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Comment by elihu | Hacker News Reader

I think the main thing is having enough employers to provide jobs for the people. This could be done by coordinating the construction with some local large businesses or maybe a University that wants to open a new branch. Or just locate near enough to an existing town/city that has jobs.

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Brasília was built in the middle of nowhere in the 1950s/1960s. It took the mandate of federal government relocation to bring in the middle- and upper-classes who could afford life in the Plano Piloto (the Pilot Plan, the main part of the city). The government tried to expel or disincentivize permanent settlement by the temporary workers that did the initial construction of the city, the "candangos". They ended up instead in unplanned satellite cities usually at some distance from the main city. (Just one extreme example of a planned city.)

There was a Russian travel-photoblogger obsessed with street signs and fire hydrants whose blog I read a lot of a few years back, out of whose very extensive travels a few patterns and interesting observations emerged, one of which was: planned cities are almost always eerily empty, with streets way too wide and not enough in between them, and are typically just about the dullest cities to visit.

[EDIT] and no, I don't have a link, I lost the URL years back and have repeatedly tried to find it again, failing every time.

I don't think it's necessarily that the cities are planned but that they're planned for cars. Dubai, Vegas and parts of Doha are pretty miserable to explore due to the scale. You're expected to be in an air-conditioned car between buildings, not wandering the streets.

In Brasilia's case the city was designed from a "bird's eye view" by an architect who didn't really understand the scale of that kind of liveable space. If you look at it out of the window of an aeroplane it looks well designed and pleasingly laid out. Walking through it at ground level, not so much.

That seems to be a mistake in a lot of "city of the future" concept art. All that empty space, tons of long strips of green and trees, very wide streets, huge squares everywhere, looks nice on a drawing or a render but is miserable to exist in because it means everything's really far apart and the scale of everything feels overwhelmingly. A lot of naïve attempts at a "green" city design have the same problem—in trying to incorporate all kinds of "eco friendly" green space they make an area less walkable, spread out the urban footprint, and make it a ton less eco-friendly.

It depends? Personally I like such large spaces, at least where I walked them in weather which allowed for that. Also E-bikes and rollers do exist now, not to forget old-fashioned bicycles.

Maybe "zone" them in ways which allows for many tiny oasis in the deserts of asphalt, concrete, steel and glass?

Everyone likes parks and plazas and the occasional wide boulevard, it's when there's a bunch of "green space" of indefinite purpose strewn about, and wide streets with big setbacks everywhere because they "look grand" and not to serve demonstrated human purpose. Utopian city designs and planned cities often suffer from both of those blights.

Like Brasilia:

http://tourplans.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/brasilia-cap...

https://brasiliaarch638.files.wordpress.com/2010/11/aerea200...

High-rises but tons of wasted space. If they'd just put in a normal allocation of space for parks & plazas and right-sized roads the whole city could be much smaller and everyone would be fairly close to the actual countryside, not just unpleasant strips of green between wide roads.

Once you start looking for it in concept-art type city plans, it's everywhere: way too much purposeless, empty space, mostly in the form of non-park green spaces and too-wide streets and sidewalks. And if you have all those problems, in a real city at least, then you need a ton more parking, because nothing's walkable and the buses are slow (because everything's so far apart), and that's even more wasted space.

Yeah but I wouldn’t move to a new city in rural montana until it has schools, hospitals, firefighters, police, trashmen, and maybe a dozen other services that require a local market or a local tax base to support.

What if there was a $20,000 per year remote tax write-off?

Work in our city and get a $20,000 federal tax write off...?

That's what happens in northern Canada.

Not just northern, try "central" Canada -- still pretty dang far north compared to other places.

so the federal government is building these cities?

30 minutes north of san franscisco means you don't even have paved roads or cell phone service. I'm not sure why you think you would need to be in rural montana to plan some tall buildings.

> 30 minutes north of san franscisco...

California won't allow building a park bench there, much less a new major city.

I think Lucasfilm found out how much a counterforce there is to building things. Also a community center...

You realize they have two buildings there right?

I think you are missing the point that there is a lot of free land. My question was why someone would bring up moving to rural montana, when most major cities are surrounded by uninhabited land.

California is a state. You might be thinking of Marin county, which surrounds only about 12 miles of the 101 freeway, so this is nonsense from multiple angles.

> My question was why someone would bring up moving to rural montana, when most major cities are surrounded by uninhabited land

I'll repeat my answer with less sarcasm: Because building new cities there is not legally allowed. It's physically, but not regulatorily possible.

You chose to ignore the actual point I was making that close ouskirts of major cities are still uninhabited and there is no need to go to 'rural montana'.

Any large construction needs to go an approval process, the article talks about the same thing. This article is about a giant project, the point isn't about any single place that would be more or less resistant. It is about the fact that large amounts of unused land with close proximity to major cities is common.

Still earthquake country

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