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Comment by Xcelerate | Hacker News Reader

It sure would be cool to see someone successfully develop a new smart city. The idea has been proposed many, many times, but at least in the U.S. it never seems to work out for some reason (and it appears in Canada as well).

I would love to see a new city designed from the ground up on some currently uninhabited plot of land. You could make it walkable, beautiful, design it to have higher density housing from the start—so many things that would be difficult to add to a city that already exists (an underground tube system for transporting food and packages??). I guess the economic and individual incentives just aren’t there. Even if you built it, would people come?

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New, centrally planned cities have only ever been a disaster that quite quickly make apparent the shortcomings of the design professions. Brasilia is a good example of the sort of planned city that would be built. Widespread availability of cars positioned them as the symbols of modernity and so the city was designed around the car, resulting in an entirely unwalkable city that segregates the classes. See also Chandigarh. Barcelona is the main counter example that springs to mind for me.

Every time this is brought up I fail to understand how people think that this time would be any different. Cities are agglomerations of patterns at every scale and the emergent beauty that arises is absolutely impossible to design in any sort of masterplan way. Organic cities are resilient in ways that we can't every really understand, and that's the important element in making a place that is livable for the longer term.

>New, centrally planned cities have only ever been a disaster that quite quickly make apparent the shortcomings of the design professions.

I can think of Washington DC and Salt Lake City that were planned and aren't disasters.

The planned parts of DC and SLC are the old parts of the city. The rest of those cities were not planned in the same way, and it shows in the haphazard geography and zoning. (For example: why does SLC have 24/7 factories a block from housing?)

Columbia MD is pretty successful

It's been talked about for so long now, often proposed by the wealthiest, most powerful people and corporations in the world. So it seems like it won't happen?

Ex: EPCOT (Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow) was originally supposed to be this in the 60s[1]. And was in a place exactly like what you propose (a large uninhabited tract of land).

After Walt died they just made it a theme park of the future envisioned by giant corporations like Exxon.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epcot#1960s:_Experimental_conc...

The problem is the "smart" part of it - if it's smart in the sense that it was properly planned around something other than the automobile, then sure, I think you can get a lot of people on board. All the stuff in your comment sounds great.

The problem is when you start adding cameras and electronics. It's obvious Sidewalk Labs is just an arm of the Google data collection funnel. I don't want any part of that in my life.

I think the cameras and electronics are great. A good way to reduce crime as opposed to adding more police. It's worked well in London to the best of my knowledge and I think we could use more of that in general.

What I object to is Google being the one entrusted with this data, with no oversight, and cross-referencing it with all the other data they have on me.

I'm having difficulty finding the article, but there was a news story that the single most data request from the London Crime cameras being.. flat managers requesting footage of people who didn't clean up after their dogs.

Cameras don't prevent crime. They may shift crime (if you have cameras and your neighbor doesn't, guess whose house is going to get burgled first?) and they may make crime easier to prosecute after, but they do not stop crime in any meaningful way.

And more than likely, the people who are spending a lot of money to buy and monitor those cameras don't really care about the shoplifters and graffiti artists - those crimes don't cost very much of society and stopping them is a low priority. Serious crimes like murders and home invasions are.. actually pretty rare and cameras generally don't catch them.

If you're spending millions to install cameras, record them constantly, and store all that footage in a way that's searchable.. it has nothing to do with crime. It has everything to do with monitoring your population.

Edit:

Found it: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/7469369.stm

I did some research, because I had trouble believing that the cameras don't deter crime. They do deter some kinds of crime (e.g. theft in the areas with the cameras) but not violent crime.

I'm really quite surprised, you'd imagine having a bigger chance of getting caught would make people stop and think.

Probably the reason is, as you say, that those types of crime take place where the cameras mostly aren't, like indoors.

Malaysia is working on a smart city from the ground up: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QFG-PIJ0GUE

I seem to recall there was some kind of effort in the UAE somewhere? Not sure how far that got.

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