From: Eric Watt Forste (arkuat@idiom.com)
Date: Wed Sep 29 1999 - 12:48:31 MDT
Apparently Anders Sandberg <asa@nada.kth.se> writes:
> QueeneMUSE@aol.com writes:
> > A planner would plan the "growth" of the buildings,
> > why not whole cities. They could even be planned
> > to grown over a certain time frame, as population increased.
> I wonder how to program a graceful aging into the structure. Maybe
> that will be a natural result as adaptive buildings adapt to their
> environment and each other.
Referring to Jane Jacobs book /The Death and Life of Great American
Cities/ again, she has made much of the necessity for buildings of
mixed ages for the economic vitality of a city neighborhood. Old
buildings that have already had their construction costs amortized
can be dedicated to fringier projects (like cryonics research, to
take a real-world example that many list readers will be familiar
with) that are important drivers of innovation. Neighborhoods
containing exclusively newer buildings have less diversity of use
and are generally less interesting than neighborhoods with buildings
of mixed age... this is sometimes also true of neighborhoods where
all the buildings without exception are very old. A mix of new
(expensive) buildings and old (cheap) buildings seems to work best
in practice in real cities. So among the patterns of growth, you'd
not want to fill in new land all at once, and you'd want to have
new buildings growing up among older ones.
Of course, the very aging processes of nanotech-fabricated
buildings will probably be very different from the aging
processes of current city buildings, but I think the economics
of the phenomena discussed above emerges pretty directly from
the second law of thermodynamics.
-- Eric Watt Forste <arkuat@pobox.com>
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