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Comment by wolframhempel | Hacker News Reader

I don't really understand why one would make it a line? If the objective is walkability, wouldn't it make more sense to arrange apartments in a square or - if you want to go 3D - a cube to minimize distance between occupants and shops etc?

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I think the assumption would be you could walk around your neighborhood portion, then take the train/mass transit to further away. Basically a city built along a train line.

Also seems like a good way to control a large population. Can't have that large of a group gather and a small force can effectively cut the city in two (or more) segments. If you shut down the train system people can't go too far to other parts of the city. I imagine this was also a consideration.

> I think the assumption would be you could walk around your neighborhood portion, then take the train/mass transit to further away. Basically a city built along a train line.

They state this explicitly in the 2-minute intro video: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=0kz5vEqdaSc

Regarding controlling the population: to me it seems like one large prison. I wouldn’t want to live in such a place.

I think the argument is that the long-distance transport needs no curves so it run faster.

But it's a sham. They'll never get 25% of the country's population into one building. It's just a PR exercise, a concept car if you will.

some of the architecture books have talked about it - they theorize the perfect city is about two miles wide and indefinitely long. You run a rail line down the middle (run four, local lines, express; or six and have a middle distance one) and now everyone by definition is about a mile or two from a station and a mile or less from farmland/extreme rural areas.

Sounds more like a basic unit of understanding or modeling a larger system than an actual ideal. Like a single leg of a hub and spoke flight system.

Econ has a similar concept for competition , iirc, “Hotellings line”.

The series of books of which A Pattern Language [253] is part of strongly argues for it as an ideal and a design principle, not just as a spherical cow.

[253] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Pattern_Language

The Dutch town of Almere was, more or less, built along a rail line. Every neighborhood has its own station.

Why square if you can have a circle?

If it were in the middle of a forest, you'd just be a minute's walk away from nature... Maybe MBS' next fantasy is the reforestation of the desert.

Good luck with that! Though it might be worth trying, as the desert will be even more inhospitable than it already is in the years to come.

These other shapes will need taller walls to keep the desert sand out.

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