I'm very invested in urbanist discourse (which is to say, all things that lend themselves to less cars and more people doing more walking/biking/transit). That said, the fantasy of building a human-scale town from scratch is, unfortunately, a fantasy.
The author is half correct in saying that we've forgotten how to build towns. It's better to say, the creation of new towns have become economically obsolete. Their niche is gone. Historically, towns formed organically around sources of value, such as farmland or rivers or mines or whatever, where many people making a living in the same region benefited from being in walking proximity, which enabled commerce. That concern just doesn't exist today, due to cars.
You don't need a town with an inn when the truckers stay at motels and rest stops. You don't need a town square when people shop at the big box store on the highway and local producers are part of a complex global supply chain.
I would argue that, for better or worse, Marfa, TX in West Texas is a real manifestation of this essay. It's only a town of about 5000, completely walkable, and homes that were selling for $20k before news got out that it was a secret artist enclave just 10 years ago are now going for north of $1 million (even more eye popping when the median single family home price in the most expensive metro areas of the state, Austin and Dallas, are around $500k). Outside the town is farmland and oil fields. Inside the town is a collection of bars, restaurants, hotels, museums, and high art, all from a once-dying/repurposed small town on a defunct train line.
"A desirable place to live / visit" is its own economic engine. See (also mentioned in that article) Seaside, Florida.
I'd have to argue against the notion that towns/ European style cities are "economically obsolete". Yes, they are virtually impossible to build from scratch at the moment (zoning, building codes, developers, etc), but the economic value of walkable cities has never been higher. If you cross reference walkscore against our metropolitan areas in the US walkable cities (that are in warm climates) are our most valuable real estate... not to mention that they are the location for most of our companies participating in the "information economy" (military-industrial complex aside).
Basically most Americans want to live in a walkable city with charm and community, but the way we built America post 1950 makes it very difficult.
I live in a UK town a hundred times that size, and still have reasonable access to proper green space. This does require:
-modern multi-storey buildings;
-public transit. Which requires similar infra to cars.
Economically, a town this size supports a train station to other towns, which is... huge. I've gone to after-work drinks in a different, similar-sized town. So has my partner.
And environmentally, there's no real objection to building up a bit (it might be a net positive, by shoring up aforementioned train station). Adding a whole new town anywhere in the region would be a nightmare. And frankly, for all the current (deserved) bad press on flats and the romanticism of single-family homes, an awful lot of the latter are terrible. Leaking, creaking, cold, subsiding, dangerous wiring and something else rhyming.
I live in an artificial town that was constructed 10 or so years ago near a light rail station to the larger city to the north (and other similar "towns") so it's totally doable, it's just not for everyone.
I take this more as a thought experiment on how building a town without the primary nuisances of 'modern' places. Cars have enabled many things but they are not unequivocally good. I understand the positives, but they produce a LOT of negative externalities and there is significant cost to spacing things further apart.
But obviously a mountain resort town has to be somewhere that outsiders want to vacation in and everyone who lives there is either in or supporting in some way the tourist industry.
Disney built a human-scale "town" from scratch as Celebration, Florida. Some people seem to like it. The basic formula could probably be repeated elsewhere.
They keep saying things like "arid, parched" which leads me to believe they are looking at land in West Texas (it is very cheap land). These things do not apply to South East Texas, which is mostly subtropical. However, even in the South East we've had issues with subsidence due to over pumping (which we've mostly weaned off from), so the point of being self sustaining on surface water still applies.
East Texas has a huge logging and tree farming industry, so if you're building in East Texas, you'll probably want to leverage the natural resources; rammed earth doesn't quite make sense there.
Also, and this is my personal opinion, I do not believe it is possible to create a successful, large town without vehicles or air conditioning here, it isn't practical, and it isn't in the culture. If you look at the history of success of Texas towns, many further West and South/South East did not become successful until the advent of the vehicle and the air conditioner. The idea of lugging groceries for even a 150m walk in this weather sounds miserable. I recommend the author looks more local to find out what makes Texas towns tick rather than global, because while there's great ideas from around the world that could be imported, you shouldn't discount the local maxima.
Villages in Spain and elsewhere use light wall colors, roof overhangs and narrow streets/walkways to keep paths shaded and cool. Also can orient for wind. Can make it a bit more manageable. For really oppressive days, you put low flow misters along paths.
In a village, you don’t go to HEB once every two weeks and get $400 in groceries. You walk to the market every day or two and shop. One tote bag. You send the kid to the butcher, fishmonger or for something you forgot. Completely different from sub/exurb lifestyle.
