Thread 16708599

Hey, /sci/. Are any of you guys interested in traditional architecture and walkable city layouts? I’ve been wondering how to design such a city layout to maximize quality and wanted to formulate the problem using Mathematical Optimization, but wanted to spitball some ideas here. This thread is a continuation of one i made on >>>/pol/ see >>508861878

Curious to hear your guys’ thoughts.

>t. /sci/fren

>>16708599 (OP)
Psychology isn't a real science. Go to /n/ if you want to discuss this in a somewhat serious manner or /v/ if you want to talk about the video game version that isn't reflective of reality.

>>16708599 (OP)
I'll name one: trees.
Without them cities become heat sinks, and get and stay way too fucking hot during sunny periods.

>>16708599 (OP)
Streets & roads, not stroads
https://youtu.be/ORzNZUeUHAM?t=45s

Houston, we have a problem
https://youtu.be/uxykI30fS54?t=4m20s

>>16708599 (OP)
The mathematics are very simple. An efficient road network is modeled via trees
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_(abstract_data_type)
the efficient layout is the "boring squares" layout: it provides the highest population density for the aforementioned road network with the simplest (ie most navigable and easy to manage) structure.

Ironically, sois hate both.

Open a history book, these cities were designed for horses and carts well before the invention of cars. They also had ghettoes and crime back then as well. This entire "issue" depends on a faulty understanding of history yet it certainly distracts from the real issues of the poor and oppressed. No matter how many times this is explained. The USA is a modern nation and it will never be Europe. We have something entirely new here on a completely different continent with a lot of potential.

>>16708599 (OP)
theres already a science of urbanism, go study that and see what you can improve

>>16708696
How do abstract trees predict conflicts at intersections?

>>16708665
>Streets & roads, not stroads
Dismissed for using an extremely close up of a tiny section of pic related to push their propaganda. This is a science board, not reddit. Please don't use such easily to disprove trash here.

>>16709015
Look up how arteries work in your body, anon.

>>16708637
dimwit take. in large groups individuals become predictable mathematical models. designing roads and paths requires throughput and demand modelling to determine everything from layout to physical materials. even minor things like the timing of a single traffic light can have cascading effects on the entire simulation and finished roadways.

>>16709046
Blood flow is solving a different problem: maximum flow which does not seem to guarantee short paths exceptinsofaras you can meet where the paths tofrom the heart meet. In other words it might be a good heuristic but I hope we can do better.

>>16709090
It’s the same problem. Traffic is exceptionally well modeled as incompressible fluid flow.

>>16709098
Incompressible fluids don't have a finite speed of sound. I'm not sure Lighthill's paper calls it a fluid because the only part they have in common is the part called a conservation equation.

One word.... hexagonal city blocks

Berlin works very well so just copy Berlin.
By that i mean that its very easy to move in Berlin. Its almost like travel is sending a text message

>>16708599 (OP)
City planning is mathematically extremely simple, the complexity rises from politics and finances not science or planning.
>>>/pol/

>>16708637
I’m not talking about pure Psychology. I’m talking about Mathematical Optimization Theory where the search space is the emotional response of your average citizen dwelling in such place (think of it as some multidimensional vector space) and you the city configuration that maximizes that response. Come on dude

>>16708696
What if there’s a way of quantifying aesthetic appeal, walkability, etc. and you subject your optimization program to those constraints as well?

>>16708737
It’s already gaining resurgence in popularity:

https://youtu.be/TVYo_SfF1xw

>>16709082
Finally a based take. Someone gets the concept of model abstraction and emergent behavior

>>16709209
> One word.... hexagonal city blocks
That’s three words. Also I’m not a bee I don’t want to live in a honeycomb hellscape. There’s a optimal point between depressing rigid order and anxious chaos which can be quantified and computed. See picrel

>>16709236
Berlin had become a hideous Brutalist shithole. Pass

>>16708599 (OP)
put a subway on every street and make the public transport bus a sandwich

>>16708599 (OP)
>>16709273
make every bus a footlong sub

>>16708599 (OP)
>le walkable cities
It’s very simple, let me break it down:
>Why are there no stores close by?
Because of robbers and shoplifters
>Why does it feel like there is no community?
Because of immigrants
>Why can’t I just go for a walk?
Because robbers and immigrants will attack you

If you are serious, clean up your criminals and get rid of your immigrants, and your cities will be “walkable” overnight. Any other “solution” is a counterfactual pipedream

>>16709261
He's obviously not talking about the architecture you stupid FUCKING retard

>>16709241
P=NP is a political problem: just secure more resources and make it acceptable to give an answer after the last day.

>>16709282
>clean up your criminals and get rid of your immigrants, and your cities will be “walkable” overnight
Its not enough

Planning doesn't work

>>16709550
Yes, you also need to get rid of the junkies and homeless and other wastes of humanity.

But really once you've reached the point that it's possible to walk down the street without getting assaulted or robbed or sexually harassed or yelled at in arabic or stabbed in the foot with a used feces-encrusted heroin needle everyone left will just have cars anyway so there's honestly no point. Let the failures have their dystopian "walkable" cities and the rest can live in peace in the suburbs. That 1.5 mile trip to the grocery store will be our insurance that they will self-segregate in their containment zones.

>>16709236
>Its almost like travel is sending a text message
In the sense that every time you do it you risk prison time?

