Slashdot Mirror
America's First Eco-City: Doomed From the Start
An anonymous reader writes "Despite backing from the Clinton Climate Initiative, and a $111 million investment from Subway Restaurant mogul Fred DeLuca, a planned city for Central Florida called 'Destiny' was doomed from the start, according to memos retrieved from Florida's Department of Community Affairs. According to state officials, despite a great deal of hype about Destiny, Florida, becoming the first fully sustainable city in the U.S., plans to build the city were rejected almost immediately due to concerns over 'possible urban sprawl, energy inefficient land use patterns, the endangerment of natural resources, and the undermining of agriculture.'"
The batshit insane goverment there killed it because it involved environmentalism.
Magical libertarian thinking knows no bounds.
A lot of things get killed when they get in the way of this industry. Wasn't long ago Florida officials would show up at your house and cut down your citrus trees because of "undermining of agriculture".
You had me at Florida.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
I'm good at Sim City. Obviously they hired the wrong guy for the job.
Am I the only one who first read the title as "America's First Eco-City: Domed From the Start"?
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
The city should have been domed, then it might not have been doomed. With a domed city nobody can get away, then they have to stay and make it work, and the city isn't doomed.
It is the logic of SciFi, it is the logic of the future.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything
http://www.palmbeachpost.com/news/news/crime-law/delray-beach-developer-anthony-pugliese-charged-wi/nSpp7/
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
EPCOT stands for "Experimental Planned Community of Tomorrow." It was supposed to be a town, not a theme park. Funny how these things go.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
The problem with trying any renewable/conservation experiment in a "real-world" scenario is that almost every angle is now covered by regulation. Green Groups/EPA/Agriculture/Neighborhood Groups/etc, etc. It's getting to the point that the only real way to test theories in a real world scenario is to buy a big Island, build your infrastructure and pay a bunch of people to move there. I think Blofeld may be able to help fund this though.
"Destiny," that's up there with Why, Arizona, or Idiotville, Oregon. I mean, a fully sustainable community blazing a path to the glorious Green future shouldn't have a name that makes you think about putting dollar bills in G strings, mkay?
Should have been named 'Fate'
They allowed politicians to be a part of the process. Politicians know NOTHING about land use, management, etc.. Your city planner is a complete and utter moron when it comes to the job they have, city planning.
None of the homes need to be larger than 850 sq foot. Making a city self sustaining is certainly possible if you do three things.
1 - gather all leaders into one place.
2 - Lock all of them in a big room with no windows.
3 - let scientists and engineers do all the planning based on real data and real designs.
Sadly most people are dumb as a box of rocks and believe they cant be happy without a 5500 sq foot mc mansion and at least 2 acres of Kentucky Bluegrass that requires 10 gallons per square yard a day in water. So eliminate the people as well, at least the dumb ones.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
This is utterly unsurprising. Intentional communities with "vision" almost always fail. Most 60s communes failed. Many colonies failed, and not just because they were attacked by natives. Modern planned communities do a bit better, mostly because they stick to patterns learned the hard way. They don't have the staying power that "organically grown" cities do. To grow a city you need water, transportation, and people that think it's a good place for a city. Sometimes you can take a marginal place and push it towards becoming a city. Washington DC is such a place. It had the river going for it, but that's about it. It was perfectly miserable when built, and still is; but air conditioning makes it bearable. The determination of the government augmented the river with rail and highway. People wanted to be there because the government was there.
So anyway, it's not surprising that some canned idea of a city put together by "visionaries" attempting to break the mold of urban development failed. That doesn't mean it's not interesting to try though. Think of it as a start-up.
A liberal experiment in central planning failed. I'm shocked.
Had that been the case, they'd be no news story. Where's the "man bites dog" in that? This was a story about "a liberal experiment in environmentalist central planning fails the state's rules because of concerns over its effects on the environment and lack of central planning", which is a pretty good story!
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Florida? That bastion of progressive thinking?
Dome Alaska has been around for a couple of centuries.
rewriting history since 2109
Each and everyday I become more convinced of this argument.
