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Comment by bane | Hacker News Reader

I subscribe to reddit's /r/retrofuturism and I've formulated a hypothesis about this. The future we used to want was full of what I like to call "garden cities" [1][2][3][4]. Massive structures spaced far away from each other and in between carefully curated green spaces. The obvious problem with this vision is that getting around anywhere turns into a huge problem. This appealed to transportation companies and car makers came out on top and we ended up with the rest of the problems, without ending up with the garden cities. It turns out these visions of the future are bad for a whole host of reasons, transport was only one.

1 - http://static1.1.sqspcdn.com/static/f/415544/5082948/1260951...

2 - http://www.fldesign.net/blog/images/imgRetroFuturism3.jpg

3 - https://youtu.be/Rx6keHpeYak?t=379

4 - http://www.wired.com/2014/07/a-north-korean-architects-crazy...

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The "garden city" movement was a thing, but not quite what you're describing. "Towers in a park" was an organizational scheme for cities proposed by Modern architects, such as Le Cobusier in his Ville Radieuse proposal, and is maybe more like what you're thinking.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden_city_movement http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ville_Radieuse

Brasilia is definitely the kind of alternate future garden city I'm thinking of. I mean, can you imagine walking between buildings at opposite ends of that area? In that heat?

Why not build taller buildings? Crammed together on a grid, provide underground walking areas?

There's certainly no shortage of cars there https://www.google.com/maps/place/Bras%C3%ADlia+-+Federal+Di...

Perhaps there is a different term for the type of city you are thinking of, generally cities such as Letchworth[1] are moreso what is known as a garden city.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letchworth

Absolutely. The greenbelt defined cities like Letchworth are definitely a different phenomenon. I'm thinking more of cities as gardens.

Letchworth is a Garden City. Brasilia is a "towers in a park" type Modernist city. You're interested in "towers in a park."

Historically, cities like Brasilia were designed around the logic of the car. For example, most roadway intersections feature over and underpasses, cars are completely segregated from pedestrians. By most accounts, it doesn't work so well.

There's got to be a better term for it.

But yeah, this kind of design doesn't seem to work well no matter the density of the buildings. Cities really need to work around pedestrians.

Have you read William Gibson's "The Gernsback Continuum"?

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

A dodgy Russian site has the text http://lib.ru/GIBSON/r_contin.txt

No, but this sounds kind of amazing. I'm adding it to my queue right now!

I'm going to give the TV adaptation a quick watch also https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1BmRiDxrnPQ

Brilliant story. A number of years back, I used the theme as an intro to a consulting report I wrote. It's probably the best counterpoint to the Zeppelin-filled skies of utopian science fiction of a certain period.

lib.ru is not exactly dodgy. It's the oldest Russian online library, founded in 1994.

Perhaps he meant dodgy in the sense of "dishonest". I.e. ignoring the spirit if not the letter of the Berne Convention?

I'm by no means a legal scholar, but this story was apparently published in 1981. Russia agreed[1] to Berne protection for 1973 and later work. So why is the full text of the story available at that link?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_law_of_the_Russian_F...

There's also Paulo Soleri. In his plan for the Newark Airport, he proposed to house the entire population of New Jersey. The runways would have been on the roof.

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