>>16708599 (OP)
>walkable city
Communist dog whistle

>>16709811
In my opinion insults should be illegal, because they are just how physical crimes get started. If someone insults you and you dont answer with another insult. you are seen as a bitch, if you do answer it will escalate to physical action.
An insult isnt like telling someone a hard truth, but an attack

>>16709810
No one is stopping them from having their walkable cities except their own leaders. City problems are self inflicted but they refuse to address them themselves. That's why they spend so much effort trying to convince everyone that Farmer Joe who lives 500 miles away is responsible for Mayor Tyrone being unable to send a crew out to fix a broken sidewalk.

>>16709251
I doubt city design can be optimised to maximise a quantifiable utility (in the economic and philosophical sense or the term). The sanest approach to this is breaking down urban planning into all the aspects you want to take into consideration (mobility, access to goods and services, commercial and industrial logistics, environmental aspects, aesthetics), setting easily quantifiable parameters such as costs, noise, air pollution, temperature, commute time, distances between key spots (such as homes and schools) and creating multiple scenarios where you'll compare how prioritising one or another aspect will influence parameters overall. Even if your team was somehow able to accurately quantify utility a priori (which would be a breakthrough in itself), a unified calculation would still allow for things like a design where schools are inconveniently far from homes but adults are happy that work and leisure are very close, ultimately increasing the positive emotional response while creating a bad model for a city. The creation of comparable scenarios to be analysed by human discernment allows for more reasonable choices.
Not to mention you need something digestable for the people involved in the decision-making process. Whether you like that or not, all studies made in a university department or bureaucratic institution will be subjected to the scrutiny a city council of elected representatives before being put to work. If all you can offer to these dimwits with law or PPE degrees is a mathematical model and a graph with curves plotted on Python, your method will be dismissed as opaque and your studies will be left to rot in some advisor's cloud drive.

>>16709251
Yes humans are just robots and should just live according to algorithm for the most optimized living

>>16708599 (OP)
>maximize quality
Quality of what? Walkability? Quality of Life? Safety? Economic potential? I don't know what you mean

The biggest problem I see with modern cities is transit.
It's difficult to walk in cities, but it's also difficult to drive in cities. Simply getting around cities is challenging.

To get the obvious out of the way, there's no such thing as a no-cars city when speaking of walkability. You don't create a walkable city by simply banning cars, all that will do is render your city inaccessible to infrastructure. Shops need large vehicles to deliver their goods and these must come right up to the building. Also people don't always want to live in the city and will need to travel to the city. And finally, cities are big, people can't be expected to walk from one end to the other.

I think underground transport infrastructure is the solution to this.
All the trains and cars go underneath in a vehicles-only environment, with an abundance of entry and exit points allowing them to interact with the surface. And all the people can freely walk atop the ground.
It's like how in buildings, we hide all the cables and pipes behind the walls. They're still there and doing their job, they're just not in the way.

As it currently is, we need cars just as much as we need pipes... they're just in the way.

>>16710015
side note. The picture shows London, but I'm not trying to say that London is a good example of a walkable city, it's not, however its undergound network is good. If they replicated the underground network but for cars, it would solve the car problem.

>>16710017
>t. Elon Musk

>>16710015
The next most prominent issue is crime

This problem cannot be solved with city planning.
College campuses have long been designed with combatting political gatherings in mind, that is to say, they do not have wide open squares for which large groups of people can organize large protests. Their spaces are made narrow and intimate, you are always in some corner of a campus but never a prominent center.
However as you may have noticed, this is completely ineffective because controlling humans through such design is just generally not that effective.

like trying to save a sinking ship with a pail of water. It removes water yes, but it's not going to save the ship.

Only law and order can stop crime, and only culture can prevent crime from ever emerging to begin with.
The police must do their duty properly without complacency or corruption, and parents and educators must do their duty also.

>>16710018
As silly as Elon Musk is, proposals to build vast underground infrastructure for cars is as sound an idea of building vast underground infrastructure for trains.

>>16710019
Another prominent isuse with cities is the feeling of the "concrete jungle"
That soulless, unnatural vibe that many cities have.

This is a problem of architecture. For the most part, buildings in cities are just not very nice to look at, and the overall plan of the city is exhausting.

>>16710021
Architecture does not need to be expensive to be nice, it simply needs to be decisive.
This is an apartment block which in terms of raw utility, is no different than a commie block. But by adding a pitched roof (which makes a building feel like a house), painting the buildings, and varying the design to be more irregular. It becomes a not too disagreeable place to live

>>16708696
and by sois you mean trumpanzees right?

>>16710023
for comparisan.
While of course there are other issues with living in commie blocks, as far as the building itself goes, it can be made to be far less depressing by simply choosing to make it look nice. Painting a building is not very expensive

>>16710025
The solution to the city planning is simple.
You just simply make the city smaller. Rather than having one big city, you have 20 smaller "cities" bundled together, who act both as a unity, but also independently.

Where each smaller city has within it all the necessary things for people to live in, shops, schools, parks, courts, jobs, etc. With allowed exceptions being things like the heart of government, which obviously must be in the heart of the city and there can only be one of them.

Each smaller city should strive to be distinct from another, and even adopt its own unique name. They should feel like their own places and not merely a distrct of a bigger city.
When you are in one of these smaller cities, even though you infact in a much larger collection of buildings that stretches on for many miles... it does not feel like it, instead it feels like you are in a smaller area.

>>16710030
And to tie up that little problem of the "heart" of the city.
That "heart" should be a largely useless city outside of its important function. Nobody should live there, Nobody should go there for anything other than important business.

A sort of Pyongyang Capital type place, that is only filled with government offices and large ceromonial squares and monuments, but is not really a place anyone lives in.

>>16709253
>We did it, walkable city! you need no cars!
>population of 4000 people, size like a Village of 500 pop but with apartment buildings

is this a joke?