Vertical cities

[RainDreamer]

1 minute ago, magnemoe said:

Vertical farming makes even less sense, the construction cost is the real killer here, yes its an lack of good farmland, however its far cheaper ways to make it than skyscrapers, ways who has been used in thousands of years. Even standard greenhouses are far cheaper. Energy cost its also an issue, if you have to supply heat and light it cost far more energy to transport the fruit a 1000 km now anything except expensive fruits make zero sense outside of a few settings like fresh salat in space or an base in Antarctica 

I always thought that is like, the last resort when human finally used up all available land and the only way to make more food to feed more people is to utilize the space above already used land. 

[Atlas2342]

4 hours ago, Darnok said:

But this is nonsense, we could build like that in times when our main transport vehicle was horse, but today we have small, easy to use and fast vehicles that can transport us on large distances very fast... but we are making towns vertical and put speed limits on cars instead of go other way and build larger horizontally towns with good access for parking spots and roads.

I'm pretty sure large horizontal towns would affect the environment greatly...and for other reasons stated by the OP...

[Emperor of the Titan Squid]

Think Fuller.

[Stargate525]

6 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

Nobody "truly owns the space"...

Just calculate:    length of your daily road to your job and back * width of the street * 100 m. Then divide it by the number of people you meet there,
You will be surprised what a small volume you indeed use.

I am aware of the notion that property taxes are in fact rent and that you can't own property whatsoever. I personally find that argument to be reductivist and silly.

 

And what the hell does the volume of my street have to do with anything, much less how many people you interact with on a day-to-day basis?

[Nuke]

15 hours ago, Robotengineer said:

Why the heck build up? Wouldn't it be much easier to dig down, Dwarf Fortress style? (Apologies if this was addressed in one of the vids, I didn't watch them)

ground water would be an issue. round these parts you cant even have a funeral without a submersible pump and a generator running durring the service. in locations with a much lower water table you are still limited by depth. you pretty much have to dedicate a lot of energy to keeping the underground areas from flooding. a lot of mines have to do this, and inactive mines are often flooded.

Edited April 9, 2016 by Nuke

[nikolay-spb]

Nah, vertical is not good.

Low pressure, low temperature, high radiation, earthquakes...

Also how would you pump water up that high?

Digging into earth is much easier. Temperature is higher (that is very good for north cities) and earth crust takes load. Also you will get water from underground springs.

[Robotengineer]

14 hours ago, Bill Phil said:

Urban sprawl is a social problem and can't be solved by monolithic cities.

But you said that as the average and median wage go down it would solve itself. From what I've read and seen low wages tend to push people out of the urban areas, not bring them in. 

[Bill Phil]

18 minutes ago, Robotengineer said:

But you said that as the average and median wage go down it would solve itself. From what I've read and seen low wages tend to push people out of the urban areas, not bring them in. 

No, I said it should solve itself. Urban sprawl is unsustainable with a low wage. Transportation costs rise. So, it should stop and solve itself, if it weren't for the unpredictability of what can happen. We live in a world where loans are enormously common, so people may stay in the suburbs by using loans. Not only that but wages may not go down. Or the soon to be massive unemployment rates will screw up everything in every way.

[Angeltxilon]

Arcologies, layered cities, underground cities, all these are interesting concepts, but, we need really this?

I think that we will not have these types of structure until obtain very big space and transport problems, if these appear, of course.
Why? Simple because are more expensive than classical building and difficultly are applied without need.

Edited April 9, 2016 by Angeltxilon

[Stargate525]

9 minutes ago, Angeltxilon said:

I think that we will not have these types of structure until obtain very big space and transport problems, if these archieve appear, of course.
Why? Simple because is more expensive than classical building and difficultly appear without need.

That's actually another very good point. It's still FAR more cost-effective to build outwards, because globally we're still at a population density of 120 per mi^2. For reference, that's about as dense as Kentucky.

[Spaceception]

Just now, nikolay-spb said:

Nah, vertical is not good.

Low pressure, low temperature, high radiation, earthquakes...

Also how would you pump water up that high?

Digging into earth is much easier. Temperature is higher (that is very good for north cities) and earth crust takes load. Also you will get water from underground springs.

Why the heck would we build something for living 9.6 km high? It'd be more like .5 kms above ground, and .5 kms below ground, with a circumference of perhaps around hundred meters.

