It’s July 4th, let’s think of something bright and happy. Lets build a new city, designed to allow for easy expansion over many generations of growth. Some part of me is suspecting that this is my subconscious trying to tell me to stop blogging. I know nothing about urban design, but my overly proud CS mind is yelling: “but it’s just a ring buffer with random replacement!” So, here we go, happy July 4th everyone!

Designate a city center. Build outward, radially, say northward. An arc of the circle looking like a slide of pizza—the name for this shape, oddly, is a sector. Perhaps it can be one radian wide and along radius of several kilometers long. Major transportation “beltways” are now straight line routes lay on the immediate outside of the zone(each on its own radius), also radiating from the center. The straight transportation pathways are great because the vehicles only need to travel in straight line most of the time. Some work can be put into optimizing city design in this linear layout.

Zoning shall be by rings that are concentric with the city and incidental to the current developmental sector. There are some obvious ideas like putting garbage centers on the outside, governance buildings on the inside. Convenience (Shopping, restaurants) and public utilities(hospital, fire company, police, park, etc) can be zoned at regular intervals along the radius for easy access.

Density of population is highest in near the city center and decreases as you travel away from the city center. So imagine something like the city from sci-fi where buildings are especially high in the center and drops exponentially traveling outward. Ranches and mansions, then SFH on the outside, town houses and then condos, efficiencies, and sleeping pods towards city center.

When the city feels like upgrading, it establishes a development sector of several kilometers by sweeping clockwise. The new sector can be longer than the last city development zone. As the city builds new components like libraries, schools, etc, the new buildings can be placed near the old building but within the new development sector. This means people who use the new facility have almost identical travel pattern as they had before the growth. Instead of turning left off of the highway(radialways) exit ramp, one would turn right and voila, the brand new library. Similar matter with plumbing, sewers, electricity, Internet, connecting with the previous generation is easy physically because of the proximity. The building in the new development sector means there will be minimal disruption to life in the previous zones. The new sector is occupied as the new population is added to the city by reproduction or immigration.

As dangerous as segregating population by age or by economic class sounds, it does present us with an opportunity to grow our society in a planned manner. The new development zone can implement new rules of law and social conventions. Instead of squeezing the radical people in with everyone else, we can throw them into a brand new city, where they, and the whole greater city, have the ability to try out something completely new. The developmental zone. New economy, new money(like bitcoins), new tech(the Internet, mobile phones, self driving cars, street video monitoring, robotic police, …) new laws(universal healthcare, new institution of marriage with fully integrated insurance, financial, social, medical adjustments of benefit and responsibilities. Maybe new traffic laws like we can all drive on the left, UBI, min/max wages, min/max work hours, licensing to kill, etc.), maybe even a new more efficient language—everything is written and spoken in the new language. In the least, the new city can enforce a new coding convention in a new programming language.

An equal opportunity system may be implemented by subsidizing all immigrants who wants and is accepted to work or live exclusively in a new zone with universal income. An immigrant from an old city block requires that their old wealth be frozen or otherwise render unusable in the new city zone. (They can go back to where they came from and use that wealth there) Because of all the political differences, this sector may have different voting system than the previous. But in the new city sector, everyone is “born” equal. It’s like a brand spanking new sector of America as it were in 1700’s—and you can have one every few decades.

To stimulate growth, the city will never replace any dysfunctional facilities. Old power generators and factories will be abandoned and demolished. But new building will not happen on the lot until another development zone incidents that plot of land. After the development zones sweep all the way around and use up the last swath of land, the next development zone needs to demolish the oldest zone. Hopefully the zone has been deserted and demolished for some generations by this time. One can even imagine the funding for each of the development zones to include land reclamation costs so that by the time demolition begins, the effort is fully anticipated and paid for. The benefit of only building next to live technology and order of people that were recently developed. We never have to connect to century old telephone wires or asbestos laden drainage pipes.

Btw, I’m watching the tv series bat women. Does anybody find it really annoying that bat women is quite hot, but then you kind want to be her when she flirts with her gf… man, this will really screw with male viewers minds. Personally I find it really offended that it takes a lesbian women to be bat women, I mean what’s wrong with a straight women, is it so hard to imagine a straight women to be bat women? Again, my eyes rolling into my head because I’ve seen it done once long ago but someone else who should be finding this offensive. Kinda weird to have people stuck in your head for long long time. Anyways, America just ended it’s special relationship with Hong Kong due to Chinese changing of their laws. The Nimitz and Ronald Regan are in the South China Sea to watch Chinese military exercises. And covid19 yet rages.

Thus, we have described a geographical-versioning system to choreograph the advancement our socioeconomic and sociopolitical system along with its physical infrastructure. The geographic feature of the city plan minimizes impact on existing population but maximizes the freedom with which the new part of the city may develop. The proposal plans to facilitate centuries of future growth over many many human generations.