*cough cough*

[unixronin]

So, it seems the History Channel held a "City of the Future" contest, challenging eight architectural firms to show their visions of the San Francisco of 2108.  C|Net has a pictorial.

I can't remember the last time I saw such pretentious pie-in-the-sky "and then magic happens" bullshit posing as architectural design.  I think the winning design firm thought they were supposed to be submitting concepts for an SF movie set in the San Francisco of 3108 AD.  It'd sure make me think twice about hiring them to design anything for me.

Comments

[johnkzin.livejournal.com]

You can't make it happen with 1 XOR 2. You must have both 1 AND 2.

(slums occurred even before massive over-crowding)

Though, you might need to generalize #2 to be about social classism, and not just poverty. Slums can be caused by poverty, caste systems, and racial tensions.

[robbat2.livejournal.com]

I meant that solving EITHER issue would drastically alter the expected vision.

There are individual solutions that may solve one but not the other.

pop. reduction by death - some large plague (90% dead). wealthy will disproportionately survive, world poverty will still exist.

pop. reduction by migration - wealthy will migrate earlier, poverty still exists. Short-term, this will increase slums (relative to suburbia) until governments offer migration to the unwashed masses (off-world colonial labour? anybody). See Red/Blue/Green Mars and KSR's descriptions of dome slums.

solving world poverty - as long as everybody is willing to live at a lower level (wealth redistribution). This leads to lots of moderate housing, not high-end, but not sprawling slums either. (Probably more like soviet-style apartment blocks as far as the eye can see).

[johnkzin.livejournal.com]

How exactly would "soviet-style apartment blocks" differ from slums? :-)


Off planet population migration could probably be done now. Just catapult people into the sun.

[robbat2.livejournal.com]

By slum, I mean informal shantytown settlements. Large-scale squats. Makeshift dwellings constructed of corrugated metal.

By comparison, soviet-style apartments have electricity, running water and a solid roof.

The shantytown slums exist in large areas of Southern Africa (where I grew up). Areas larger than the middle-class suburban neighbourhoods, often on the fringes of heavy industrial areas, where middle-class people do not want to live.

[johnkzin.livejournal.com]

But slums in the USA don't tend to be shantytowns. They tend to be ... soviet-style apartment blocks, in various states of disrepair and demolition. Or of similar quality of life.

[robbat2.livejournal.com]

and worldwide, far more population lives in shantytowns than said apartment blocks. Living in said apartment blocks is usually correlated with a minimum wage job or social assistance, while shantytowns have no formal income whatsoever. I think shantytowns may yet arise in the US as the economic situation worsens, if they don't already exist in fringe locations (I have seen some settlements around Hilo, HI that were definitely bordering on being shantytowns).

I'll be down in San Jose and outskirts in early April at the MySQL conference. We can debate it further over drinks.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Off planet population migration could probably be done now. Just catapult people into the sun.

What, a dozen a month? Maybe a dozen a week, if we got all the different launch facilities working at it full time? And that's just to LEO. You'd have to have a lot more delta-V to drop people into the Sun. The problem with the Marching Morons scenario is that if you have the resources to do it, you have the resources to implement much better solutions.

[johnkzin.livejournal.com]

No, no, I didn't say "launch them into the sun on space vehicles". I said "_catapult_ them into the sun". :-)


We just need better catapult technology.