I’ve started similar threads like “what is your ideal society.” I decided, rather than vague concepts of what society would be like (leading to long arguments of unprovable speculation), I want to see people’s ideas from the very rigid nuts and bolts of it. If I don’t see much fire in this thread, I’ll give my own crazy ideas.
The thread is like this: What kind of city would you like to create or live in? Are there servant robots? Is it in the sky? Can you imagine it built? Can you picture the use of resources, and the enforcement? Really, let’s get our hands dirty. You’re an architect with probably a little too much freedom for your own good. What do you do?
I do think about things like a roadless city that might be cost effective, and still convenient to all residents. About cranes that can interlock as rail tracks in order to lift large objects and cart them to other areas.
I think the stupid, mentally defective people are still welcome. They just have to pay a terrible price if they’re of enough sound mind to guarantee their complacancy toward other people and then fail to comply with their own guarantee. -probably- get a lobotomy after some freak back alley crime.
The ideal civilization is built upon the concepts of medicine. The goal of true medicine should be to bring each body up to maximum strength and capacity. Optimal strength for all, that would be a winning civilization. But today the opposite is done, strength is suppressed and it goes to waste.
#6 is fascinating, faust. What’s that all about? And #8 is actually a concept growing more into science and out of humour. You could have a train which links up with carts carrying individuals or small groups that enter together - as the train passes, the cart speeds up following a siderail until it links up with the train and becomes part of it. Upon the targeted delivery site, it links up with the next neighbouring rail and detaches from the train while slowing down.
#6 came from another thread, in Rant, I think, wherein we were debating the merits of the ads that appear on ILP’s homepage. It’s a sort of fetish of mine. Although, in all seriousness, I think women generally make good cops.
I also hate getting stuck behind school buses. I live in a rural area.
I also hate that the kids are immediately picked up by SUV and minivan-driving moms - to be whisked off to some other activity, or to prevent them from having to walk for ten minutes. I would not like to have grown up like that.
I am glad you didn’t take my flippancy as offensive. My over-riding point is that utopian states are impossible. We just have different aims and goals in life.
Here’s a question. Would you support the ideas of chinese industry? Could workers all be ushered in on a large conveyor belt, put to their posts and set by laws that station them there or lose their jobs?
My ideal city is not a city. I will not, cannot, shall not ever, I will die before I live in a city again. A loose fragmented friendly but, not nosy, well spaced out shoulder room, leave me the F**k alone society is best.
Well utopian might be poor wording. I want to know what we would change about common society from a sort of engineering perspective. What kind of ideas seem to have progress? Maybe a city where humans are cloistered together is unsound. How could an infrastructure exist efficiently otherwise? Maybe humans on conveyor belts is actually ideal when you think about the labour value? Or maybe it too much compromises human beings as drones. My dim hope is to see if we would actually come up with something that an engineer, or an economist, or a socialist of some sort would truly be interested in. A society that we would like to see, but something that literally tells us what to do to achieve it rather than some vague notion of abstract ideals.
The biggest problem I notice is the distance one has to travel for work.
The mill towns used to build a bunch of houses right around the mill for the workers to live in. That was sort of the slave quarters after emancipation.
It would sure be convenient for people if employers provided suitable housing close by. Development by random opportunity, and peoples attachment to their homes makes rearranging an area problematic, but new places could be planned with these requirements.
The more advanced SIMS gets the closer we are to finding out what works. I haven’t played with it myself but the concept is intriguing, and my daughter likes it.
I think an ideal society would start with everybody having an education. And would-be parents would be educated on how to bring up responsible children. Yes, everybody taking responsibility for themselves would be a great start towards an utopian society.
I think many people are attracted to the convenience of concentrated areas such as cities provide and if cities were allowed to grow organically rather than to fit the mistaken ideology of urban planners, they would be more attractive and efficient.
There are a few basic problems in modern cityscapes that are the direct result of poor insight into the way cities actually function. The creation of large and separated “business districts” and “industrial districts” and “manufacturing districts” and “retail districts” from living space creates huge rents in the urban fabric and renders the city less coherent. Another problem is that city planners try to make cities car friendly with freeways, vast ribbons of wasteland dividing neighborhoods into separated enclaves.
A city is a place that should be friendly and comfortable to those on foot because a person on foot is interactive and a city is all about interaction. A proper city would cause its inhabitant to look at the automobile as an uneccesary burden.
The separation of activity is a suburban phenomenon not suitable to the city environment. In the modern city entire districts are deserted on weekends and holidays. Cities should not be like this.
Cities are human ecology. It is time to start thinking of them that way.
A spacious city, with plenty of room in between buildings. Lots of parks and open space. The city will be run on renewable energy, like solar power, wind power, and other methods. The only jobs that exist are jobs in the fields of entertainment, technology, art, philosophy, science, and city workers (police and stuff). There will be wal-mart like shopping centers who are monopolized, but limited by the city government so that prices stay low. 5-acare ections of land that are undeveloped are free to own for a ‘new’ person at the age of 21. Famlies can only have 2 children, otherwise they are taxed heavily (to control population). Most of the taxes paid go to improving infrastructure technology, and also to science.
The city will be run by a small group of members (maybe 3-5) who are elected every 5 years.
