A $10B Experimental City Nearly Got Built in Rural Minnesota (2018)
I love coming up with ideas for future cities.  I have previously even hired digital artists&#x2F;CAD developers to help me illustrate my ideas.<p>To me there are lots of obvious structural things that are outdated about cities.  And it is fun to think of out-there concepts to radically change or maybe improve things.<p>Recently I was in Gravity Sketch making a 3D model in VR of part of my idea.  That 3d model looks terrible now and has only about 40% of the concepts included.  Right now it is a series of connected enclosures, sort of like domes but sort of not like domes.<p>Basically there will be like a grid of these enclosures that are connected by two or more levels of roadways for small autonomous cars (pods) -- most of which will be for single passengers.<p>Each megastructure is a little bit like a tree inside of an egg.  Spiraling along the internal edges will be roads for traversing the levels.  There will be something like 7 or 8 vertical levels, each of which is maybe 4 or more stories tall.  The branches of the tree are steel holding up platforms.<p>Each main level has two sub-levels: one for infrastructure, and one for people and buildings.  The infrastructure level contains the roadways for the autonomous pods, as well as things like water, electricity, sewer, networking, and basement&#x2F;cargo reception.<p>The main level contains multistory buildings, walking roads, and a significant amount of space set aside for a type of permacultural-landscaping.  So there will be zoning requiring that space to be developed as for example food forest with aquaponics built in.  This will be on all levels and platforms.  So in the city charter or whatever is this requirement to dedicate a certain amount of space to this type of agriculture which is also landscape.  The idea is not to realistically produce all of the food or even a great proportion of it, but to enable some fresh produce to be at hand and to ensure that people are connected with food sources.  The idea is that by making agriculture a more integral part of the city, there may be more attention placed on agriculture by ordinary people and there may be more attention placed on making it more sustainable or something.  Also it seems wasteful to just use landscaping for decoration.<p>Another aspect is that I would like alternating bands of facade on the egg.  So there will be strips of something like glass but which will permit UV B (required for Vitamin D production) in a double layer.  And then strips of a thick insulated layer with an energy-harvesting sheathing that incorporates solar panels and ducted wind turbines sort of embedded in tunnels in the solar-cell-covered undulating surface.<p>It seems that you would need strategies for passive and active heating and cooling.  Such as automated shading, opening and closing ventilation, and heat recovery ventilators.  Etc.<p>It would be nice if some type of glass could be used largely for central walkways in order to increase the penetration of light.<p>Anyway I have a bit more that I wrote up before.<p>Multi-Level City Concept<p>In a high-density urban core, many skyscrapers exist in a relatively small area.  This makes it possible to house many people and support many businesses in that small footprint.<p>However, in these areas, while most buildings may have 50 or more floors, there is only a single level containing public infrastructure: the ground level, which contains all of the vehicle transportation, water, sewer, electricity, and communication.<p>In this scenario, there is actually more private infrastructure in the buildings themselves than infrastructure in the public level.  This is because each structure is a self-contained, privately designed and privately maintained entity.  So transportation (elevators), electricity, communication, water, sewer must all be facilitated by each private structure.  In addition, each of these is connected to the public infrastructure on only one level.<p>This presents multiple problems.<p>Problems with Single-Level Infrastructure in Many-Level dense Urban Cores<p>Since vehicle traffic can only move on one level, congestion can be extreme.<p>Multi-Level Public Inter-Building Public Infrastructure for Dense Urban Cores<p>Supporting Autonomous Passenger and Cargo Delivery<p>Suppose that there was a way to build a type of multi-level skeleton for a city.  So instead of a single roadway at only ground level, there were several different roadways at different floors of a superstructure.  This superstructure would be designed to support the installation of modular construction.<p>With this system, delivery of goods by small autonomous vehicles could, for example, proceed directly from the back cargo door of a restaurant on level 8, to your front door on level 2 a few blocks away, strictly over the public roadways which connect not only different buildings but also at different levels.  Vehicles could traverse levels over graded roadways or perhaps some type of small vehicle elevator system.<p>---------------------------------------------<p>Another _totally different_ idea that I had quite awhile ago was <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;runvnc.github.io&#x2F;tinyvillage&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;runvnc.github.io&#x2F;tinyvillage&#x2F;</a>