Planning Successful Cities
Stuck at the crossroads with plagues waiting in the wings.
Washington, D.C. is an example of a city made from scratch. For those of you who watched "Time Lab 2000" with Sam Waterston, you might recall the show that pointed out that the French designers of the town were disgusted at the pittance offered them as remittance, so much so that they packed up all their plans and returned to France. Fortionately an African American, in those days a slave, had seen all the plans and was one of those few human beings with a remarkable photographic memory. They were able to reproduce the entire things thanks to this one individual's memory of it all.
Actually, I believe we all have photographic, as the term goes (it's much more than that), memories but the avenues in our minds to the ability are blocked by a phenominon which I could describe as structural restraints. It's almost as though the restraints are in place genetically to prevent mankind from destroying itself. Perhaps we could consider it a survival mechanism.
But where was this city built? In a swampy area beside a river. Maybe necessary in the nineteenth century.
These wetlands are vital for the balance of life. Before I evoke the "E" word (for ecology, at which time most of you will surf to another website), let's have a look at the problem, here. Since I don't have a grant and a team of reserchers or even the time to do more hard individual traveling, for the moment, than I have already done, and a dozen other sinces that I couldn't even imagine but would be perfectly valid here, we'll have only a glimpse. But as I mentioned in The Labyrinth of Cementia and The problem with a limited frame of reference , a hint is all you get.
One of the crucial considerations right up there on the top of the list for a city is public health. The swamp in not a good idea for human habitation. The human seems to do well in a semi arid environment, for example, a Low Chaparral biome. The advent of human population density in estuary areas is invariably bad for the estuary and then indirectly but ultimately, and in a big way, bad for the health of the human population, not to mention everything else.
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Paul A. L. Hall
Copyright © 2003 [Paul Hall]. All rights reserved.