I've been to the location where this was planned to go. There's nothing there. Nothing. The nearest "place" is Yeehaw Junction. Seriously, that's actually the name of something. It's small and a little scary. I stopped there to get gas once. The location for Destiny is very near Kissimmee Prairie preserve. There's a campground there that's a great place to go to do astronomy as the skies are nice and dark. But that's the only reason I would ever want to go to this campground. It's just miles of scrub pine. Looks like this : Kissimmee Prairie Preserve.
Trying to bootstrap a city in a location like this seems to be very difficult. The only reason someone would want to move to this location in the first place would be to get away from it all, which would preclude the type of people that would want to get in on the ground floor of a new city.
It's interesting that this is the second story about a failed master planned eco-city in Florida this month.
Full disclosure: I work for Nextera Energy. Parent Company of Florida Power & Light which this story references.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
What on earth makes you think it's reasonable that humans would have NO impact on the environment?
Your metric is fucked up.
Every single thing has an effect on the environment. Should we rip out our volcanoes for their carbon emissions? And kill every fish that shits in the ocean? And what about that whole earth rotation thingy, you know, the one that made the temperature go from 80 degrees every day to 20. We should stop that, because it changes the environment. Oh, and if you killed yourself, you'd decay and change the environment. You'd breed deadly bacteria that could hurt an innocent wolf that tried to eat your corpse.
The goal, believe it or not, is not to preserve the environment in its current state. The goal is to alter the way that we live so that our impact on the environment is one such that our planet will be able to sustain us indefinitely. This doesn't mean nothing will ever change. There are these things called evolution, and plate tectonics, and a whole host of other things that cause our planet to change. Our goal isn't to preserve everything, but to ensure our continued survival with the limited resources we have. So the voluntary human extinction movement seems to be the very opposite of achieving that goal.
You do realize that there have been many successful planned cities, including the capital of Brazil.
And do you have any examples of these? The main problem with centrally planned capitols is that they tend to have very poor containment. You don't want that crap on you.
It looks like the primary problem was they had all kinds of big ideas, and utterly failed to hire anybody with any land-use planning or large-scale development experience to put them on paper in a language likely to be approved.
Just like computer people have their own language and lingo when dealing with technology, so do government land-use officials when reviewing development plans. If your plans don't cover what they expect them to cover, fail to counter objections the planner is likely to have, etc., your proposed development is probably not going to be approved, no matter how meritorious.
The documentary in question may have given them an unfair shake, but I doubt there would be a thriving Brasilia, if it weren't for the substantial resources of Brazil propping it up. I think that's a caveat that attaches itself to a lot of these projects - they work, but only if they have a large economy to leech off of.
I bet it was a real blast, too.
Plan My Week for iPhone
"Sustainable" doesn't mean "has no impact on the environment". For example, breeding von Neumann machines and converting the entire non-stellar mass of the Solar System to a Dyson cloud is sustainable, but has a wee bit of an environmental impact.
"negative impact on the environment"
With such a non-definition, OF COURSE we (and every living organism and many non-animate processes) have a negative impact.
The only appropriate answer to that is - so?
Batshit insane federal environmental program (read: crony capitalism) killed by slightly less insane local regulators.
Eco city dooms YOU!!!
This sig is not paradoxical or ironic.
Australia's capital, Canberra is very effective.
It's a set of concentric circles that can be seen easily from a distance with all the politicians right in the bullseye.
well, those are possible problems everytime a city is built. or anything that people would work at.
you could have used those same reasons to reject plans for disneyland.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Local liberal central planning trumped by state conservative central planning?
Learn to love Alaska
What did you expect? It's a land development project in South Florida. There's a long, long history of scams in that industry.
Also, the location sucks. From the rather vague map on their web site, it's south of Kissamee and due east of Brandon. There's about here. That's Indian Lake Estates, which, as you can see from the aerials, was supposed to be a large development with 300 city blocks. About 5% of the lots have houses. There's one area where houses were built along small canals, but the canals all dead-end, so there's no flow and they'll stagnate. Here's a street view. Nearby are remnants of other failed developments, a defunct Air Force base, and a a few modest farms.