Edited April 9, 2016 by Spaceception

[magnemoe]

52 minutes ago, Stargate525 said:

That's actually another very good point. It's still FAR more cost-effective to build outwards, because globally we're still at a population density of 120 per mi^2. For reference, that's about as dense as Kentucky.

This, main reason for crowding is addresses, secondary is easy transport however this breaks down at very high density again. 
Travel is about time not distance, if people like the place they live and change work they will keep the apartment and commute to work in another mega building. 
This is the curse of cities, you can build insane transport solutions and they will be filled up because of this. 
Worse its no good solutions to this. 

[Stargate525]

4 hours ago, Spaceception said:

Why the heck would we build something for living 9.6 km high? It'd be more like .5 kms above ground, and .5 kms below ground, with a circumference of perhaps around hundred meters.

100 meter CIRCUMFERENCE? that's a building less than 100 feet on a side. That's smaller than the WTC towers were.

3 hours ago, magnemoe said:

This, main reason for crowding is addresses, secondary is easy transport however this breaks down at very high density again. 
Travel is about time not distance, if people like the place they live and change work they will keep the apartment and commute to work in another mega building. 
This is the curse of cities, you can build insane transport solutions and they will be filled up because of this. 
Worse its no good solutions to this. 

That's why you break it into villages. Everything you need daily has to be within that 500-1000 person bubble; transit outside that sphere needs to be rare.

[Spaceception]

Just now, Stargate525 said:

100 meter CIRCUMFERENCE? that's a building less than 100 feet on a side. That's smaller than the WTC towers were.

Erm... 100 meters is 328 feet, the Saturn V was 363 feet tall or 111 meters.

EDIT: I'm an idiot.

Edited April 10, 2016 by Spaceception
I'm a idiot

[Stargate525]

Just now, Spaceception said:

Erm... 100 meters is 328 feet.

Yes... And unless you're building a two dimensional tower, the circumference(distance around the whole thing) cannot itself be 100 meters. If it's a perfect circle, you're looking at about 100 feet from one side to the other. As I said, smaller than the WTC.

[Spaceception]

Just now, Stargate525 said:

Yes... And unless you're building a two dimensional tower, the circumference(distance around the whole thing) cannot itself be 100 meters. If it's a perfect circle, you're looking at about 100 feet from one side to the other. As I said, smaller than the WTC.

Look at the edit

[YNM]

Vertical cities ??? How about people who already in the slum areas ? Like, uh India ? Or China ? They won't be able to live in one...

If you think europeans and americans already have the problem now, those two countries (continents ?) have them from long ago. Yet we don't see any vertical cities to look at... Take another high-tech example : Tokyo metropolitan area (and a few good amount of cities around it). Same as before, they actually don't have that many tall buildings area compared to the size of the whole sprawl.

How to fix the problem, you ask ? Simple : Build smaller houses. Like in the slums. Or, like in Japan.

And for those of you who think that travel will be cramped, have no worries ; as long as the time-saving worth it, people will use that to the brim. Just find some good videos on how they load the commuter train in rush hour in Japan.

[GoSlash27]

Problem: People don't actually want to live in giant mega tower hives, eating soylent green and drinking each other's recycled urine...

[Spaceception]

Just now, GoSlash27 said:

Problem: People don't actually want to live in giant mega tower hives, eating soylent green and drinking each other's recycled urine...

The Japanese might be fine with it tbh.

[Bill Phil]

24 minutes ago, GoSlash27 said:

Problem: People don't actually want to live in giant mega tower hives, eating soylent green and drinking each other's recycled urine...

And people now don't want to drink water from a river where people bath. But people sure as heck used to be fine with it.

[HebaruSan]

World population is probably stabilizing (negative growth is common among first-world countries), and there's still a lot of desert that could be terraformed and settled. We probably won't get much more vertical than we already are.

[HoloYolo]

17 minutes ago, Spaceception said:

The Japanese might be fine with it tbh.

I hope you realize the capital of Japan, Tokyo, is the most populated capital in the world. There are so many people in one space that it's better to use only necessary space for people and not over expand. There are 4600 PEOPLE per square mile. Tokyo is crowded as hell.

