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What makes a city special compared to a cluster of businesses and residences? Hans Blumenfeld [10] argues that a metropolitan area attracts corporations and residents with highly specialized skill sets. Also, as the population grows, a wider variety of niche businesses can sprout up and sustain themselves while catering to a relatively small segment of the market. So by this consideration, a good metropolitan area draws businesses and populations to it by maximizing the diversity and variety of specialized skills and jobs. See Figure 1.1 for a visual summary of these trends. A larger, more developed metropolitan area (represented by the green shaded area extending out from the smaller blue shaded area) would have more positions requiring advanced degrees, as well as offer more variety in terms of ethnic restaurants, specialized services, etc.
Geographically, as cities grow in population, they often grow ``outwards'' in area before they growing ``upwards'' in density. As noted in Figure 1.2, this typically follows a pattern of ``fingers of development'' that grow outwards from the urban core along established transportation corridors such as highways or waterways. The result is that most metropolitan areas eventually become victims of their own success. Drawing a more diverse and skilled population eventually increases their geographical size towards a point where a resident of the city can no longer access all of the resources the urban area has to offer due to congestion.
On the national level, arcologies would be constructed to connect well to other cities, with effective transportation and distribution systems and quick transit times to most major destinations. Current cities tend to have suboptimal transportation facilities. Many cities originally sprouted up around ports by major waterways, where maritime shipping accounts for over 90% of the tonnage of U.S. international imports and exports[26]. However, domestically we move freight predominantly by truck[4]. The United States has invested heavily in the interstate highway system. Around many cities these get tied up in rush hour congestion, resulting in delays and waste throughout. High speed rail is an option that works well in most of the rest of the industrialized world, but has languished in America. Airports are usually built too far from the city to connect easily to mass transit systems, and eventually get enveloped (and subsequently throttled) by suburban growth after which they become a noise nuisance to residents.
On the metropolitan level, rush hour congestion itself is an abomination that any commuter would readily identify with. We must look terribly silly to outsiders, repeatedly stressing our transit infrastructure past the capacity limit where it ceases to be effective. We tend to want to commute simultaneously simply to be in sync with everyone else - even those whom we don't even need to deal with during the workday. Dantzig and Saaty have dubbed this phenomenon as ``cicadian rhythms'' and have noted that it also applies to water and energy utility usage. They have outlined the very simple remedy of staggering a population's daily schedules, which is attainable once a community reaches a sufficient size to support commercial staffing arrangements into several shifts.
The U.S. metropolitan growth paradigm of roughly the last half-century has been characterized by suburbanization. Affordable housing seems to be in such short supply and fuel prices had been so low that many chose to commute into job centers from suburban or exurban towns 30, 60, 90 miles away. Financial policies strongly encourage citizens to purchase homes and enter into mortgage agreements. This provides economic stability in the workforce, helping to affix them down in a geographic area and ensure they stay gainfully employed to keep up with mortgage payments. However, in today's increasingly unstable job market, this policy can have adverse effects as a workforce with impaired mobility will not have as much flexibility to take on employment that maximizes use of their skills.
So as more massive superhighways are built to relieve the strain on the original interstate connectors, more suburbanites continue to sprawl out along these new corridors. After a certain point, the ratio of space allocated between highways and developable, livable area becomes saturated to the point where we get diminishing returns from building more roadways. High capacity highways take up a lot of space relative to streets, and when we start to pack those highways close together, we end up spreading out actual useful land into isolated pockets nestled between interchanges. Looking down on our cities from above, we'd find that most have more land area allocated to paved roadways for cars to drive across than space for humans to go about their affairs [32].
To their credit, automobiles are certainly the most flexible mode of transportation. All you need is a slab of pavement or even gravel connected to the nearest street, and you now have an interface to the ``intercontinental road transportation network''. Compared to the equipment you'd need to interface with the municipal power grid or water/sewer lines, this slip of asphalt is likely one of the simplest yet most capable ways of moving people and products to and from your home. However, when be build cities almost exclusively around automotive transport, we end up losing a lot of what makes dense cities good for people and sustainable for the environment. Cars act as a multiplier to the amount of space each person takes up. Not only do you need a driveway space to park each person's car at their home, but also a space reserved at their work, as well as some shared spaces at all of the shops and venues at which they'd possibly spend time. Add to this the ganglia of roads connecting those parking spaces together, shoulders for emergencies, extra lanes for additional peak capacity, and of course spacious service stations, and we find that our cities have vastly outgrown the human scale. A transit-oriented city would provide more land use for people by introducing transit alternatives that allow them to travel between home and work from door-to-door. Park-and-Ride initiatives connecting to mass transit accomplishes little in regards to improving land utilization, since they do not eliminate parking spaces, only relocate them further away from the workplace. In an urban complex with sufficient transit, people should only need to use (or borrow) cars to leave the city, and rely on transit to move people and goods within the city.
As the urban area grows, we attempt to preserve an ideal population density while also preserving the practical reach of the transit system to prevent fragmenting the city. For civic planning authorities, this traditionally involves zoning and building out roads and utilities. At some point along the city's growth, they might consider the efficiencies of building infrastructure based on a futuristic arcology hyperstructure in order to meet their urban development goals in a compact physical package.
On the personal level most home infrastructure for living does not have much flexibility for change. We are still using much of the same basic physical interfaces developed over a century ago for power and voice communications. Additional systems have sprouted on top of and alongside these networks, such as DSL over existing telephone wiring, cable television, and various wireless and satellite networks. Add to that various combinations of buried water mains, sewage systems, natural gas pipelines, and perhaps we might begin to appreciate the need for developing more flexible and maintainable utility distribution and interconnect standards. The new standard interconnects would provide room for expansion and serviceability, supporting the adoption of emerging new infrastructure networks and allow easier retrofit of older homes and living spaces. Such standards help reduce the barriers to market entry, allowing economical deployments of upgrades such as fiber-to-the-premises or even some things for which markets haven't really been created for yet, such as the fully-automated package delivery systems or centralized HVAC services referred to by Dantzig and Saaty [17].
