My first thought when I read today’s prompt was to think, “nope. Not playing along today. This one is dumb and I don’t care.” Then I thought about it for a few seconds and came up with one or two ideas and now I am back to playing along.
I come from Boston, Massachusetts, USA. My city was founded 400 or so years ago, centuries before the industrial revolution kicked off. The city wasn’t designed, it evolved. What we now call roads, both major and minor, were originally probably cow paths or hiking trails or horse and buggy lanes. They likely didn’t make any sense at the start and given modern transportation options they sure as hell don’t make sense today.
If I were to design a city for the future I would start from there. I would lay out the roads in an efficient, smart manner. Either a grid or a wheel with spokes or something like that. The roads would be wide enough to support multiple lanes of traffic. There would be routes reserved for cars, routes for trucks, routes for bicycles and other pedestrian traffic, and plenty of space for foot traffic. I imagine the foot traffic areas would be separated from the roads somehow and probably look more like parks. In Boston we have Commonwealth Avenue and the Rose Kennedy Greenway. I’d probably design it similar to those ideas.
Under the city would be great big gobs of public transportation. An extensive subway system. If I am going to have all of this space for surface traffic it’s going to mean my swanky city is going to be pretty huge in terms of square footage, you know? You’re not going to be able to easily walk from one end of town to the other so subways will take care of that. I’m not an economist (or an engineer) so I don’t know how, but I would hopefully figure out a way to make public transportation free. We’ll see about that, capitalism.
The buildings would need to be tall. My town will be a skyscraper town. I would want the commercial and residential districts to be close to each other in hopes that people could get an apartment close to work, or get a job close to home. I don’t know how to do that, but it’s an idea. I’d have to hire smart engineers to piece all of these wacky ideas together, but I’m sure someone would have the know-how to pull it off.
Now all I need is the land to build this goofy metropolis. It’s going to need a lot of space. How close are we to terraforming Mars? That might be enough square footage, maybe.
I guess my next thought is… did I just plagiarize Epcot? Probably. That would make sense.
Inside the Red Head's Head 