It doesn't look like "regulation" was the problem. More like "reality".
The UK has lots of planned towns: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_towns_in_the_United_Kingdom (definitions of cities differ, some of them might count).
A couple of them are accused of being boring, dull, or American-style (i.e. grid system roads), but they still work as towns. All of them have a purpose though.
One 'Eco Town' is being built, North West Bicester ("bis-ter"). The map I see still have long, straight roads. Putting cycle paths alone doesn't encourage people out of their cars*, you have to make the car journey less convenient, as is done in the Netherlands, Denmark, etc. The solar panels are good, but it would surely be better to add them on all new buildings, rather than just in this one village.
*See Stevenage, an older new town with a great cycle path network, but also an excellent road network. Hardly anyone uses the cycle paths: http://www.roadswerenotbuiltforcars.com/stevenage/
Yep, and like the GP said, we get that DC crap all over us...
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Australia's capital, Canberra is very effective.
It's a set of concentric circles that can be seen easily from a distance with all the politicians right in the bullseye.
The problem is there are a set of bunkers underneath Canberra.
Who would have thought that underneath Canberra was a place more boring than Canberra.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
Now here's the clever thing - the city designer thought of that and built an artificial lake right near the middle of the place so that the bunkers couldn't be dug down deep enough without getting flooded.
Putting cycle paths alone doesn't encourage people out of their cars*, you have to make the car journey less convenient
Another problem with planned cities is forcing people to adapt to the city rather than the other way around. I see it a bit like software, if you have to break the functionality of the thing in order for it to be used as intended, then maybe you should change your intent instead.
Putting cycle paths alone doesn't encourage people out of their cars*, you have to make the car journey less convenient
Another problem with planned cities is forcing people to adapt to the city rather than the other way around. I see it a bit like software, if you have to break the functionality of the thing in order for it to be used as intended, then maybe you should change your intent instead.
The intention is that bicycles are used for shorter journeys (to work, shops, school etc), for health, environment and economic reasons.
Wide, high-speed roads didn't build themselves, and people adapted to them (with problems -- death and injury from accidents, earlier death from pollution, environmental damage, dividing communities, etc.)
Many British cities seem to be based on the use case "User can drive to work", rather than "User can travel to work".
The intention is that bicycles are used for shorter journeys (to work, shops, school etc), for health, environment and economic reasons.
And the practice is that bicycles just aren't that useful to people.
Wide, high-speed roads
You mention one adaptation to humans right there. "Wide". And choosing high-speed roads instead of say, high speed bicycle lanes or rail lines, is another adaptation.
And the practice is that bicycles just aren't that useful to people.
Maybe not everywhere, but the Netherlands, Germany, Denmark, etc would disagree, as well as plenty of towns elsewhere. (Also many poor countries.)
Wide, high-speed roads
You mention one adaptation to humans right there. "Wide". And choosing high-speed roads instead of say, high speed bicycle lanes or rail lines, is another adaptation.
So...? I don't see how this means it's a desirable adaptation, or better than the alternatives.
Each and everyday I become more convinced of this argument.
Well, if you're convinced, then I'm convinced. baa! baa!
The fact is that the natives who lived in the pacific northwest had successful land management practices. They had rules for who could fish where and how much, they set fires yearly when moving between their summer and winter grounds which kept down the brush including poison oak, and they were able to subsist primarily on hunting and gathering because their land management was so very successful and the land so rich. Predictably, ol' whitey fucked it all up for them. First he murdered them wholesale, notably in the form of the U.S. 1st. Cavalry killing every man, woman, and child on an island in the lake (one of the larger settlements) in revenge for deeds by a distinctly different band of Pomo. Then he destroyed their way of life by attrition, granting their land to others and then paying them a dollar per tree planted to rip out the oaks and install black walnut. You can't live on walnuts alone, but you can live on acorns.
The point here is that humans are capable of responsible land management, the problem is which humans are chosen to make the decisions. Baa! Baa!