Smaller hand trucks/carts would also be a norm, very common to see those in Europe with the elderly, delivery or tradesfolks.
One aspect of the covid era was that many stopped walking to urban stores every day and made it a weekly thing or got delivieries. Kind of eye opening to see a city like SF return to crowded markets.
As a Texan, who has spent a good chuck of their life in the Panhandle and west Texas:
So far I have only made it through half of this, but it is clear this person has not ever spent any amount of time on a farm or a ranch or in any part of Texas (west or not).
Food production is smelly and dirty. You don't want to live upwind of a gin or feed lot. In west Texas you don't build high because of wind. For such an arid place they sure are banking on having access to a shit ton of water.
There is a huge aquifer that most of the places out on the High Plains of Texas pump from. It's use is contentious, but your not going to be surviving off of a 3 acre playa lake.
Upon reaching the following line, I laughed out loud. This is utopian social planning at its least realistic:
“There will be an urge to build each home optimized for air conditioning. Don’t. All buildings must be useful and livable even with the power cut. Hence, natural ventilation, strategically designed windows that open, etc. is necessary. Obviously you can add AC (Air conditioner) on top of that, but in no way should the town be dependent on AC.”
Anyone who has never been to West Texas should check the weather today in some subset of {Amarillo, Lubbock, Midland, Pecos, San Angelo, El Paso, Alpine}. (Some are nice and some are not!) If you can work inside all day with your house that temperature... good for you, but I cannot. And nearly every house in all of those places is air conditioned.
Better yet! Visit the Great State of Texas and take a walk of three blocks or more outside in a city during the heat of the day in June, July or August and report back on how much you liked it...
"All homes will be equipped with fireplaces, wood stoves and chimneys."
In West Texas? Which has no trees? "Sustainable", right.
What this guy is missing is that small towns were originally service centers for surrounding farms. When 60% of the population worked in agriculture, towns were needed as distribution points for goods and services. With under 2% of the US population working in agriculture, that function is gone. Plus, between WalMart and Amazon, distribution no longer requires a town.
This is a nice overview of historic urbanism, but it nearly completely misses the real question:
How will you legally be allowed to build this car-free town?
Even in Texas you can't just build whatever you want wherever you want. Every city and most counties have minimum lot sizes, road, sewer, power, and fire code requirements that would completely defeat any effort to build a medieval european village in the US.
In terms of location, you need to be 5-7 miles away from any existing city to be outside of it's ETJ. Any closer and you're probably going to be subject to the zoning laws of that city.
In theory you could pull this off if you could get a critical mass in an unincorporated area and then incorporate a town so that the new town sets the development laws to allow this pattern of development, but you normally need anywhere from 200 to 2000 people to get that started, and until that time the county rules dictate.
One potential hack is to build the town as a condominium complex, so the entire thing is considered one apartment/condo building, even though the design is nothing like a normal apartment/condo. Another is to treat it as a trailer park, but you probably have to do a phase of development where the buildings are small pier-and-beam structures that can pass as "not permanently attached" to the land.
In short: At this point the design principles of historic and modern urbanism are generally well understood and not that interesting. The primary obstacle to these practices being brought back is that they're utterly illegal in North America, and the plausible routes around that illegality make the economics - which would already be challenging - substantially more difficult.
>all homes will be equipped with fireplaces, wood stoves and chimneys.
Great: the burning of solid fuels (coal in the past, but nowadays mostly wood at least in the US) is the source of one of the most damaging forms of pollution (particulate) these years, which is the reason that for example fireplaces and wood stoves have been banned in new construction in the Bay Area since 2005.
I did find it weird to assert that you can't use wood for construction materials because it wouldn't fit, but then require it for fuel. If you can't find enough wood to build out of, then it seems even harder to find enough to cook & heat with, even in a relatively warm climate like Texas.
Probably not a problem with only a few thousand people. You could also require catalytic stoves or some other kind of stove with lower particulate emissions.
This reads the second-system effect applied to urban planning, which is a field that does not lack for ego-driven projects of planning-over-natural-growth. (e.g. Seeing Like A State, and the career of Robert Moses.)
I don't know whether to be relieved or disappointed that we'll never learn all the fun, new problems that his grand plan would introduce.
> The newest building on the block should look like the oldest. In the case of Texas, this means the town will be built to a Mission, Spanish-colonial, or German-colonial style
Pretty amusing to leave whatever the correct word for "Anglo-American-colonial" is out of this list.
