Why Linear Cities Don’t Work (5 Reasons)

nyam is a proposal for a city that'sactually under construction to be housedentirely within a single 170 kilometeror 105 mile long line but of course acity can't just be contained within thestrictest geometrical definition of aline an infinitely long object with nowidth depth or curvature the arm's otherdimensions includes its width at 200meters wide or 656 feet that's about thewidth of a typical block here in Chicagoit's also 500 meters or 1600 feet talland that's a bit taller than the HancockTowerand then it goes for 105 milesthat takes us all the way down here to atown called Hoopeston Illinoisall this built volume is meant to house9 million people and that so happens tobe about the same population as Chicagowell not the city of Chicagorather the Chicago metropolitan areawhich sprawls all the way into theneighboring states of Wisconsin andIndianaabout 9 million people live in this areaand it contains about ten thousandsquare miles or twenty six thousandsquare kilometers that would be liketaking the length of the arm and makingan entire Square out of it that's thearea that Chicago metropolitan densitythat it would take to house the sameamount of people that neon proposes todo so in one sense the ambition of nyamis a welcome one to take up less landthan a sprawling City would take upwhile I'm certainly not advocating forthis project it's fraught with all sortsof problems innovation in the way thatwe think about cities and their designis urgently important the world'spopulation is expanding rapidly and someargue that we can no longer just sitaround and wait for cities to groworganically over long periods of timeyou know like they always have moreimportantly now than ever cities must bepre-planned and they need to be builtquickly and efficientlyChief Advocate Saudi Arabia's CrownPrince Mohammed bin Salman claims thatthe new 500 billion dollar City designis a reaction to the perception thattoday's Global cities are not designedwith people in mindsince the Industrial Revolution citiesprioritized machines cars and factoriesover peoplehe also claimed if you have money youshould raise the bar and createsomething Innovative and differentbut a cursory look at the history andevolution of linear cities like nyamquickly reveals that they aren'tparticularly new idea and they areactually the epitome of Urban DesignConcepts that came out of the IndustrialRevolution despite claims otherwise theyare ultimately born from an attempt torationalize urban planning and growthalong Transportation Networks Urbantheorist Kevin Lynch went so far as tocall linear cities the direct expressionof machine values they are the result ofthinking of the city as a power stationor an assembly lineto take the dehumanizing aspects oflinear cities even further nyam lookslike what Timothy Morton would call ahyper object which are things that aremassively distributed very largerelative to humans whether directlymanufactured by humans or not otherexamples include some buildings likepencil Towers in New York but alsoabstract things like climate change orall the plastic in our oceanshyper objects have a significant impacton us humans and we struggle tounderstand them we discover that we arestuck in them in this way neom as ahyper object is a post-humanarchitecture a structure not designedfor or even by humans really but for andby objects much larger than us in factniam's Advocates claim that artificialintelligence will be the Beating Heartof the City artificial intelligence willbe Central to many of the city'soperations including the healthcaresystem which neon bosses claim will add10 years to a resident's life the entirecity is a machine for incubating humansaccording to Peter Tremor hyper objectsoccur when humans design buildingsaccording to conditions that theythemselves have created but seem to havelost control over so these phenomenahave gained a certain amount of autonomynyam appears a lot like a vanity projectand it may be closer to say a Las Vegascasino or the Palm Island City then itis really viable urbanism so judging iton you know traditional urban planningprinciples might be more of a moot pointbut I'm interested in how cities aredesigned from scratch and the questionremains why don't we build line citieswell I think reason number one is whatwe just talked about because they're notmade by or for people historically theyare the result of Designing a city likeyou would a machine at first glancelinear cities seem like a great optionthey offer the promise of efficientTransportation networks reduced Relianceon cars and the ability to house on alarger population within a smaller landarea however despite their potentialadvantages we don't have a lot of linearcities strung across the globe but thatdoesn't mean there's a lack of proposalsout there or that they don't exist atallfor instance the very first linear cityconcept was a plan for the expansion ofMadrid by Arturo sorio yamata in thelate 19th century this design was about400 meters wide it's about double Neonit has ribbons of buildings on eitherside of the Central Avenue for cars anda train the surgery would also carryother services like sewage andelectricitythe design would cut through thecountryside putting people Closer ToNature and encouraging our culture andthe lack of intersections would reducecongestion and improve traffic flowit would also be easier to providepublic transportation as a linear layoutbut allow for the creation of dedicatedLanes to mass transitthe entire proposal was for a total of50 kilometers in length but only fivekilometers was builtthe idea was as the city expandedadditional sectors would be added to theend of each band so the city wouldbecome ever longer without growing anywiderwell this sounds pretty radical and itwas at the time when you look at thearea that was developed according tothese principles as it looks today you'dbe pretty hard-pressed to find theoriginal lineit's hereit's camouflaged within the greater Cityaround it indicates a couple things tome firstly we kind of already haveimportant linear streets and corridorsin all of our cities and theimplementation of soria's design doesn'tquite make it to the scale of somethingthat we call a city today lines workwell in cities not as cities but alsothe city didn't really grow according tothe linear mandate the city consumed thelinear part and absorbed the entiredevelopment within its larger fabricthat's one place where Urban theoristsKevin Lynch's criticism of linear City'slies this is also reason number two forwhy linear indoor cities don't work theydon't grow evenly