Comment by jkaunisv1 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jkaunisv1 | Hacker News Reader

Make internet a basic utility, paid through taxes, that requires no activation. I've never had to explicitly pay for water or have it turned on/off when I switch apartments, it would be amazing for internet to be the same.

See Pattern Language/Christopher Alexander for ideas on how to design the physical spaces to work for the people who will be using them, including random passersby.

Put cars lowest on the priority list. To me it feels like you should only need a car to travel between neighborhoods, though there would need to be a solution for elderly/less mobile folks.

Build the city near some beautiful nature, and then put a free public transit line that gets people from the city center to there, fast. I live about a 10 minute drive/30 minute bike ride from a beautiful national park, but I rarely go there because it's not fast and easy to get there.

Subsidize a good amount of small office/storefront space for new businesses. Let people try out ideas for shops and businesses without going into crazy debt just to sign a lease.

Make efficiency/sustainability requirements for building WAY higher than the norm. In many climates, AC/heating isn't actually needed if you invest a bit more in building materials upfront and build intelligently.

Interesting that you mentioned pattern language. My brother is an architecht, I'm into tech. I remember asking him about Alexander / pattern language after reading GoF, et. al. and he hadn't heard of him. He looked into it and was kind of like shrug. Seems Alexander isnt't super mainstream in the architecture community, and his ideas weren't that revolutionary. My read is that he's better know to software engineers than actual architects?

I've heard of his books being required reading in some architecture courses, and I've heard many architects don't care as you said.

Whether or not his ideas were revolutionary, just going on the way new developments in my city are built, they could really stand to take a page out of his book. Everything is just a big rectangular box plopped down on a rectangular grid with ugly materials. I assume it's all optimized for cost. So right now I don't have much respect for the architecture community.

Part of the point of A Pattern Language is that it wasn't revolutionary. The premise is that people have been building buildings for thousands of years, and certain common patterns appear without anyone calling them out specifically. So, Alexander set out to compile a list of all those patterns, and hypothesize about the problems they solve and why that particular solution is preferable to the alternatives.

To someone who is trying to make an artistic statement with their buildings, A Pattern Language might be uninteresting, since his advice is essentially the architectural equivalent of composing music in a major key according to traditional rules of harmony. If that's what you want to do, that's great, but if you want to make something deliberately dissonant or challenge traditional notions, it's not so helpful.

It's also worth noting that Alexander has some very strong opinions about things, and (just like any other area of human endeavor) there are architects who disagree with him.

Oh, and subsidize coffee houses in the Austrian style. Don't expect private businesses to create the kind of places that create a sense of community in cities and facilitate chance interactions between different groups of people.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com