Linear Cities?

1)Robert Heinlein, in some of his stories, postulated a linear city, using public transportation with a distributed energy supply.

2)In "Mutant," by Lewis Padgett, they had laws limiting the size of any city to a few thousand inhabitants to prevent another nuclear war from causing great damage.

An evenly distributed system like this would be resistant to weapons of mass destruction by virtue of not being good targets.

A linear city, if the lines are thin enough, would be almost as resistant, provided all needed resources are distributed.

Read:

http://politicalcalculations.blogspot.c ... z-qgNfTNFQ

Although it is not likely for us to abandon nodal cities at present, people who want to live outside them, but not in small towns, could plan to live along a line of transportation. What might be the course of such a general transition?

Some other research suggests that a well designed linear city is more livable than the nodal cities we have today. It would not be possible for me to nickname such a city "ground zero."

Does anyone know of other SF stories based on linear cities, preferably with distributed resources

DDHv wrote:1)Robert Heinlein, in some of his stories, postulated a linear city, using public transportation with a distributed energy supply.

2)In "Mutant," by Lewis Padgett, they had laws limiting the size of any city to a few thousand inhabitants to prevent another nuclear war from causing great damage.

An evenly distributed system like this would be resistant to weapons of mass destruction by virtue of not being good targets.

A linear city, if the lines are thin enough, would be almost as resistant, provided all needed resources are distributed.

Read:

http://politicalcalculations.blogspot.c ... z-qgNfTNFQ

Although it is not likely for us to abandon nodal cities at present, people who want to live outside them, but not in small towns, could plan to live along a line of transportation. What might be the course of such a general transition?

Some other research suggests that a well designed linear city is more livable than the nodal cities we have today. It would not be possible for me to nickname such a city "ground zero."

Does anyone know of other SF stories based on linear cities, preferably with distributed resources

I read articles that proposed this approach for rebuilding New Orleans after Katrina but... that would have been an intelligent solution and carried too much of the "not invented here"

I am thinking of a city that was something like that but the story name escapes me... Something about a city built in an asteroid but having some sort of trans dimensional aspect. Not Ring World but I believe I read them at about the same time...

How about Eon by Greg Bear? That is the work I was thinking of.

Linear cities sound like a good idea until you realize you have certain nodes everyone occasionally wants to or has to visit, but in each city you only need one per million inhabitants or so. In a big linear city, distances to those nodes would be impractically large for many people, since average distance to each particular point would increase linear with population.

aairfccha wrote:Linear cities sound like a good idea until you realize you have certain nodes everyone occasionally wants to or has to visit, but in each city you only need one per million inhabitants or so. In a big linear city, distances to those nodes would be impractically large for many people, since average distance to each particular point would increase linear with population.

A very good point

As stated, resources would need to be distributed. Also transportation would need to be good. It might be an idea to have, as much as practical, these occasional nodes smaller and more frequent. Redundancy would be a good idea for any that are critical.

Maybe a grid city, with the crossing nodes limited in size and the lines perhaps twenty miles apart? All of us whohave driven in cities know how slow traffic can get when too crowded, better planning should reduce traffic jams. Require the internal areas to be devoted to things that takes up space, but are poor targets: parks near the grid lines, orchards, farms, secondary roadways, etc. It is the concentration that turns cities into good targets. This would also mean that city dwellers, in an emergency, could get food relatively locally - I walked over twenty miles when I had to, and distance to the center of a green space would be half the grid spacing.

Since critical resources must be brought from a distance, the nodal city is susceptible to supply problems. Remember in Asimov's Foundation series, how Trantor's concentration on keeping needed resources arriving was one of the factors leading to the fall of the Galactic Empire.

Does anyone know if the supply problem was a contributing factor with Rome or any other urbanized real life historical polities which have fallen

The "Fall of" wherever is almost always a political discontinuity - and not infrequently one only apparent in retrospect. It's also generally a long drawn-out process. One of the rare exceptions was the fall of the Neo-Assyrian empire, which was conquered and its capitals captured, sacked and depopulated virtually overnight. That, interestingly, put the skids under one of the conquering powers. However, the Fall of Babylon, when it came two generations later, was very much a matter of the Persian King of Kings marching in, deposing the current ruler and putting himself on the throne.

As for Rome... hmmmm... If you ask a Roman, you'll get a blank look: the city is quite clearly still there. In fact, if you look, you'll see SPQR stamped on every piece of municipal metal work [although I suspect that that was Mussolini's idea]. The city was a going concern right through late Antiquity and throughout the Middle Ages. It had also ceased to be the political centre of the Empire long before the putative Fall: the capital had moved to Milan by the middle of the 3rd century, wandered through various European and Asian cities [at one point, under the tetrarchy, there were 4 capitals, none of them Rome] and when the last Western Emperor was deposed in 476 was at Ravenna.

It had also, by 476, been at Constantinople for a century and a half. If you had asked any Byzantine of the 6th, or even the 12th, century about the Fall of the Roman Empire, you'd have gotten that same blank look, followed by 'nonsense! this is the New Rome!' I'm not sure that they ever completely stopped calling themselves Romans, but if they did, it didn't happen until nearly the end - sometime in the late 13th or 14th century at the earliest.

