>They all revolve around ensuring a city is self-sustainable.
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They all revolve around ensuring a city is self-sustainable. That does not mean it can be sustained by some nebulous ‘economy’, but that it literally HAS to be sustained ONLY through its own production.
The author is reminding me of the ancient Greek city-states. They stereotypically had one major city, that controlled enough surrounding farming villages and farmland to sustain itself, and that would send out colonists to settle (or conquer) more land, and found a new city-state, when its population grew too great to sustain.
Of course, in bad years, when their land couldn’t sustain their existing population, starvation was fairly common. It’s an issue typically forgotten when planning self-sustaining cities, or communes, or homesteads - if you don’t build in a lot of excess production capacity, so that you have significant surpluses in good years, you won’t have enough to sustain yourself in bad years. And a lot of bad years are coming
Anyway, when the author talks about cities being self-sustaining, and all their ideas for making cities unique and separate from one another, it makes me think about what counts as part of the city and how much additional land, used for human habitation, can be part, or needs to be part, of that sustainability. And what networks of trade would build up between these self-sustaining cities so that cities with surplus can provide it to cities not producing enough.
I think the author has a lot of cool ideas, some of which would be practical for smaller communities or housing developments but not for full size cities, others of which are intriguing but not really practical, and others of which would have some really unfortunate side effects (every city having its own currency would just let money changers make money off the inefficiency of multiple currency standards, and give wealthy investors opportunities to profit off currency arbitrage - have we learned nothing from the cryptocurrency scam ecosystem?) but thinking about how utopian cities might work is the first step to implementing some of those ideas in the cities we have. You gotta dream big. Thanks for sharing.