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Comment by ksynwa | Hacker News Reader

> This layout seems designed partly for social control - during zero-COVID, authorities could lock down 10,000 people by simply guarding a few entrance gates. The wide roads would also make it easy to move military forces through the city.

This seems like a bit of a leap? Apart from zero covid, which I say is an exceptional scenario, I haven't heard of Chinese people socially controlled en masse into their home through use of force. The idea of military driving through the middle of city is even more ridiculous.

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Most western cities were designed with such things in mind. Look at Haussmann's renovation of Paris. Why do you think all those armories were built in US industrial cities at the turn of the 20th century? The odd thing is he makes it sound like China designs its cities with concerns not seen in the West.

> The idea of military driving through the middle of city is even more ridiculous.

Okay… https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1989_Tiananmen_Square_protes...

Some people either forget, or worst, do not know it happened. But they are very opinionated…

It isn't like people sat in smoke filled rooms and pre-conspired their cities for pandemic controls, that part's silly but the way a lot of Chinese cities are constructed has its roots in this high modernist, Le Corbusier, Robert Moses style design[1].

Chinese urban planning is very much heir to this idea of regular, orderly urban development, in the parts of cities that aren't old and premodern. Everything has its place, the apartment complexes, the roads, the recreational areas, how people move, and so on. It's become very fashionable to rail against this in particular in Western intellectual circles but honestly having been to China but also to places like Chandigarh, I've had a pretty positive impression.

[1]https://99percentinvisible.org/article/ville-radieuse-le-cor...

Not sure. In post-WWII Warsaw in Poland, a similar pattern was employed (of very broad boulevards). Allegedly so that even after the city is nuked, there is enough space for two-way traffic between the rubble.

Covid was an exceptional scenario and also a convenient test period for that control. As for moving military forces into cities - it would be very viable. Look at any situation on leaked social media where police or state actors are shutting down protests - for example when masses of Chinese citizens demonstrate against their employer or real estate scammers or banks or whatever. The authorities have an easy ability to bring lots of personnel and gear to any situation quickly. Then there’s the dystopian stuff that ranges from social credit scores preventing use of public transit to police drones patrolling the air between apartment buildings telling citizens to stay home. The Chinese society is under mass control all the time from all sides.

It's not a secret or chinese thing. European kings and emperors also had their cities remodeled to stack the odds in their favor in case they had to deal with uprisings.

Washington, D.C. was laid out to be defensible against the military technology of the time. Hence all those circles and radials with good fields of fire.

Well this is the shittiest reduction of L'Enfant's plan that I've come across.

Here, have a shitty reductionist reply.

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