It's true that the population, as well as the political significance, of the city of Rome had declined a long way from its peak by 500, but that was the result, not the cause, of the political and economic failure of the western Empire, and it started with the beginning of the Crisis of the Third Century around 230; it was that disruption that led to a decline in the supplies available to the city. However, in the East, where that disruption never happened, by the 500s Constantinople had far surpassed Rome at its peak.

The only place where issues of resources may have been a major factor in the collapse of a civilisation was in the Classic and Post-Classic cities of the Yucatan. Nobody knows why they were abandoned, but agricultural collapse is a leading contender.

DDHv wrote:< snip >
Does anyone know if the supply problem was a contributing factor with Rome or any other urbanized real life historical polities which have fallen

DDHv wrote:

aairfccha wrote:Linear cities sound like a good idea until you realize you have certain nodes everyone occasionally wants to or has to visit, but in each city you only need one per million inhabitants or so. In a big linear city, distances to those nodes would be impractically large for many people, since average distance to each particular point would increase linear with population.

A very good point

As stated, resources would need to be distributed. Also transportation would need to be good. It might be an idea to have, as much as practical, these occasional nodes smaller and more frequent. Redundancy would be a good idea for any that are critical.

Maybe a grid city, with the crossing nodes limited in size and the lines perhaps twenty miles apart? All of us whohave driven in cities know how slow traffic can get when too crowded, better planning should reduce traffic jams. Require the internal areas to be devoted to things that takes up space, but are poor targets: parks near the grid lines, orchards, farms, secondary roadways, etc. It is the concentration that turns cities into good targets. This would also mean that city dwellers, in an emergency, could get food relatively locally - I walked over twenty miles when I had to, and distance to the center of a green space would be half the grid spacing.

Since critical resources must be brought from a distance, the nodal city is susceptible to supply problems. Remember in Asimov's Foundation series, how Trantor's concentration on keeping needed resources arriving was one of the factors leading to the fall of the Galactic Empire.

Does anyone know if the supply problem was a contributing factor with Rome or any other urbanized real life historical polities which have fallen

I am working on a concept that is sort of a liner city but built more like donuts with a 1 kilometer diameter and a domed open center for agriculture and recreation with cultural and administrative nodes at the center.
Larger cities would be 10 k but covering the center seemed too problematic... even the smaller ones would be a big challenge.

The idea of linear city was actually developed (not invented) first in USSR, in 1920s. The idea was refined by the prof. Ladovsky and dr. Lavrov in early 1930, with the experience of development of Stalingrad.

The best approach to the idea was proposed in 1930 by Milutin. He suggested the idea of city, composed of two parallel lines: one residental and one industrial, separated by the strip of parks, forests and recreation areas. The industrial objects were supposed to be placed athwart to the city main axis, so they may be easily enlarged just by "branching" out of the main line. The city was supposed to be build according to the weather map, so the majority of winds would blow the industrial smoke outward of the city. The theoretical advantages would be the easy transportation of people and materials,

The idea wasn't considered viable, because the ammount of support infrastructure - schools, hospitals, water pumping stations, electrical substations - grew enormously, due to the requiements of uniform linear distribution.

http://townevolution.ru/books/item/f00/ ... 000097.jpg

The Milutin scheme on the top, the middle is Gilbehsaimer scheme, and the lower is Gropius scheme.

C. O. Thompson wrote:

DDHv wrote:"="aairfccha"
Linear cities sound like a good idea until you realize you have certain nodes everyone occasionally wants to or has to visit, but in each city you only need one per million inhabitants or so. In a big linear city, distances to those nodes would be impractically large for many people, since average distance to each particular point would increase linear with population./"

A very good point

As stated, resources would need to be distributed. Also transportation would need to be good. It might be an idea to have, as much as practical, these occasional nodes smaller and more frequent. Redundancy would be a good idea for any that are critical.

Maybe a grid city, with the crossing nodes limited in size and the lines perhaps twenty miles apart? All of us whohave driven in cities know how slow traffic can get when too crowded, better planning should reduce traffic jams. Require the internal areas to be devoted to things that takes up space, but are poor targets: parks near the grid lines, orchards, farms, secondary roadways, etc. It is the concentration that turns cities into good targets. This would also mean that city dwellers, in an emergency, could get food relatively locally - I walked over twenty miles when I had to, and distance to the center of a green space would be half the grid spacing.

Since critical resources must be brought from a distance, the nodal city is susceptible to supply problems. Remember in Asimov's Foundation series, how Trantor's concentration on keeping needed resources arriving was one of the factors leading to the fall of the Galactic Empire.

Does anyone know if the supply problem was a contributing factor with Rome or any other urbanized real life historical polities which have fallen

I am working on a concept that is sort of a liner city but built more like donuts with a 1 kilometer diameter and a domed open center for agriculture and recreation with cultural and administrative nodes at the center.
Larger cities would be 10 k but covering the center seemed too problematic... even the smaller ones would be a big challenge.

IIRC there is no design limit on the size of either a properly designed geodesic dome, or an air supported dome. However, "In theory there is no difference between theory and practice, in practice there is."

In plains areas, a hexagonal overall design with a dome in the center of each for ag, etc. might make sense. With today's communication means, administration could be more distributed in position, but also more centrally organized in control patterns.

It would be interesting to work out a list of those things where today's technologies are able to use distributed positions without losing much effectiveness. If additive manufacturing becomes practical for general production . . ..