[magnemoe]

3 hours ago, Stargate525 said:

That's why you break it into villages. Everything you need daily has to be within that 500-1000 person bubble; transit outside that sphere needs to be rare.

You misunderstand, this will only make it worse as you get friends within the 500-1000 people group so then you switch work you will not move you will commute.
Other option is far more control over you than you want. 

Traditional villages had too long travel time between each other so you had to work inside it, cars and trans changed this.  

[YumonStudios]

On 4/9/2016 at 6:57 PM, Spaceception said:

Also, would you be willing to eat lab grown meant? As long as it looks, smells, and tastes like meat?

Why naut?

On 4/9/2016 at 6:57 PM, Spaceception said:

 

CO2 scrubbers on the building of heavily polluted areas will help take out excess CO2 out of the atmosphere, releasing the Oxygen, and using the Carbon for 3-D printing

No. Just no. That's never going to be viable, simply due to the cost of Co2 scrubbers, and high energy use (and noise). Plastics will always be cheaper from hydrocarbons.

Not to mention we have a natural Co2 scrubber that produces viable products. It's called a plant.

On 4/9/2016 at 6:57 PM, Spaceception said:

 

3-D printing will turn junk into materials, making the use of (Most) metals obsolete as 3-D printing makes a large amount of materials almost, or as strong as metal, putting less of a strain on the amount of metal used on Earth, put simply, vertical farms, like space colonization, will greatly help reduce humanity's carbon footprint, and allow ecosystems to recover.

Yeah, not happening. I can see extensive recycling, but it's not going to replace metal mining, and it's definately not going to be able to be done from people's basements. People will probably buy 3D Printers and sell products to people who want them, as not everyone will be able to, or want those things in their houses. Also, metals need huge amounts of heat to melt, and that alone is a good reason to not have that in your house. Aluminium might be excusable though, it's lower temperature, and can be melted in a regular fireplace.

Recycling also needs large equipment to crush, flatten, sort, and melt materials. Not to mention it's an industry all by itself. The two combined kill this idea. Also, that equipment is freaking LOUD.

On 4/9/2016 at 8:57 PM, Northstar1989 said:

 

More compact urban development would require much higher transportation costs. 

Why? It should be lower, since you can walk from point A to point B instead of drive...

On 4/9/2016 at 7:13 PM, Robotengineer said:

Why the heck build up? Wouldn't it be much easier to dig down, Dwarf Fortress style? (Apologies if this was addressed in one of the vids, I didn't watch them)

We have more experience building up, and it's apparently cheaper.

On 4/9/2016 at 7:21 PM, Spaceception said:

True, but I'm talking about fully fledged vertical cities, not just a few here and there, but maybe the entire city being one giant building.

We need moar research!!

Isn't that the point of vertical cities?

No, that's a horrible idea. Building many smaller, but still large buildings is not only easier to build and maintain, it is also something people are a lot more used to. It's also evolutionary, which usually tends to win out, if spaceflight has taught me anything.

On 4/9/2016 at 8:10 PM, todofwar said:

I remember a study someone did where they created a rat utopia, but then ramped up the pop density. As the density increased they saw more and more aberrant behavior in the rats, they started eating each other even though they had enough food and things like that. There seems to be something about dense cities that sparks increased crime and other problems, probably because our monkey brains are evolved to handle 150 social relationships at max, anything beyond this and we start seeing people as scenery or obstacles. If we ramp up density like this you're going to have to take into account the psychological stress and have quite a bit of focus on community building. 

Yeah, if we have the tech to make vertical farms economical, then we should be able to build more buildings bigger and cheaper, which would mitigate this (more overall space, despite greater density per cubic meter of land). I would argue it is essential to make suburban people go to apartment buildings.

Also, giant parks and urban farms every km2 or so can mitigate this effect. So, for every km2 of city, there is .5km2 of farm or parkland. It should still be more dense than suburbs.

Also, here is a detailed account of one of those rat density studies:http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/22514/1/2308Ramadams.pdf

They apparently stopped interacting with others normally, and died out due to lack of childbirth.

The mice also stopped taking care of their children.

Scary stuff.

20 hours ago, magnemoe said:

This, its an question of costs, very high buildings are prestige projects, not something you do to save money / costs. See how large my **** is basically. 

Unless you like in Signapore or Japan, and land is $$$ as hell, than building up is cheaper than building out.

