The city of the future looks like a former military bunker in Taipei (2016)(blog.duncangeere.com) |
The city of the future looks like a former military bunker in Taipei (2016)(blog.duncangeere.com) |
Cities in Japan are much better put together, but I prefer the chaotic, gritty feeling of Taipei, and Treasure Hill is an interesting segment of that.
(I suppose this is a bit of a lazy question, but I couldn't easily find anything conclusive when I searched, and I bet there are interesting angles on the idea that I haven't even considered.)
I actually used to live in a rented "house" in the place the article is about, probably around 1994-1995. Most of my neighbors were very old veterans, with a handful of NTU students who were rarely seen.
Talking with my veteran neighbors was fascinating for me. Most of them had stories of the Civil War and some had fought in WWII. They were from all over China and I had great difficulty understanding a lot of them. Even my wife, who grew up in Taiwan had trouble - I distinctly remember one neighbor, "Uncle Bo", who had suffered a stroke and was basically abandoned there by his family, who pronounced the number 9 like, "kyu" (like Japanese), among many other pronunciation quirks. I found out later that this is common in some dialect in mainland China, but I forgot where/which dialect.
The living conditions were pretty ... not great, with eroding concrete, scorching hot in the summer, and constant issues with moisture leaking in, but I think our rent started out at NT$2500 ($80 USD?), which was even cheap at that time. Our landlord later raised the rent to $3k and we "abandoned our post."
I still have a weird fondness for that time and place, though. It's conceivable that I am one of the last people some of those veterans told their stories too. People in Taiwan at that time were not terribly interested in stories old people told, so maybe I was even the _only_ person some of them ever told their stories too, but I went back there in 2019 and was happy to see all the work that had been done to record the stories and memories of my former neighbors in the artist village that is there now. I think there was even a little plaque for Uncle Bo, IIRC.
Looks cool though, and has a nice backstory.
Abandoned town (overgrown): :O
Especially during sunny days, when no storage is needed, it will be extremely cheap to air condition and desalinate seawater.
That ignores the purpose of the building codes even artists can die in fires (see https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_Ship_warehouse_fire). This is especially worse when you have families and children living there.
This city of the future sounds like nothing I want a part of.
Title should be "One architect's idea of the \"city of the future\" looks like a bunker"
If we required suburbs to support themselves economically, the suburbs would vanish.
Sounds about right.
The tradeoff: The US apartments are theoretically easier to evacuate in case of fire. They are also consequently poorly laid out of use, with ugly central hallways, and only one side of windows on most apartments.
These are peoples homes, the danger is probably less than many US ghettos or homeless encampments, how about we start bulldozing those which are unsafe and ugly if people homes have no meaning.
There's no reason you cant make communities not up to spec with current building codes safe. This is normal for historic buildings which have exceptions.
The Ghost Ship fire was a concert, I don't believe any killed were residents.
> This city of the future sounds like nothing I want a part of.
Nothing like never leaving the safety of the suburban home I guess, the new hacker ethos.
But just defining their around the lack of safety is a poor option. It's hard to tell from the article whether they just worked around the bureaucracy without fixing the issues or if they made it safe in non-standard ways too. And so everyone would probably be better served if there was a process for handling exceptions that actually assessed and documented that a non-standard method was used and that someone signed it off as safe enough, so that ambiguity wasn't there.
(And the world of Neuromancer isn't one I'd like to live in, as much as I loved reading about it)
"The Ghost Ship fire was a concert, I don't believe any killed were residents."
"One victim of the fire was a building resident."
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_Ship_warehouse_fire
They knew they had faulty electricity and they had a small fire before.
Not to be flip: I too wouldn’t want to live in a society where improvisation were the construction norm. But it’s not clear to me that all code requirements are life- or safety-critical.
It sounds like Treasure Hill was in fact emptied and “renovated” in the course of this “artist village” process [0]. One imagines that such a process may have addressed the life-critical deficiencies even if it couldn’t meet the more nitpicky code requirements that might apply to normal development.
