Comment by nirimda | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nirimda | Hacker News Reader

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> There are lots of planned cities that are natural experiments in this... They ... produced mixed results at best, eg Brasilia's original strictly separated zoning has been widely panned as a disaster.

I'm not sure if there's been some slight shift of topic here. By "planned", I think we originally meant "deliberately built in relatively undeveloped land". But then you mention as an example of a failure of deliberately building a city in relatively undeveloped land, an example of a failure of micromanagement (also a kind of planning, but one that is completely orthogonal to the circumstances of the city's founding).

So does Brasilia's original strictly separated zoning show the problems of strictly separated zoning, or does it show the problems of deliberately building a city where none was before? It's possible we just had the wrong idea of what you need to have a great city during the 20th century isn't it? Washington DC, for instance, is an artificial city with top-down planning, but it was built at a time when people had different ideas about what made a great city, and it doesn't really seem to be a failure. It doesn't even appear on your list, despite being the case that served as a template for your other examples.

(I don't know. I don't know anything about Brasilia other than that it is the capital of Brazil.)

Brasilia was designed exactly to not be what it became. The original plan from Lucio Costa introduced the concept of "superblocks" which would be more-or-less self-sufficient, having shops, residential apartments, schools, parks and so on every few superblocks.

The military dictatorship decide to introduce strict zoning (probably lifting ideas that were happening in the USA during the 60s), completely destroying the urbanistic approach of the original design.

It's a failure of micromanagement from authoritarianism, inspired by the misguided (and nowadays considered idiotic) approach to urban design of the USA in the 50s onward.

>Washington DC, for instance, is an artificial city with top-down planning, but it was built at a time when people had different ideas about what made a great city, and it doesn't really seem to be a failure.

As I recall, DC was designed by George Washington himself (probably with help from his friends), back in the late 1700s, but the city as a whole was not: what they designed was the Federal district only. The Capitol, the White House, the National Mall between them, etc. Over time, this grew with the additions of the Smithsonian buildings and many other things.

The thing is, no one lives there. That district is entirely devoid of residential areas in fact, and with very little commercial stuff if any. All that stuff is mostly to the north, and I don't see any evidence of it being planned top-down at all, except maybe the original street layout which is largely a simple grid, with lettered streets running east-west, and a few interesting things like Dupont Circle (which probably came later).

DC is definitely not a place I'd call a "master planned city" or "artificial city"; it's evolved far too much in the last 300+ years.

What is your source here?

I am from DC and it's pretty well known that it is a planned city. Look up the L'Enfant Plan.

I'm not really sure what you are talking about.

Go look at the map of the L'Enfant Plan. Now compare it to a map of modern-day DC. They aren't the same: the modern city is much larger. The original plan just covers the federal district, street layouts, etc. Georgetown is just a name on the side of the plan, for instance, with no actual plan. The original plan certainly doesn't include the subway system, or Union station and all the train lines, or many many other things.

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