal town. I’d created hyper-dense residential complexes spread between industrial complexes and commercial areas. Each hub would be connected to all the other hubs through a network of subways, but also there would be Zip cars (temporary rental cars) at each corner. Then my ideas kept changing as I realized that the city needed to be green in color not just in concept– lest the populace grow restless.
But as I kept changing the city, my motivation waned. Now my home state is stealing my idea. And by stealing, I mean that they came up with an idea that very vaguely resembles my own. Oh, well… I’ll nail it next time.
- ‘Last’ is relative here. This actually happened several years ago. [↩]