[0] https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/treasure-hill-taipei
It depends somewhat on your definition of "critical. The 50s didn't have seat belts, and clearly most people survived. So "few" died in cars that there was opposition to year introduction.
I was recently in a country where smoke alarms are not "a thing". As is no-one had one, they simply don't exist. Sure there's the odd residential fire , but they're rare - single digits per year. Ladders kill more people than fire, but we sell a ladder to anyone, and you don't need a degree to climb one.
Building regulations are an important way of keeping people safe. They're a stamp of quality to buyers. Unfortunately they also seem to want to cover 100% of all cases all the time. And that final 0.01% is expensive, and time consuming. Which delays, or denies projects. Which results in fewer places to live. Which, dare I suggest, leads to homeless deaths.
Safety standards -are- important. Buildings falling down, or going up in flames, is obviously really bad. But equally not-building-at-all is dangerous. And regulators seem to give very little weight to that when adding another regulation.
Cities build of multiple well connected cores with high density going to lower with all needed services and sufficient workplaces available in each make lot of sense and is probably most self sustainable model.
The endless detached houses with minimal spacing and no services on other hand.
And for what it’s worth, other options don’t change the “one dude’s prosperity” part.
Ask someone to make a flood, earthquake and fireproof building and they can price it up and decide if they want to proceed.
One maimed human from an accident/incident/event that could have been prevented, and the cost can dwarf the expense of building better.
The Pacific rim is somewhere that is fairly prone to natural disasters. Here in NZ, an earthquake in Christchurch [1] killed 185 people, 115 of them in a single building that didn’t meet the building code. If that building’s defects were known, and it had been classed a work of art, that makes the situation worse in my view.
As others have noted, you can make old buildings safer. Can’t they do that?
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Christchurch_earthquake
Clearly if you are in an earthquake zone then earthquake protection are high on the list. If you are on a flood plain, then flooding needs to be managed send so on.
Now for my next part, I run the risk of being flippant. That's not my goal. Clearly the building code failed those 115 people, and their loss is 115 families in mourning. But, and I say this with all due contrition, that "only" 185 people died is a measure of regulation success, not failure. One building collapsed, but most survived (at least enough for people to get out safely.)
No doubt that building will be learned from, and there will be efforts to make every building perfectly safe. As you point out some building may be too expensive to rehabilitate.
Should those buildings be demolished? It's easy to count the dead from one gat fell down. It's harder to count the deaths from no-building, or a demolished building.
Obviously in an earthquake zone, earthquake regs are critical. No argument there.
But what about a million small regs that add up to real cost, but offer minimal gains? Each seems, in isolation, to be Important, but their collective protection seems marginal.
Again, it can seem cavalier to say "good enough", when "perfect" saves lives. Its easy to count lives cost with "good enough". It's harder to count lives lost to "perfect".
Alas I do not live in Christchurch so I can't comment to this specific case. However, in general new buildings are subject to new codes, where old buildings may not be.
Even to this day, all that undeveloped farmland is dirt cheap compared to the hive life, and yet people vote with their feet and their money for the hive. For a substantial proportion of them, the first step is to exchange the countryside life specifically for this informal/improvised condition of dwelling, just to be close to the hive.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_cities_throu...
Mass urbanization into megapolies is 200 years old at best. With very few exceptions in older eras that didn’t house a big portion of humans in given eras.
I imagine in the future only the very rich will choose to live in some cities, the very poor will mostly have no choice and have to live there and large swathes of the middle class will love to get out into the country/small villages if their jobs allow it.
Same applies to urban living.
Banding together to improve our chances of survival? Yeah. In the past it was a few dozen, now it's a few hundred thousand. I don't understand this notion that living in the woods or something is human nature. Working together to grow beyond that is human nature.
And you don’t need to live in a single city. Banding together includes communities sticking together.
Birth rates in cities suggest there may be issues with dense cities too. Mouse paradise experiments and all that jazz.