Lynch says thesupposed flexibility of the linear formis chimerical since chained withoutdisplacement can only occur at theremote ends of the line or right anglesto it that all destroys the linearitythus one activity cannot grow fasterthan another unless its neighbordeclines with equal speed it is in factvery difficult to keep development fromaccreting along the edges which are soclose to good accessnevertheless linear cities inspired allkinds of modern thinkers and designersacross the globe people like Lou capuziaeven this passion also made its way toRussia with people developing radicallynew socialist cities like Mikailaktitovic and Nikolay alexandrovichmiliutin who developed the strip Cityyou also have Ivan leonardov's proposalfor the town of Magna tagorsk in thecentral strip of the design of this cityare the residential buildings glassTowers alternated to low-rise structureslocated in the green belt all detachedfrom one another in order to provide themaximum access to Air and Lightall of these examples are like normalcities with buildings separated byspaces just arranged within a singleline and this is how the original neondesign started before it was proposed asa giant structurebut pooling everything into a big linearbuilding isn't particularly new eitherwith the earliest examples being aproposal to stretch across the entireUnited States with a single building in1910. it was called Road town and wasthe dream of Edgar chambliss the goalsfor this city to span from New York Cityto San Francisco one single line thewidth of an average house stretchingacross the entire countrythis idea was so influential at the timethat Thomas Edison donated his patentfor single poor concrete houses as amethod to be able to construct andWilliam H Boyles donated his patent formonorail designbut this brings us to the next criticismthat's levied toward linear cities andthat's the diminishing return onefficient movement Road town is like ahighway and to keep things moving youcan't have too many stops along the wayor to slow everything down so we end upneeding to have different networksdedicated to local traffic versus thehigh speed ones while the entire citiesarrange for that one line of efficientmovement actual movement is always solinear while roton was a dream for a newcity design many others have beenproposed as pragmatic solutions toexisting conditions a good example ofthis is the linear city project by Petereisenmann and Michael Graves theirproposal was to connect various citieson the west coast of the United Stateswith parallel strips one of them forindustry and the other for housingoffices and stores all of theseproposals lack Urban centers insteadthey rely on pre-existing cities to beable to provide them this is our nextreason for why linear cities don't workUrban centers are importantpsychologically and urban cities don'thave them to be in a city without acenter makes us feel lost anduncomfortable linear City started toreally fall out of favor and were thesubject of intense criticisms during the1970s and some of these criticisms camein the form of mock proposals which weredystopian Visions clearly disguised asbeautiful images this is super Studio'scontinuous Monument represented asenigmatic collages of gleamingstructures set and contrasted the colorsand textures of the real world TheContinuous Monument was a vasthypothetical structure that was meant tostretch across the entire Globeencompassing all of humanity within itswalls the structure was made up of aseries of interconnected modules thatwere designed to house all of the basicneeds and functions of human societysuch as housing Transportationcommunication and Leisure one of the keyideas behind the continuous Monument wasthe concept of the death of the objectsuper Studio argued that the traditionalfocus on individual buildings andstructures was limiting and thatarchitecture should instead be viewed asa continuous and interconnected systemeven the architect REM kohlhas got in onthe action with his thesis projectinvoluntary prisoners of architecturein his version set in London thestraight linear layout of the city wouldmockingly fix the world's Problems bytrapping everyone inside of its graspone thing that I think this dystopianproject illustrates is that linearcities offer residents almost no senseof choice there are only two options formovement they also limit choice in otherways as well they require a high levelof planning and coordination in order tobe successful they rely on thedevelopment of efficient Transportationnetworks and the coordination of landuse and zoning regulations these typesof projects can be a challenge toimplement to the point that it almostrequires an authoritarian regime justImplement and control it Kevin Lynchalso continues to describe the misguidednature of linear cities the separationsthe oversimplification the pureAesthetics of the working machine seemcold and repellent if we imagineourselves actually living in these idealplaces they are founded on a conceptionof the city which seems basically wrongif you're into designing your own Citywhether Just a Dream a dystopia orsomething to actually build you'll needa website and the first step is to get adomain name perhaps with a coolextension like dot cool or dot failhover is the place to start and registeryour domain how awesome would it be tohave linear cities dot fail then you canget an email address with a domain tolook all official and you could be themayor at linear city valve fail once youregister your domain with hover you canconnect it with just a few clicks usingthe connect feature makes it supersimple and intuitive and if you dohappen to have any questions along theway hover is actually the Best in Classcustomer support team you're not dealingwith some giant faceless Corporationwhile you might not be dreaming ofcities building your online brand hasnever been more important your onlineidentity begins with your domain nameand hover has over 400 extensions tochoose from to help brand yourselfonline I'm assuming that some of you aredesigners given what we talk about hereyou can actually use dot design insteadof using a generic.com or dot Biz byusing dot design you're actually tellingeveryone exactly what you do newcustomers can get even an additional 10off of any of the 400 plus domainextensions offered by going to hover.comStuart Hicks get your very own personaldomain today if you enjoyed this videoyou might enjoy this other one aboutindoor cities and interior urbanismssubscribe to the channel if you haven'talready it really helps us out todeliver you bi-weekly videos on thebuilt environmentokay