🚀 go-pugleaf

In article 92Jun5201150@SAIL.Stanford.EDU, jmc@SAIL.Stanford.EDU (John McCarthy) writes:
> My main objection to Dantzig's compact city, other than that compact
> cities are entirely unnecessary in the next 100 years, is that in
> order to make efficient uses of facilities, they are scheduled 24
> hours per day.  Everyone has a phase, i.e. his schedule of using
> the different facilities.  Presumably the members of a family
> would all have the same phase.  If people of different phases
> wanted to marry, at least one of them would have to abandon his
> own family.  One of the first things people wanted to do at the
> end of World War II was to get rid of shift work and put almost
> everyone on the same phase.
> 
> Why does Jon Roland believe that the high efficiency of the compact
> city is required?
> --
> John McCarthy, Computer Science Department, Stanford, CA 94305

24-hour phased utilization of facilities was something Dantzig suggested,
but it is not essential to the design. I would envision such cities operating
much like cities do now, with some facilities operating 24 hours a day and
others not.

For why I think such efficiency is required, see my posting "Thirty-Seven
Percent Rule", an attempt to put into simple, grade-school arithmetic terms
a way to get order-of-magnitude estimates of the materials-retention
efficiency required to support a given sustention period. In more immediate
terms, it can be argued that much of the suffering people are enduring today
is the result of the inefficient ways we are investing our capital, and
most of that inefficiency arises from sprawl.

Unless you simply don't care about people beyond a century from now, then we
can't wait until compact cities become essential to begin building them.
I estimate that we can probably not afford to build more than about one such
city a year, for a million inhabitants each, over the next hundred years,
and providing a capacity for 100 million persons is probably a minimum needed
to support a vital civilization thereafter.

---

jdr@starflight.corp.sun.com, starflt@uunet.uu.net
Jon Roland
Starflight Corporation, 1755 E Bayshore Rd #9A,
Redwood City, CA 94063-4142, 415/361-8141