Vulnerability of Space Settlements to Attacks

From: "spider_boris"
To:
Sent: Tuesday, January 29, 2002 4:04 PM
Subject: [spacesettlers] Re: Vulnerability of Space Settlements to Attacks

[snikt]
Was not Brasilia planned from scratch and built in one fell swoop?
Or am I thinking of another Brazilian city?

Yes, Braslia indeed was planned from scratch and built in a non-stoop way
along a few years. Even though, that is just evidence favoring what I wrote:
"Human civilizations are not *used* to build a whole city from scratch and
then populate it..." (I added just now the stress in "used" for emphasis.)
There are thousands and thousands of cities in Brazil, and I know only two
cases among them where the cities were really built from scratch. That is,
planned cities are by far rare exceptions, and not the rule, and they have
their drawbacks, as explained below:

The more recent and better known planned Brazilian city is Braslia, and
that project alone drained a lot of money from the government safes and was
extremely criticized as a white elephant at the time (late 50's - Braslia
was finished in 1960). (I was born more than a decade after that, and even
though I also think that it was a waste of money.)

The other project that I know is my own city, Belo Horizonte, which was
built in the late 19th Century to be the new capital of my state. I don't
know how costly it was at the time and/or if the cost/benefit was heavily
criticized as in the case of Braslia. However, BH (as we often call it)
serves as an example of how a planned city can be *mis*planned:

- In first place, the dimensions of the city were extremely underestimated:
the planners thought that the city would never exceed 400,000 people;
however, in the first years after foundation, population growth rates
reached staggering values like 50%/year - mainly due to immigration, of
course - and that limit was quickly reached. Nowadays, we have more than 2
million people living in BH City and over 3 million in the Great BH. It is
interesting to see a city map, like the one at
http://www.pbh.gov.br/mapas/portal/fotos/bairroscomlistagem.gif, to see how
undersized the city was: in the map at the given URL, the originally planned
portion of the city is just part of the yellow area... Also, looking at
www.belohorizonte.com.br (where there is a beautiful navigable mosaic map
built with satellite and aerial images), one can clearly distinguish the
tiny planned part of the city (the "Centro", or Downtown) because it has
streets crossed in 90 and 45 degrees patterns, while all the city around has
mold-like street growth patterns.

- By the way, the 90-and-45-degrees-pattern used is simply awful for two
reasons: (a) it does not respect the topography (and the city is located in
a mountain region, as you can see in the satellite imagery) and (b) it is a
nightmare when it comes to car traffic. (Too bad that cars were still a
quaint luxury item in the 1890's...)

Therefore, *because* I know at least two examples of Earth-based planned
cities that were either too expensive or very ill-planned, I think that
future planners of space cities should be *very* careful. I would advocate
the use of the following policies:

- If you are building a small habitat, keep it really small, the size of a
big building at most.

- If you are building a huge habitat, build it as a "land area", and not as
a city. For instance, build it just as an empty air-filled cylindrical shell
and let the colonists build the city(ies) on demand in there. It would be a
"minimal intervention" policy.

I can't think of a building housing 10000 or more right off the top
of my head, but there are plenty of really big buildings that would
hold many more people. Take West Edmonton Mall as an example - sure,
nobody is _housed_ there, but imagine that those 900 or so stores
were converted to apartments... how many people could you house in
5.2 million square feet?

5.2 million square feet = 483,000 square meters (Sorry, I can't reason with
those American units. I would be lost in my visits to the US if not by the
fact that most products also display information in the Metric System. ;-)
Assuming 100 square meters per people, it could house 4,830 people.

But now I remember that there is indeed a building housing more than 5,000
people in So Paulo, for instance. I suspect that in Asia there are even
bigger housing structures. Maybe the 10,000 figure is not so outlandish...

:) ed

Lucio