Alaska that never was: Seward's Success (2011) | Hacker News Reader

Alaska that never was: Seward's Success (2011)

historicalaska.blogspot.com

30 pointszeristor16 comments

Huh; well, it's not mentioned in the article, but "Seward's Success" is a play on the original purchase of Alaska. When it was first purchased from Russia, the US Secretary of State, William Seward, was ridiculed by opponents of the purchase; nicknaming the purchase "Seward's Folly".

Random historical context.

OP here, its a shame that I missed this posts moment in the sun.

The Wikipedia article, which I also posted to HN, but missed the limelight discusses why it was called Seward's Success:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seward%27s_Success,_Alaska

This looks much like Walt Disney's original plan for EPCOT. And similar to the one part actually built, the Contemporary Hotel at Disney World, with a monorail through the interior.

I came here to say this: the artist’s renderings of the housing and monorail look exactly like the Contemporary resort at EPCOT.

Besides Disney are there any other examples of "futuristic" cities?

Brasilia, the capital of Brazil, springs to mind. The 1930s World Fairs held in New York and San Francisco. I’ll probably have a facepalm-why-didn’t-that-other-one-occur-to-me moment after I hit ‘submit’, but that’s what’s come to mind so far. I’m a bit addled this morning.

Masdar City in Abu Dhabi is probably the closest modern equivalent to Epcot’s original vision, though it's debatable how much of the master plan will actually be built. Songdo (near Seoul) is less sci-fi-ish but much farther along in development.

As an aside, Niemeyer's buildings in Brasilia - particularly the cathedral and the palace - are phenomenal pieces of civc architecture.

songdo is nice to live in, but it didn't have good enough public transit / highway to seoul...

(1 / time-to-reach-seoul == your house price)

Airports, maybe.

Dubai?

Some wealthy cities look like that from a distance, due to monumental architecture, but the illusion often breaks down at ground level. Dubai, Singapore, etc.

The concept art looks eerily reminiscent of the buildings in Logan's Run (1), or perhaps vice versa.

1. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0074812/

Also the Usborne Book of the Future had its Future Cities section with a picture of a Domed City albeit on The Moon.

This came out in 1977, I'm not sure if there was a ground swell perhaps inspired by the Montreal Expo 67 which had a large Buckminster sphere:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montreal_Biosphere

I think the basic idea could be done for a fraction of the cost. Assuming the island didn't have cars you could have conventional buildings with narrow streets that would be used by snowmobiles in the winter and bicycles in the summer.

Ever been to downtown Montreal? They have all the buildings inter-connected either with tunnels below or skyways above. It all works pretty well in a region with long, cold winters.

I often wonder what would happen if some of these remote areas adopted special economic zone policies for the development of a new city.

Even more optimistic was the technique used to sell lots in the Coachella Valley. Someone once had a theory that several seasons of agriculture would somehow "terraform" the region into a paradise, and realtors eagerly seized upon it.

Compare "Apple Valley" and "Lucerne Valley", both of which I remember as having been convenient places for geology, as there was very little of the elsewhere common inconvenient interposed layer of biology.

(Because the valley floor soils had accumulated for thousands of years without having any nutrients washed away, the first several harvests upon irrigation were bumper with very little fertiliser input. Later harvests ... less so.)

"Fish, and plankton. And sea greens, and protein from the sea."

OT, but if you ever find yourself in Seward, AK you owe it to yourself to eat at The Cookery. The oysters are half price between 5 and 6pm.

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