> It should look like it was founded and laid down in 1667 or 1746, not 2022.
Large parts of West Texas were not settled until after the Civil War (with gridded streets of course), making "historical authenticity" a bit of a challenge. But building a "new" horse-compatible late 19th century Texas town with wide streets and big lots would be hard enough already, so I definitely respect the gusto here.
Is there an Anglo-American colonial style in Texas outside maybe Galveston? Genuinely interested and would love to visit any remnants we still have.
Empresarios and land grants seem to have led to different settlement patterns at the start for the Anglos than the rigid early Spanish or hilariously insular hill country Germans.
“Spanish colonists came organized once the missions and presidios were already built, Anglos posted up stick houses by themselves on land they ostensibly owned and tried not to get slaughtered by comanche” is the vibe I usually get.
A couple years ago during a period of existential levity, I thought to myself: what's the most ambitious thing I could do with my life? The idea of creating a city for some reason popped into my head. Perhaps it was born out of my frustrations with finding affordable housing and the obsolete nature of the work commute (prescient pre-covid), that I started a blog and started reading about urban economics and sharing some thoughts and notes etc.
Of course going through the process of trying to get a permit for a small home remodel will destroy any enthusiasm one would have to work with any bureaucracy made me quickly forget of the ambition. During that brief period though, I did learn about different efforts out there (some now defunct, ex Google's) of re-imaging the modern city. I do hope some desolate plots of land now become economically viable post-covid and become experimental zones for new ideas and small communities.
This was an interesting thought experiment, but required some mental gymnastics to go along with the premise that the town should be entirely self-sufficient. (Especially trying to grow all of your community's food in West Texas!) But to the extent I'm interested in how you would build a community more than how you'd build a town, there are some interesting thoughts here about how you'd go about an intentional community if you didn't mind some reliance on modern industrial society (which is also true of the Amish farmers the author touts throughout)
I sometimes wonder why there's not more people and growth in Northern Australia. It seems like there's a lot of space and resources up there but not many people...
Ellenbrook is more of a planned exburb, not a new planned town per se. It's about as far from Perth as Parramatta is from Sydney. Odd that you mention Australia, as I think we're completely lousy at building new cities (leaving towns aside) - the projections of future Australian population would be a lot easier to take if the bulk of people didn't just keep cramming into Sydney and Melbourne.
AFAIK The number of new planned towns in the US post 1950 is approximately 0. The closest equivalent is a "Master Planned Community," which is a large-scale suburban development that might include a mix of land uses. Those are relatively common, but they're build as attachments to a larger city, not as new cities.
How to make cheap West Texas land worth even less: Build homes on it, but don't include garages or driveways; instead tell prospective buyers that they need to keep their pickup trucks outside of town.
EDIT (as I feel I was overly snarky): I don't think there's anything wrong with thought experiments like this, and I've wondered to myself what a brand-new city or town might look like. I do think the no-car thing would be an incredibly hard sell in rural Texas though. The reality is that most modern towns aren't self-sufficient. Maybe there's a dentist, or maybe you have to drive to the next town over for one. Maybe there's a used sporting goods store, or maybe you have to drive an hour to one when the kids grow out of their cleats, etc. I think something like this would stand a better chance if it were right outside of a city. Maybe an old farm in what is now the suburbs - you could build a dense, walkable town that also connects to the big city via mass transit.
A 600 person town isn't remotely self-sufficient in the modern developed world. You could in principle build something walkable that, given sufficiently pleasant surroundings, some people would be willing to trade against walking to do most of their errands or hopping in a car to go anywhere.
But you'd need the public transit links and I'm guessing many would still want to own a car on the outskirts (as in a college/corporate campus) and provide access of some sort for the disabled, etc.
> Maybe there's a dentist, or maybe you have to drive to the next town over for one.
As part of the plan he specifically says "save an excellent spot in the town center to offer at low cost to whomever decides to practice dentistry there"
This sort of exercise, both in thought and realization, is important for this generation of young people. Some of the ideas are silly and/or naive. But there have been too few of these experiments proposed by the young, and even fewer attempted in real life, over the last couple decades.
Utopian communities were part and parcel of 19th C America, and there was a flutter of activity around communes and intentional communities in the 1960s and 1970s. We have the infrastructure and technology nowadays to do better.