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I wonder how much good that money would have done if it hadn't been stolen from the hands of the poor?
Libs tend to forget that tax money comes from somewhere, and in a super-poor nation like Brazil, it doesn't come from the middle class and it certainly doesn't come from the few super-rich.
It's hard to see the harm done to the future through government overspending, because you can't planeshift into a world where Brazilia was never built, but the damage is done none-the-less. You might get a nice shiny city of the future (that's a tossup, much of the time you will get an empty concrete jungle--see China), but people wind up starving in the rainforest, or being forced into a shantytown, or simply sacrifice a generation of economic progress.
I'm sure there are other examples around, but here's one from my home state, the Minnesota Experimental City. For those who are not intimately familiar with Minnesota geography, the proposed location was about 90 miles west of Duluth and about 3 hours north of the Twin Cities. Nothing there but a map dot called Swatara, trees, and a few dairy farms. That pipe dream started back in the '60s and eventually fizzled out in the late '70s.
They said I was daft to build our capitol in a swamp, but I did it anyways. It sank into the swamp. I built it again, and it sank into the swamp, then I built it a third time. It flipped over, was sacked by the British, and then sank into the swamp. But the fourth one, the fourth one stayed up, and that's what you're going to get Hillary, the strongest capitol on this continent!
In practice, when conservatives gain political power, they just become mean liberals.
Real progress is impossible in the United States. A multitude of groups all coincidentally work towards goals that conspire to cripple this country. So what ends up happening is the government equivalent of spinning wheels. They'll dump millions of dollars into the least impactful project they can find so that they can pander to their constituents. Meanwhile, corruption at the municipal level, especially in struggling cities, ensures that development projects still get rammed through, but because there was no proper planning they often end up causing more problems than they solve.
Maybe not everywhere, but the Netherlands, Germany, Denmark, etc would disagree, as well as plenty of towns elsewhere. (Also many poor countries.)
They'd also agree too. The population isn't some monolithic ideological bloc.
So...? I don't see how this means it's a desirable adaptation, or better than the alternatives.
You wrote:
Putting cycle paths alone doesn't encourage people out of their cars*, you have to make the car journey less convenient, as is done in the Netherlands, Denmark, etc.
In other words, when people had a choice, they chose cars. That indicates cars are a desirable adaptation in the absence of meddling to the people who actually make the choices.
I see a fundamental inability to grasp the concept of "desirable". Sure, I can meddle in the costs and benefits of choices, to make other choices more desirable. But what is the point of doing so? As far as I can tell, the sole purpose of warping transportation so that bicycles are more desirable is to make quirky towns. There's no real value to it.
So if someone built a city that could only be navigated by brachiation (traveling through trees), then you have no problem with that?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xiTM2HQ0g98
Have gnu, will travel.
So we are talking about taking a suburb of Orlando and creating a city bigger than Orlando around it. The ecosystem is very fragile, the infrastructure would have to be largely built from scratch, and at that point in time the politics in the area were at best semi-feudal. Come from the right family or know the right people and things are much easier to get done. This project was ambitious, but look at another one called Palm Coast which was also ambitious and you will see that there were empty streets for *years*. Although this area is now much more developed, it was possible to explore whole neighborhoods that had paved streets and infrastructure but no houses! Yes, I think a project like this was doomed form the start, but largely because of the local political environment and need to build basic city support.
Maybe not everywhere, but the Netherlands, Germany, Denmark, etc would disagree, as well as plenty of towns elsewhere. (Also many poor countries.)
They'd also agree too. The population isn't some monolithic ideological bloc.
I don't think they would. I don't know where to start looking for direct evidence of that, but in Northern Europe, Germany etc the average age of learning to drive is increasing, the number of people actually learning decreasing, and the number of people owning a car decreasing. Car club use is increasing.
You wrote:
Putting cycle paths alone doesn't encourage people out of their cars*, you have to make the car journey less convenient, as is done in the Netherlands, Denmark, etc.
