Old Man River City – A Community Dwelling Machine | Hacker News Reader

Old Man River City – A Community Dwelling Machine

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42 pointscostcopizza17 comments

Part of the power of cities is that they balance density and modularity. You don't need an enormous capital outlay to build a city all at once. It can grow and shrinks organically at an individual building, street, and transit line level based on the needs of the population and industry, and can update itself piecemeal as new materials and construction techniques come into play. Building an integrated "community dwelling machine" seems to disregard all of that, and the practical reality if it would even have been possible to fund the thing in the 1980's would have been an incredible, outdated, derelict hulk in East St. Louis by 2019.

When I read the name I envisioned a snake-like high density megastructure with 2 constantly growing and expanding ends.

Having a maximum set size requires that the entire thing be planned at once, which could be far more difficult. With constant but semi-unplanned growth, a megastructure like this could slowly wind it's way across the land.

I think Bucky liked his domes a bit too much.

I don’t the modularity is necessarily lost with a mega structure like this- interior remodeling of office, residential, and space happens all the time. As for the updating- East St. Louis had extremely out dated housing stuck in the 1980s when this was proposed and it hasn’t gotten better AFAIK.

I think the real problem (outside the aforementioned capital outlay) lies in the issues with the interface with the rest of the world/community. The Arcology is just to self contained and reality isn’t. It’s often hard enough to find locations within a current large office building or complex, it would be even harder inside this concept. That’s really going to limit the retail and service industry inside a mega structure like this. The circle shape is also a problem- circles don’t pack well, so there is a natural stand off are between the Arcology and the rest of the community. Integrating the internal and external transport networks and infrastructure would be darn near impossible.

The endless miles of windowless and half-populated internal corridors seem like they'd be both be awful to live with and serve as a substantial enablement of crime.

From this part of the description I get the feeling that it wouldn't be a solid block of interior levels but would likely have some sort of atrium space that is spanned by bridges

>Inside-that is, below the moon crater’s three-and-a-half-mile-eircumferenced, surface-terraced mountain mass-are all the communal services not requiring daylight: for instance, all the multilevel circumferential trolleyways, interlevel ramps, roadways, and parking lots, with numerous radial crosswalks and local elevators. There are radial crosswalk bridges at every four terrace levels. These provide bridges-never more than two decks up or down-for walking homeward, outwardly from the interior community bowl, to one’s individual, terraced, tree-hidden dwelling area.

So it would probably look more like any of the countless building atriums currently in existence, see https://www.google.com/search?q=building+atrium

he also describes the crater structure as being an A-frame so I think that lends credence my supposition.

You could certainly have filled in sections where needed to provide office or retail space. It would actually be quite practical to partition the interior space at regular intervals with a wall consisting of offices facing in to the atrium space behind which you could place retail and a main thoroughfare spanning from the inner to outer parts of the A.

My immediate thought was that Apple Park (the spaceship) looks like a miniaturized commercial space only decedent of this idea. Even the scale is roughly constant- Apple Park houses 12000 employees in roughly 1/10th the size of the Old Man River City, which was to hold 125,000.

There is another, similar building in the United Kingdom.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Doughnut

After reading that, I realized the US pentagon building is also a roughly similar concept, and is almost exactly the same diameter as Apple Park.

Arcologies always seemed like a neat idea to me, but I've never seen an in-depth look at their proposed infrastructure.

What would power and communication distribution look like? HVAC? I assumed chill water with several distributed plants. This place is going to need lots of loading docks or it's own trainyard for food and other consumables. Domestic and waste water would probably both need to be handled on site.

I've never seen those aspects of an Arcology design explored.

I think the key to working this out would be extending current practices employed for large buildings with an eye to interconnection. Maybe the best strategy would be to modularize the arcology so that it would be composed of many interconnected structures that are each more or less self sufficient. You could apply this to the Old Man River City by designing it as individual slices of a toroidal pie and then replicating this design until you have the full shape.

At one point, Google was proposing building a dome over their part of Mountain View. What happened with that?

My take: This project's success would have depended on the ease and affordability of maintaining it.

"Thus landscape-partitioned from one another, the individual homes beneath the umbrella dome do not need their own separate weather roofs."

Is this saying that the houses themselves wouldn't have roofs? That would seem like a pretty significant privacy and security issue.

At first I thought it must have meant that the dome would make weatherproofing individual roofs unneccesary (e.g. no need for a waterproof membrane if the dome diverts all rain), but from the line "The experience will be that of living outdoors in the garden, without any chance of rain and out of sight and sound of other humans" I think you must be correct.

Putting aside the facts that A) some of us like the rain and the dome would prevent that, not to mention forcing total reliance on artificial irrigation if you want to have a garden, and B) it relies on the assumption that the dome will never be cracked or compromised in any way, I must agree with you on the privacy and security issues.

The design seems built around the idea that good spaces make good people, and good people make good neighbors. This could not be further from the truth. I live in a "nice" area and most people are selfish assholes, with absolutely no consideration for their neighbors or (seemingly) any awareness that their actions effect other people.

I have had to call the police multiple times for noise disturbances, have caught my neighbors leaning over the fence and spraying my plants with pesticides (I have a bunch of native plants and ground covers (well groomed, not runnning wild) instead of a traditional manicured lawn, which I believe they find offensive and were trying to kill - plus I have pets which chew on the plants and don't want them getting poisoned), constantly have people throwing rubbish over the fence into our yard, have had stuff stolen from the yard (fence materials, paving stones, etc. that we were in the middle of building with) etc.

If this city plan came to fruition I have no doubt it would degenerate into a anarchistic hellscape within a month. My house walls and roof protect me from the weather, but more importantly they protect me from the society in which I live.

Your initial assumption was correct. The sentence you quote is probably describing what is now known as an indoor-outdoor area that combines elements of a garden with a living space. Most of the house would be enclosed:

> The floors of the individual homes on the outward terraced slopes penetrate inwardly of the “mountainside” to provide an 85-percent-enclosed family apartment set back into the “mountain’s” surface

I do agree that the idea of only separating the exterior parts of the houses with landscaping is a bad idea. Continuing the walls out to the edge would make more sense, good fences make good neighbours and all that. The biggest difficulty would be the visibility of your exterior space from above since lower levels project out further than higher ones. No nude sunbathing unless you aren't shy.

Honestly the dome overhanging the whole structure is the most ridiculous part of this plan. It doesn't make any practical sense. I could see an argument for doming the inner area like a sports arena though. It would be far more practical and useful to extend a glazed roof over the outdoor area to provide protection from weather and equip it with a retractable shade that can block the hot sun and prying eyes. Combined with walls on either side and you have a nice sun room that is more private and secure while still being much more luxurious than a simple balcony.

Now that you point out that all of the houses are mostly "underground" the dome seems especially odd since climate control would likely be relatively easy.

Good advice for sea steading.

City's are easy if modular.

Buildings like this are only good for dystopian science fiction.

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