Building a "new city"

Just came across this: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-24928082

funny, I thought that was what they were already doing on Salisbury Plain?!?

They could demolish milton keynes and have another go.

Or nuke slough.

If you want to build a nice place, first thing you have to do is stop cars going there. Even London could be a nice place if it had no cars.

Or nuke slough.

Has it not already been nuked?

Slough town centre, earlier:

Not in my back yard

I match your Slough and raise you Harlow New Town….

Why though?

Surely better to spend the effort and money encourageing businesses and more affluent people to move to the North East and other areas?

I used to live here, terraces with sea views (or the moors the other way) for £38,000!

http://www.zoopla.co.uk/for-sale/property/skelton-in-cleveland/green-road/?include_retirement_homes=true&include_shared_ownership=true&new_homes=include&q=skelton%20green&radius=5&results_sort=lowest_price

Just a thought ,how about if all the planners,architects and builders lived in the town that they designed and made. 🙂

For a start, it would have fewer cars, says architect Alison Brooks. Referring to the new post-war towns like Milton Keynes and Stevenage, she says that “one of the flaws in the vision was that they were based on private car ownership”. She argues for a clever mix of public transport, car-sharing, and cycling at the heart of any new development.

As nice as that sounds, I reckon what will actually happen is that people still want/need cars and will just litter the new town with the abandoned cars dumped in any available bit of space. Just like on the countless new estates already around the country which are chronically under provisioned for parking.

In the modern paradigm of needing two jobs just to afford a house, you won’t have families with both workers living near work, so they will need cars.

how about if all the planners,architects and builders lived in the town that they designed and made

Or commuted (by whatever means) from it to the town where they actually work.

Retro83- As nice as that sounds, I reckon what will actually happen is that people still want/need cars and will just litter the new town with the abandoned cars dumped in any available bit of space. Just like on the countless new estates already around the country which are chronically under provisioned for parking.

This^

We brought on a new build estate 4-5 years ago (Not what either of us were looking for at the time) because we had a huge deposit and mortgage in place and got a really stupid deal on a house as the market went into freefall and nothing was selling.

But it was a 4/5 bedroom house with one parking “Carport” under another flat behind us.
Oh and this Carport stands empty too as its built to the standard single garage size which would be fine if we were still driving A40s

Not so good if you can drive into it…… but not open the doors
Even less useful if you have 2 kids to get out as well.

Our next move will be to somewhere with a decent amount of off-street parking and enough space to build a proper Garage/workshop for Projects.

The whole estate is just rammed with cars, no one uses their nice allocated covered parking spaces, they all just park on the road, which is a twisty turny thing to maximise the plots for houses, but really does nothing to help the double decker bus threading its way through.

Read Ebenezer Howard to understand the basic pattern for new town design in the UK then see all his ideas get diluted until it’s eventually pointless.

See VINEX in Netherlands or Vauban in Germany…great ideas but don’t quite work in reality.

I wrote my thesis on the poor design (IMO) of UK new towns, very interesting subject.

cr500dom – Member

Not so good if you can drive into it…… but not open the doors
Even less useful if you have 2 kids to get out as well.

Once spent ages squeezing a metro into our garage, it would have been fine as long as the driver was 3 inches thick. Which works out ideal as a garage that’s too small for a car becomes default bike space!

s nice as that sounds, I reckon what will actually happen is that people still want/need cars and will just litter the new town with the abandoned cars dumped in any available bit of space. Just like on the countless new estates already around the country which are chronically under provisioned for parking.

the difference being surely that the estate is plonked on the edge of a town designed arround cars. A town designed arround bikes and busses would work differently.

My first thought would be to have a go at designing a city ‘for the bike’. As mentioned there are a lot of cities designed around the car or adapted for the car (much more so in America). But since we are all pushing for greener transport methods, what if we were to have a go at making that city for the bike. Everyone complains that the city is designs with bikes as an after thought and the current systems dont work, so what if we were to design it with the bike as the principal transport and public transport along side it, with cars being sidelined.

I think it would be an interesting exercise, the density, distances, range of travel, culture… everything would be different.

TINAS- the difference being surely that the estate is plonked on the edge of a town designed around cars. A town designed around bikes and busses would work differently.

Only if there were sufficient jobs within that city (across the whole spectrum) for all residents otherwise you end up with the same problems but no infrastructure for commuters to elsewhere.

