Atlas City Project

Just want to bring a little focus to a few aspects of the planning process:


City Design
...Yes, we need a city design. But looking at pretty pictures moves us no closer to our goal. We need to set some standards, and its likely, those won't be found in any existing designs--this is why Architects exist.

How many people will the city house? Do we want the city to be flat or vertical? What are the future plans for the city, will we use it as the core of a larger city-to-be or will we just build another city on a different site?

But more importantly:

Where will it be built?!

This largely dictates many of the answers to the above questions. If its in a sunny area, we want to take advantage of as much surface area as we can as a means of have more space for solar panels, for example.



Second is the consideration of utilities. Where will our electricity come from? Where will our heat come from? Where will our water come from? Where will our food come from?

Will the food be grown in a Vertical Farm? Do we need robots to handle that for us (costs extra money) or can we do it ourselves until we can make robots later? Will the vertical farm be at the core of a vertical city? Somewhere on the periphery? Where will it be in a flat city?

All of these are things that need to be decided on before we decide on HOW the city actually looks, in fact, as these questions are answered, the appearance of the city is actually created too.



Next is setting realistic expectations. Sure I'd love to have a city with beautiful parks, channels, and fountains where all the food is grown by robots and made readily available to me and transportation is as easy as having my computer request a robotic taxi. BUT, we're trying to do the first one. We won't have a lot of money. And all of THAT, requires big money. Yes, we will provide as much of the labor as possible on our own, yes, we will make our own contributions that aren't necessarily figured into a budget. But the bottom line is we are BOOTSTRAPPING this project because none of us have a blank check.

Lets not spend so much time and energy thinking about how the robots that harvest our food function, when we don't even have the basics of where this thing will be built.


After we answer many of these questions for ourselves we can begin to look at funding sources and set a timeline and goals. Draw money in for grants, do other fundraising, buy land, and really begin to set into motion the process of building a real future, not not just dream about it.

I can understand the temptation to think small so that the project has at least some hope of being built, but it would be better to plan a large city that will be built over a century or more, as funds permit.

Most of these have been answered numerous times. I know there's a lot of info to go through. I think we have a pretty good representation of these issues so far and won't get much better until there are more licensed professionals with experience to find faults we couldn't have anticipated.

I see where you are comming from robert.
The biggest problem is that there are alot of unknowns right now, which as chase has pointed out, cannot be answered without expert intervention.

for example, i do not know the efficiency s between different building materials, or height variations for buildings. We need civil engineers for that.

Although, what we can, we like to put on our wiki. Although it may be more general ideas, have you checked it out yet? It might give you more broad overviews of some proposed solutions to problems, albeit such general ideas arent what you are looking for..

Hope this helps.

This is the conceptualisation forum, no engineers required, this is for the dreamers, the engineers come along later to tell us it cannot be done.

Either here or in the wiki, the basic questions should be addressed, what is the maximum size of the city going to be, what is the maximum population the completed city will support.

Maybe I haven't looked at the right pages, but the wiki seems to be very generalised with no hard information that I have found yet.

I don't think you can put artificial limits on population size or city size, or just doesn't work in the real world short of say a gated community, where the limitations become apparent very quickly.

Dieter wrote:


I can, max size 100 square miles, max population 65,000.

To be built over several decades.

Thats nice. But you're missing the point. The goal is to build a city now, correct? That requires money. Money has a limited potential, it can only do so much. So with a given amount of money, how many people can we safely house and feed? THAT is the size of the city.

As far as future potential?

As I've proposed before, the city that gets built might eventually become the core of a much larger city. Few Americans realize it but most of our major, old cities were originally military forts. True, in some cases the walls have long been demolished but the campus of the original fort is still there. Atlas, might be a similar situation. It will be at the core of a much larger future city. But that future city, in whatever form it takes, is not our immediate concern. What we are concerned with is the fort... A small area, of concentrated planning, with a specific purpose.

So lets focus on the fort.

When "Detroit" was built it wasn't envisioned as a city of 140 sq miles to house +2 Million people. It was a small fort set up to launch attacks against Indian nations, which later evolved into a major center of commerce around trade with Indians, which later evolved into a major producer of marine vessels, which set it up to become a major producer of automobiles. Do you really think the guys who layed down the lines of the fort were thinking about building expressways to handle the traffic, zoning specific areas of the land for heavy industrial manufacturing (like automobiles)? I can assure you, they did not.

The honest truth is just like the settlers, we don't know what industry and technologies might evolve tomorrow. Trying to figure that out is not our concern today, because today, our concern is TODAY. "Futurists" once predicted we'd all have flying cars by the 21st century... Where are they? That prediction was more than 80 years ago. Do you see the futility in focusing on things so far out of our timeframe? That is why we focus on today...

The only thing we can do today is focus on building our fort. Who knows, maybe in 20 years teleportation will be easy and we don't need to worry about any kind of transportation system at all. That's fine and well, and possible, but not a guarantee. We need to focus on building our fort today, for a certain number of people to survive. IF it catches on, it will grow organically, as all cities have done. But you've got to lay the foundation before you start thinking about what color to paint the walls.

This is the dreamers forum as stated above. We have had countless debates on this topic. We are settling on thinking that the start will house about 5000 people. And we will be thinking about the future while we design the first city. We probably wont use the circular city design because it has limitations. We focus on building with the fewest amount of limitations as possible. We want to impact the environment as little as possible and use each square foot of land as efficiently as humanly possible. This is a smart city not a common one. We can use our brains to figure out the most effective way to build a building that can be easily changed and upgraded in the future, as opposed to the current wasteful standards. We will also utilize the most advanced technology possible. Dont worry about the money it will come. We need some pretty ideas though to show people to get them excited about Atlas, thus the conceptualization committee was born. hope this helps

Yes, we want to build a city now, so we start small and build it up over several decades.

Others have said we do not want to demolish and rebuild parts of the city as the city grows, so we need a rough idea of what the complete, far future, city will look like, so the first city fits right into the plan and does not need to be demolished.

The population of 65000 is for a low level city, but if it is decided to go high rise then either the maximum population will rise a lot higher, or the area of land required will be reduced, it is another aspect of forward planning, can the funds be raised over a century to build a city for a million people, I do not think we should cram people into tiny apartments or they will not be happy and will leave.

who said we were going to use "tiny" apartments? I was thinking more like luxury highrise condo style living.... Again you should go through and read all the old stuff in the archives.

I was not assuming you were going to have tiny apartments, I just gave my opinion in case anyone was thinking they could save money by doing so.