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Comment by Barrin92 | Hacker News Reader

The entire idea of a "smart city" is pure anathema to how vibrant cities function. It's a technocratic wet dream, the digital version of Robert Moses and Corbusier making a comeback. The people preoccupied with this should read some Alain Bertaud and learn how markets work and then go do more productive things with their time than trying to micromanage cities.

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I don't see how, I would say most of the decisions that were made in the US are. Cities in the US are not "vibrant" compared to Europe.

I think cars are mostly to blame, roads are so large, no pedestrian-only streets, parkings take so much space, etc.

That's all Robert Moses' doing. He was the great champion of bulldozing neighborhoods and downtowns to replace them with highways, and eliminating trains, busses, streetcars, and bike lanes to fill the sides of every road with free street parking. He had governments of all parties convinced of his utopian vision of soaring highways and personal rapid transit as depicted on automobile ads and sci fi comics.

I actually prefer the vastness of space in the US. Just go out in the American country side and there is so much beauty. I would love to see a world where the idea of a city is obsolete, distributed local communities of 2000 people spread across the span of American wilderness. Basic services such as electricity, sewage and internet are all maintained by standards set by the state authorities, but run by locals. It all sounds too hipster, but it is not. This COVID-19 pandemic has taught us a lot about how we can survive as a distributed species as compared to dense city life.

Europe has no such luxury due to the density of people cramped in tight corridors and old (but beautiful) architecture. There it makes sense to have a well organized city life.

IMO city life is overrated but that's just my opinion/perspective of society.

You've invented small towns. What prevents you from moving to one post-pandemic?

> Just go out in the American country side and there is so much beauty

did you think the rest of the world didn't have that?

> Europe has no such luxury due to the density of people cramped in tight corridors and old (but beautiful) architecture. There it makes sense to have a well organized city life.

Come visit the countryside in Europe.

Bonus: if you don't want to live in the city (due to work) you can work outside of it and use public transport!

I agree that top-down solutions / edicts rarely work, unless the grassroots organic growth is already there.

When I see the word "smart" applied to anything I just think of the big junket of smart conferences and and smart workshops that all these middle-management types go to, that's the real industry here: middle sized fish eating all the investment dollars before the little fish, innovative startups, can get a taste.

The bad news is that next few buzzwords are already starting to build their own money pit conference circuit if "smart" things become passé. I know this because my wife presents at one such, in the pre-CoV world we got to fly around and eat fancy food once or twice a year presenting buzzword laden solutions to other middle-management types.

Maybe all this will junketing will go away now, will the world be any poorer because of it?

Have you read Bertaud? His central thesis is how urban economics, as measured by data collection, must inform urban planning. Sidewalk Lab’s plans were very congruent with his ideas.

Jane Jacobs is required reading as well.

Anathema: "someone or something intensely disliked or loathed", I don't think this word means what you think it means? Perhaps antithesis?

Also, I don't know much about the smart-city idea, though I do know that you can design spaces, homes, blocks, etc. in a way that creates natural interaction -- which is something that Google has excelled at (possibly more than any other company). This is also discussed heavily in facilitator-culture (and can be seen with Zappos).

Anathema is Greek for damnation, or accused/accursed from Latin (shortening the etymology I read on it)[1]. Makes more sense as damnation in modern usage, so I think it stands.

[1] https://www.etymonline.com/word/anathema

Mmm, you might be able to argue with poetic license that it stands, but I would argue that's not what it means in English, and it's derivation is not its current meaning, and even with "damnation" as a definition it still doesn't read very well.

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