The long term success rate today would probably still be low, but the value in the exercise is in the personal growth experience for the young themselves and the prototyping of new ideas, some of which migrate to the general culture. Lots of lessons learned are available from books written about these past communities to prevent making the same mistakes.
Perhaps the risks are just too high these days for the young…
A refreshing read. Most 'modern' towns are loud mainly because of vehicles and lawn care. It is interesting to think about a town built around not needing those things.
What is especially exciting about the idea, is the opportunity to incorporate modern internet into the town from the start.
The article mentions solar panels and wifi technicians. Naturally, the town would be equipped with a kind of mesh net for local communication in cases of outages, etc.
But also, the town librarian could maintain something like community resources hosted on the mesh network. Design documents, etc.
Of course, the town would provide a Pleroma or Matrix server to all residents too :)
Mesh networks don’t actually scale well compared to traditional fiber topologies. If you have the opportunity to bury fiber from the get-go, that’s a much better option for most optimization criteria (latency & bandwidth, for starters).
I like these town vibes and the US lacks these types of towns mostly because economics. Self sufficient farming is cool but there is a reason the vast majority of places don't do it. And one might say it creates that family or towny vibe but most towns in the US don't do it. Why economics. People are somewhat resistant to big town store but a few sellouts lead to more and eventually the price differential can destroy that model. Now the author point out they want to prevent this from happening but making towns no cars which is a tough sell if your not a tourist town (getting to this is the problem). I can think of many towns in Europe that have this property and maintain the local feel much better but still it feels much harder. Jobs are really important and if you town is just making farm stuff you run a risk of a huge poor spot developing leading to issues spiraling out of control because there's not jobs to fix it. Now this might be the exact reason to try it because there is risk and it has potential but it seems very difficult to pull this off
Aren’t new towns and villages built all the time? Definitely not with all the aesthetics this author is looking for, but not fair to say we as a society have forgotten how to do this.
I can think of several examples in Texas, the mueller neighborhood in austin. Steiner ranch outside of austin ( built on an old ranch ) . The woodlands outside of Houston built up in the 80s and 90s by an oil baron
Reminds me of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culdesac_Tempe
Which seems to be making headway in getting built according to twitter. Ironically may drive out there this summer & check it out.
[+] [-] helen___keller|4 years ago|reply
The author is half correct in saying that we've forgotten how to build towns. It's better to say, the creation of new towns have become economically obsolete. Their niche is gone. Historically, towns formed organically around sources of value, such as farmland or rivers or mines or whatever, where many people making a living in the same region benefited from being in walking proximity, which enabled commerce. That concern just doesn't exist today, due to cars.
You don't need a town with an inn when the truckers stay at motels and rest stops. You don't need a town square when people shop at the big box store on the highway and local producers are part of a complex global supply chain.
[+] [-] thebradbain|4 years ago|reply
"A desirable place to live / visit" is its own economic engine. See (also mentioned in that article) Seaside, Florida.
https://www.themanual.com/culture/marfa-texas/
https://www.npr.org/2012/08/02/156980469/marfa-texas-an-unli...
[+] [-] jppope|4 years ago|reply
Basically most Americans want to live in a walkable city with charm and community, but the way we built America post 1950 makes it very difficult.
[+] [-] yodelshady|4 years ago|reply
-modern multi-storey buildings; -public transit. Which requires similar infra to cars.
Economically, a town this size supports a train station to other towns, which is... huge. I've gone to after-work drinks in a different, similar-sized town. So has my partner.
And environmentally, there's no real objection to building up a bit (it might be a net positive, by shoring up aforementioned train station). Adding a whole new town anywhere in the region would be a nightmare. And frankly, for all the current (deserved) bad press on flats and the romanticism of single-family homes, an awful lot of the latter are terrible. Leaking, creaking, cold, subsiding, dangerous wiring and something else rhyming.
I'm not meaningfully further from nature, either.
[+] [-] mulcahey|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] williamsmj|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] swiley|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zip1234|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ghaff|4 years ago|reply
But obviously a mountain resort town has to be somewhere that outsiders want to vacation in and everyone who lives there is either in or supporting in some way the tourist industry.
[+] [-] nradov|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chomp|4 years ago|reply
East Texas has a huge logging and tree farming industry, so if you're building in East Texas, you'll probably want to leverage the natural resources; rammed earth doesn't quite make sense there.