If it doesn’t cater for the whole social spectrum, it`ll just end up like Harlow / Basildon / MK etc where effectively the east end slums were cleared out into new properties with the old social problems

anus – Member

My first thought would be to have a go at designing a city ‘for the bike’.

Lots of space for Audi parking you mean?

that’s the problem – you can’t just make a city from scratch – it has to grow.

So unless you can do all this at the same time, you can’t build a city without consideration for cars

– public transport that is convenient and cost effective
– jobs in the city
– parking for those that do need to work/travel outside the city

Realistically, a new city will not have those jobs and therefore people will need/want to drive to jobs elsewhere. You may be able to design some sort of park and ride but in reverse where you catch a bus/tram/etc to a car park on the outskirts to then get your car and drive where you need but it’s going to need people to change their expectations which is unlikely in the short term.

Of course you dont just build a city all at once (apart from in China) but you design the principals, infrastructure and ideas for it to be built around.

Realistically, a new city will not have those jobs and therefore people will need/want to drive to jobs elsewhere.

They seem to be removing all inner city employment in Cambridge, every local business on a large plot is being encouraged (by offering planning permission) to up sticks and move out of the city to make way for massive blocks of rabbit hutch buy-to-let flats. Talk about creating a car dependant society…..

Nuke Slough?!?!

It’s grammar school provides all our top politicians and leading figures in The Establishment!

Well as a new town dweller (Milton Keynes) it’s now starting to come together and feel like a proper town and not just a scattering of new estates around a ghastly glass shopping centre but it’s taken 30 years to get there. 20 years ago if you wanted to go out for the night you had to trek to Northampton for a real town pub crawl otherwise you just had the nasty pub on you estate but now there are a large number of bars restaurants etc available so it’s not so bad.

The biggest cock up though is the public transport system. You can drive pretty freely around the place even in rush hour and cycling around is superb on the redways but if its got the absolute worst bus service I’ve ever experienced, which is why I took to cycling many years ago. They were supposed to build a monorail around the city which would have been paying dividend now but they chose the cheap option and went for the private car approach, now the demand for public transport is next to none so it has taken a back seat and no one wants to invest. If only they had geared the place up for a good public transport system I think the place could have been a real success.

Nuke Slough?!?!

It’s grammar school provides all our top politicians and leading figures in The Establishment!

OK, fair point. Just Nuke the grammer school and leave Slough alone….

infrastructure and ideas for it to be built around.

YES YES YES

OK, fair point. Just Nuke the grammer school and leave Slough alone….

Not a risk worth taking to be honest, area bomb nuke just to be sure.

Sorry.

Anyone been to Telford?

Really, you want to recreate that?

#shudders

I match your Slough and raise you Harlow New Town….

In defence of Harlow it does have cycle routes integrated into a lot of the new town elements and a lot of planned and maintained green spaces. That’s about all I think of in its favour though…

Build a place to be car free and anyone who can afford a car will choose not to live there. Which is great if you happen to be after social segregation and like creating slums. That’s what happened with the tower blocks of the 60s – anyone who could afford to leave, did so.

Just as a weird left field idea – how about we ask the average person what they want from a town rather than trying to enforce our ideas on them. You will end up with a town that has cars, bikes, buses etc and mix of housing.

This is because people will ask for what they are familiar with. The reason that they are familiar with it is because that is what towns have evolved to be. Evolution is slow but tends to deliver what is required in the end.

Radical ideas and getting everyone on bikes (or what ever your dream is) will only work through forced control (congestion charge) or because people want to do it anyway.

Where should we put the new city?

Quick check on light pollution shows where most people are and therefor where the greatest demand it.

I guess we should stick it near the existing light pollution but not in the middle of it.

There is a kind of triangle cornered by London, Birmingham and Bristol so how about something in the middle of that? Just north of Oxford I guess.

Just been on Google Earth and Enstone has had it. Close to the M40, north of Oxford and south of Birmingham nothing of relevance there except houses and field. There is a little airport and a few Formula 1 teams near by. It will become known as the ‘Monaco of England’ with a street circuit race track, a monorail, cycle paths and a jet pack parking zone!

Anyone see any objections?

I’m surprised no one has suggested we build this city on rock and roll 🙂

Someone always playing corporation games
Who cares they’re always changing corporation names
We just want to dance here someone stole the stage
They call us irresponsible write us off the page

Daventry could do with bulldozing and starting again.

Daventry could do with bulldozing and starting again.

I can understand bulldozing it but why start again?

donks
20 years ago if you wanted to go out for a fight you had to trek to Northampton

EFA