In other words, when people had a choice, they chose cars. That indicates cars are a desirable adaptation in the absence of meddling to the people who actually make the choices.
I see a fundamental inability to grasp the concept of "desirable". Sure, I can meddle in the costs and benefits of choices, to make other choices more desirable. But what is the point of doing so?
To make the cost/benefit to the individual making the choice more closely align with the cost/benefit to society as a whole.
As far as I can tell, the sole purpose of warping transportation so that bicycles are more desirable is to make quirky towns. There's no real value to it.
Somewhere where many people cycle rather than drive has
- less air pollution
- less congestion (faster journeys for those that do need to drive, buses, etc)
- lower rates of motor vehicle injury/death
- less expenditure on roads (fewer needed, slower to wear out)
- more independence for children (and others unable to drive)
- healthier people (lower cost, whoever is paying, and more productive)
- lower fuel consumption (money and/or CO2, whichever you prefer)
- less noise
In practice, the new boss is the same as the old boss, and their beards have all grown longer overnight.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Somewhere where many people cycle rather than drive has
- less air pollution
- less congestion (faster journeys for those that do need to drive, buses, etc)
- lower rates of motor vehicle injury/death
- less expenditure on roads (fewer needed, slower to wear out)
- more independence for children (and others unable to drive)
- healthier people (lower cost, whoever is paying, and more productive)
- lower fuel consumption (money and/or CO2, whichever you prefer)
- less noise
So? You could make that above list twice as long and it still would remain that people prefer cars when they can have them and use them. I don't mind that there are towns forcing people to use bikes, public transportation, or whatever. But I gather these sorts of places are heralded as the future, not eclectic curiosities. That just doesn't make sense.
Appealing to absurdity.
Indeed. Now do you have something to say about that? We can impose arbitrary constraints and challenges on the residents of a town. You imply as much (as long as it doesn't suck so much that most people leave). So what is the reason for doing so?
You're like some AGW alarmist suggesting all the CO2 trapped in the earth would somehow be released.
No. Because they often don't realize that it is absurd to make such a suggestion.
Sorry, but the first one was Arcosanti, in central AZ. Also a failure.
The statement I was responding is you claiming people are "forced". I'm simply pointing they aren't forced because they can just not live there. You know, like how if a private company makes a product you don't like, you don't have to buy it. You aren't "forced" to buy it.
You don't have to live there in order to be forced to interact with the town in question. For example, Brasilia has been used as an example of such a planned town. Because it is also the center of government for Brazil, that means a lot of people are forced to interact with its planning and design even though they don't live there (or they worked for a government agency which forced them to move there in order to keep their job).
Second, the meaning of "force" as I use it, is quite legitimate. You can say that you were "forced" to stand in line for the movie. Nobody will mistakenly assume you meant that you were dragged off the street by armed goons and frogmarched to the theater.
But I guess my point here is that we have people in this thread bragging about destroying the functionality of towns in the face of known public demand for that functionality and then asserting that the destruction was "desirable". It doesn't make sense. Then these bad ideas get applied at a larger scale. Speaking of participation-dependent force at the national or global level is a whole different ball game than it is for a small town.
The OP at the very top said "liberal experiment in central planning failed". Then the reply was that there were successful planned cities. You then came in asking for examples and say such cities have problems, one of which is that people have to adapt instead of other way around
Such cities have unusual problems. For example, Washington, DC has unusual levels of crime due to its political status. Brasilia has the problem that it exists only because it can siphon resources from Brazil. Without the government apparatus, it's just another small, backwater town. With that parasitic apparatus, it's the fifth largest city in Brazil and the fastest growing of those largest cities.
Here's where I come in, pointing out that people having to adapt (to cities or pretty much anything else) is a feature, not a bug. Adaptation is something one is faced with outside of central planning. Central planning does not remove it, but simply shuffles and trades what you're adapting against.
The problem here is that the central planners of many of these projects are acting contrary to the wishes of the residents even though they don't have to. Residents have to adapt to quirks and obstacles that could simply be removed by the planners for a lot less collective effort.