Also, and this is my personal opinion, I do not believe it is possible to create a successful, large town without vehicles or air conditioning here, it isn't practical, and it isn't in the culture. If you look at the history of success of Texas towns, many further West and South/South East did not become successful until the advent of the vehicle and the air conditioner. The idea of lugging groceries for even a 150m walk in this weather sounds miserable. I recommend the author looks more local to find out what makes Texas towns tick rather than global, because while there's great ideas from around the world that could be imported, you shouldn't discount the local maxima.
[+] [-] hindsightbias|4 years ago|reply
In a village, you don’t go to HEB once every two weeks and get $400 in groceries. You walk to the market every day or two and shop. One tote bag. You send the kid to the butcher, fishmonger or for something you forgot. Completely different from sub/exurb lifestyle.
Smaller hand trucks/carts would also be a norm, very common to see those in Europe with the elderly, delivery or tradesfolks.
One aspect of the covid era was that many stopped walking to urban stores every day and made it a weekly thing or got delivieries. Kind of eye opening to see a city like SF return to crowded markets.
[+] [-] bertmuthalaly|4 years ago|reply
A tree-lined one, though, can be quite nice: https://twitter.com/brent_bellamy/status/1411133447062441990
[+] [-] psychometry|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] asciimov|4 years ago|reply
So far I have only made it through half of this, but it is clear this person has not ever spent any amount of time on a farm or a ranch or in any part of Texas (west or not).
Food production is smelly and dirty. You don't want to live upwind of a gin or feed lot. In west Texas you don't build high because of wind. For such an arid place they sure are banking on having access to a shit ton of water.
There is a huge aquifer that most of the places out on the High Plains of Texas pump from. It's use is contentious, but your not going to be surviving off of a 3 acre playa lake.
[+] [-] huitzitziltzin|4 years ago|reply
Upon reaching the following line, I laughed out loud. This is utopian social planning at its least realistic:
“There will be an urge to build each home optimized for air conditioning. Don’t. All buildings must be useful and livable even with the power cut. Hence, natural ventilation, strategically designed windows that open, etc. is necessary. Obviously you can add AC (Air conditioner) on top of that, but in no way should the town be dependent on AC.”
Anyone who has never been to West Texas should check the weather today in some subset of {Amarillo, Lubbock, Midland, Pecos, San Angelo, El Paso, Alpine}. (Some are nice and some are not!) If you can work inside all day with your house that temperature... good for you, but I cannot. And nearly every house in all of those places is air conditioned.
Better yet! Visit the Great State of Texas and take a walk of three blocks or more outside in a city during the heat of the day in June, July or August and report back on how much you liked it...
[+] [-] Animats|4 years ago|reply
In West Texas? Which has no trees? "Sustainable", right.
What this guy is missing is that small towns were originally service centers for surrounding farms. When 60% of the population worked in agriculture, towns were needed as distribution points for goods and services. With under 2% of the US population working in agriculture, that function is gone. Plus, between WalMart and Amazon, distribution no longer requires a town.
[+] [-] _Microft|4 years ago|reply
https://twitter.com/wrathofgnon/
[+] [-] jppope|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] burlesona|4 years ago|reply
How will you legally be allowed to build this car-free town?
Even in Texas you can't just build whatever you want wherever you want. Every city and most counties have minimum lot sizes, road, sewer, power, and fire code requirements that would completely defeat any effort to build a medieval european village in the US.
In terms of location, you need to be 5-7 miles away from any existing city to be outside of it's ETJ. Any closer and you're probably going to be subject to the zoning laws of that city.
In theory you could pull this off if you could get a critical mass in an unincorporated area and then incorporate a town so that the new town sets the development laws to allow this pattern of development, but you normally need anywhere from 200 to 2000 people to get that started, and until that time the county rules dictate.
One potential hack is to build the town as a condominium complex, so the entire thing is considered one apartment/condo building, even though the design is nothing like a normal apartment/condo. Another is to treat it as a trailer park, but you probably have to do a phase of development where the buildings are small pier-and-beam structures that can pass as "not permanently attached" to the land.
In short: At this point the design principles of historic and modern urbanism are generally well understood and not that interesting. The primary obstacle to these practices being brought back is that they're utterly illegal in North America, and the plausible routes around that illegality make the economics - which would already be challenging - substantially more difficult.