20 hours ago, magnemoe said:

Vertical farming makes even less sense, the construction cost is the real killer here, yes its an lack of good farmland, however its far cheaper ways to make it than skyscrapers, ways who has been used in thousands of years

20 hours ago, magnemoe said:

 Even standard greenhouses are far cheaper. Energy cost its also an issue, if you have to supply heat and light it cost far more energy to transport the fruit a 1000 km now anything except expensive fruits make zero sense outside of a few settings like fresh salat in space or an base in Antarctica 

You don't need to build skyscrapers, 4-story vertical greenhouses do well, and those are the only kinds of Vertical farms out right now. They are far cheaper, being made out of similar things used to make normal greenhouses, and also don't need a lot of lighting and a lot less extra power than you would expect.

http://permaculturenews.org/2014/07/25/vertical-farming-singapores-solution-feed-local-urban-population/

And even a 4-story greenhouse would produce huge efficiency increases- now you can farm even in the Canadian Shield, and not only do you have extra plant space, but also controlled conditions that increase efficiency and reduce pesticide and fertilizer use.

Currently, only building costs are holding it back.

21 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

Just calculate:    length of your daily road to your job and back * width of the street * 100 m. Then divide it by the number of people you meet there,
You will be surprised what a small volume you indeed use.

But just seeing so many people can give the feeling of overcrowdedness. Humans are intended to live in small groups, not huge cities.

22 hours ago, Darnok said:

 

But this is nonsense, we could build like that in times when our main transport vehicle was horse, but today we have small, easy to use and fast vehicles that can transport us on large distances very fast... but we are making towns vertical and put speed limits on cars instead of go other way and build larger horizontally towns with good access for parking spots and roads.

 

But it makes sense, urban sprawl is a serious problem, especially since cities are often located on prime farmland, and ecologically important deltas.

On 4/9/2016 at 9:44 PM, kerbiloid said:

 

The unavoidable robotization of industry and farming will unavoidably reduce both the cost of production and amount of people occupied in production of something.
As most of people will either be unoccupied or do unneccessary job, an average salary will be permanently decreasing.
This will suppress small companies and cause an agressive competition between the large corporations.
Also this will force all forms of unification and virtualization of the human lifespace (watch "Cloud Atlas" and the remake of "Total Recall" as an example), which will lead this competition to the battle of prices.

 

Will it though? That's happened 3 other times in the past (the 3 other industrial revolutions) and there are usually lots of jobs after words, as new oneas re created from new tech, and increased consumption.

On 4/9/2016 at 9:44 PM, kerbiloid said:

You can place millions of people more or less comfortably in a huge building several hundred meters in size - and thus you will need no city transport at all.
All you need to deliver anything from one side of such city to another: a several hundred meters high elevator (welcome to Dubai skyscrapers) and a electric carriage to move it 500 meters sideways.

Ideally, yes. However, modern cities are designed so that residential, commercial, and industrial districts are all seperate, primarily to improve real estate value(no one wants to live next to a factory), and since transportation isn't that expensive. Mass transit will become essential in these giant cities, like they are today.

On 4/9/2016 at 9:22 PM, tater said:

This will likely go the way of the previous megastructure movement of the 1960s.

 

??? What happened?

On 4/9/2016 at 9:13 PM, max_creative said:

You will need:

• oxygen tanks up high 
• really good structural stuff 
• really fast elevators 
• and lots of other stuff, like really tall cranes. 

Plus, what happens when a building collapses? That would be very bad...

Which is why enormous skyscrapers are a bad idea. Build more buildings taller, not one building enormous...

On 4/9/2016 at 8:57 PM, Northstar1989 said:

More compact urban development would require much higher transportation costs.  Theoretically the oil supply beginning to dry up and being unable to keep pace with demand could drive this, but electric cars will ultimately allow us to just power our automobiles with coal and wind power... (preferably Wind, it's actually the cheapest power source- as coal produces a lot of pollution and CO2 that is not accounted for in its direct costs- some estimates indicate the TRUE cost of coal is as much as 3x the cost currently paid by consumers- as the ecological, health and property damage from the sulfur and nitrogen emissions, increases in lung-cancer and acid-rain from a coal power plant are not currently paid for by the consumer of the electricity...)