[+] [-] hedora|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] newaccount2021|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] oftenwrong|4 years ago|reply
Let's Build A Traditional City (And Make A Profit) (2013)
https://www.andrewalexanderprice.com/blog20130330.php
...which was also discussed on the HN front page:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8111406
There is also a sequel post:
Let's Build A Village From A Parking Lot (2015)
https://www.andrewalexanderprice.com/blog20151203.php
[+] [-] novok|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] burlesona|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hollerith|4 years ago|reply
Great: the burning of solid fuels (coal in the past, but nowadays mostly wood at least in the US) is the source of one of the most damaging forms of pollution (particulate) these years, which is the reason that for example fireplaces and wood stoves have been banned in new construction in the Bay Area since 2005.
[+] [-] breischl|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wyager|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lifefeed|4 years ago|reply
I don't know whether to be relieved or disappointed that we'll never learn all the fun, new problems that his grand plan would introduce.
[+] [-] analyte123|4 years ago|reply
Pretty amusing to leave whatever the correct word for "Anglo-American-colonial" is out of this list.
> It should look like it was founded and laid down in 1667 or 1746, not 2022.
Large parts of West Texas were not settled until after the Civil War (with gridded streets of course), making "historical authenticity" a bit of a challenge. But building a "new" horse-compatible late 19th century Texas town with wide streets and big lots would be hard enough already, so I definitely respect the gusto here.
[+] [-] finiteseries|4 years ago|reply
Empresarios and land grants seem to have led to different settlement patterns at the start for the Anglos than the rigid early Spanish or hilariously insular hill country Germans.
“Spanish colonists came organized once the missions and presidios were already built, Anglos posted up stick houses by themselves on land they ostensibly owned and tried not to get slaughtered by comanche” is the vibe I usually get.
[+] [-] siavosh|4 years ago|reply
Of course going through the process of trying to get a permit for a small home remodel will destroy any enthusiasm one would have to work with any bureaucracy made me quickly forget of the ambition. During that brief period though, I did learn about different efforts out there (some now defunct, ex Google's) of re-imaging the modern city. I do hope some desolate plots of land now become economically viable post-covid and become experimental zones for new ideas and small communities.
[+] [-] eastbayjake|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] twobitshifter|4 years ago|reply
https://ellenbrook.com.au/
[+] [-] ianbicking|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] glangdale|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] burlesona|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lastofthemojito|4 years ago|reply
EDIT (as I feel I was overly snarky): I don't think there's anything wrong with thought experiments like this, and I've wondered to myself what a brand-new city or town might look like. I do think the no-car thing would be an incredibly hard sell in rural Texas though. The reality is that most modern towns aren't self-sufficient. Maybe there's a dentist, or maybe you have to drive to the next town over for one. Maybe there's a used sporting goods store, or maybe you have to drive an hour to one when the kids grow out of their cleats, etc. I think something like this would stand a better chance if it were right outside of a city. Maybe an old farm in what is now the suburbs - you could build a dense, walkable town that also connects to the big city via mass transit.
[+] [-] ghaff|4 years ago|reply
But you'd need the public transit links and I'm guessing many would still want to own a car on the outskirts (as in a college/corporate campus) and provide access of some sort for the disabled, etc.
[+] [-] defen|4 years ago|reply
As part of the plan he specifically says "save an excellent spot in the town center to offer at low cost to whomever decides to practice dentistry there"
[+] [-] onecommentman|4 years ago|reply
Utopian communities were part and parcel of 19th C America, and there was a flutter of activity around communes and intentional communities in the 1960s and 1970s. We have the infrastructure and technology nowadays to do better.
The long term success rate today would probably still be low, but the value in the exercise is in the personal growth experience for the young themselves and the prototyping of new ideas, some of which migrate to the general culture. Lots of lessons learned are available from books written about these past communities to prevent making the same mistakes.
Perhaps the risks are just too high these days for the young…
[+] [-] sunshineforever|4 years ago|reply
The main reason I haven't done it is money. If I had even 100k I'd have probably bought some 40k lot and started building on it myself.
[+] [-] zip1234|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] olah_1|4 years ago|reply
The article mentions solar panels and wifi technicians. Naturally, the town would be equipped with a kind of mesh net for local communication in cases of outages, etc.
But also, the town librarian could maintain something like community resources hosted on the mesh network. Design documents, etc.
Of course, the town would provide a Pleroma or Matrix server to all residents too :)
[+] [-] wyager|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xphos|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rel2thr|4 years ago|reply
I can think of several examples in Texas, the mueller neighborhood in austin. Steiner ranch outside of austin ( built on an old ranch ) . The woodlands outside of Houston built up in the 80s and 90s by an oil baron
[+] [-] TheBill|4 years ago|reply