But it's already happening. Denser cities are more efficient, and can be serviced by mass-transit. Modern urban planning favours building up, rather than out.

On 4/9/2016 at 8:57 PM, Northstar1989 said:

As for more compact farming- there are a lot of solutions to obtain more food from less land we're already not making use of.  For one, genetic engineering of crops is still really just in its infancy compared to the increases in crop yields we could obtain with more aggressive adoption of the technology. 

Because people hate GM crops.

On 4/9/2016 at 8:57 PM, Northstar1989 said:

  And finally, there's a lot to be said for growing crops underground in manmade caves, Dwarf Fortress style (just without the giant man-eating spiders), with growth-lamps, as doing this allows you to carefully control the temperature, humidity, and keep out many pests/weeds entirely (in fact, some studies have shown it's CURRENTLY economical in certain abandoned mining tunnels, with the gains in productivity making up for the costs of electricity).  All of these will see more widespread use as increasing population drives increases in the the cost of food, driving farmers to increase yields in progressively more expensive ways, long before we start making serious use of vertical farming...

Energy costs are probably too high for underground farming due to needing artificial lighting. And I doubt mining tunnels have enough ventilation...

Build up in skinny 10-4 story buildings with crops and conveyors to move the crops very slowly. Then you have much lower energy costs, as you have free energy from the Sun.

On 4/9/2016 at 8:57 PM, Northstar1989 said:

Further, multi-cropping (that is, planting multiple crops in the same field- such as vegetables beneath apple trees, or potatoes in the same fields as brussel sprouts...) really doesn't see enough use either, mainly as it's difficult to automate and thus requires a lot of labor.

This could change when robots become more advanced.

 

Edited April 10, 2016 by YumonStudios

[YumonStudios]

20 hours ago, RainDreamer said:

I always thought that is like, the last resort when human finally used up all available land and the only way to make more food to feed more people is to utilize the space above already used land. 

The biospheric collapse would probably destroy civilization before that happened. Farms actually produce Co2.

9 hours ago, Angeltxilon said:

Arcologies, layered cities, underground cities, all these are interesting concepts, but, we need really this?

I think that we will not have these types of structure until obtain very big space and transport problems, if these appear, of course.
Why? Simple because are more expensive than classical building and difficultly are applied without need.

But we already have space problems, especially in East Asia.

8 hours ago, Spaceception said:

Why the heck would we build something for living 9.6 km high? It'd be more like .5 kms above ground, and .5 kms below ground, with a circumference of perhaps around hundred meters.

0.5 kms below ground is a bad idea, the water table is often only a couple feet below ground.

It's probably the reason we build up instead of down.

4 hours ago, Stargate525 said:

100 meter CIRCUMFERENCE? that's a building less than 100 feet on a side. That's smaller than the WTC towers were.

That's why you break it into villages. Everything you need daily has to be within that 500-1000 person bubble; transit outside that sphere needs to be rare.

Modern cities are heavily interconnected. I agree that once we get everyone into skyscrapers, having park space is essential, but they need to be close enough to make transit between blocks less than 5 minutes.

2 hours ago, YNM said:

Vertical cities ??? How about people who already in the slum areas ? Like, uh India ? Or China ? They won't be able to live in one...

If you think europeans and americans already have the problem now, those two countries (continents ?) have them from long ago. Yet we don't see any vertical cities to look at... Take another high-tech example : Tokyo metropolitan area (and a few good amount of cities around it). Same as before, they actually don't have that many tall buildings area compared to the size of the whole sprawl.

How to fix the problem, you ask ? Simple : Build smaller houses. Like in the slums. Or, like in Japan.

And for those of you who think that travel will be cramped, have no worries ; as long as the time-saving worth it, people will use that to the brim. Just find some good videos on how they load the commuter train in rush hour in Japan.

Smaller houses face psychological problems. Look above for the mouse experiments, and how normal behavior broke down in crowded spaces.
If you can build bigger houses economically, and people will buy them, I see no reason not to.

1 hour ago, HebaruSan said:

World population is probably stabilizing (negative growth is common among first-world countries), and there's still a lot of desert that could be terraformed and settled. We probably won't get much more vertical than we already are.

Only problem is that you need a HUGE amount of water to terraform a desert. Good freaking luck getting that water.