Topias


Realistic plans for an ideal city 

By

Douglas J Shaw
Copyright (c) 2005 Douglas J Shaw 

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the Publisher.
If you ask, though, he'll probably give you permission because he's quite relaxed about that kind of thing.



Global Press
Johannesburg
South Africa
dougieshaw@bigfoot.com 


ISBN 0 9533306 6 4

Printed in South Africa. 
Cover image by Christine Armstrong  072 375 6444
. 
CHAPTERS
INTRODUCTION 
1. CITIES AND UTOPIA 
2. THE PRIVATISED ECONOMY
3. WHAT MAKES TAX FREE ZONES WORK 
4. HIGH DENSITY/ SMART GROWTH 
5. LEGAL AND CONSTITUTIONAL
6. THE INVESTOR
7. FINANCING 
8. IT INFRASTRUCTURE
9. LOWERING BUSINESS COSTS
10. POVERTY REDUCTION
11. THE NUMBERS 
12. MARKETING THE ZONE  
13. THE TEAM 
Introduction 
This book is the story of how things can be better. It incorporates a lot of strains of thinking that individual disciplines have made and integrates them into a whole: A city called Libertonia, one that we expect to be built one day. 
There are 6 main planks to making the world a better place:
1. Free Market Economics: this makes everything better and cheaper and makes us free. The regression to having government using 50% or more of a nationals resources has to be reduced to tax levels of 2-3% with delivery never being done by government. 1
2. A legal system that supports this Wealth Maximisation
3. An urban planning model that incorporates both the insights of urban planning and a way of privately implementing them to synergise with  'Smart Growth"  and create cities that are economically efficient as well as beautiful and environmentally friendly. 
4. A use of IT to co ordinate the city and solve many existing problems and reduce many costs 
5. Innovative ways to reduce the costs of business and thus the costs of everyone
6. Integrating this with development insights to ensure that this city is as powerful as it can be in lifting the poor out of poverty far better than outdated and destructive ideas like welfare, government action and hand outs. 

This book is called Topias. Utopia is the name for an idealistic scheme but one that cannot work in practice. It comes from the Greek words meaning 'no' and 'place'.2 It's no place. 
So I call it Topia because its 'place'  not a 'no place', a practical, costed, thought- through scheme, that doesn't involved unworkable notions like socialism3 or agrarianism4. 
The reason its plural5 is that there isn't just one ideal there are many and with a few common successful elements as we explore here, there are an endless amount of different worlds we can create for the people of the earth. The future is not the monolithic world of social democracy or communism. Each city in the future will differ more from other cities than is the case today.   
I hope you enjoy
 
Douglas J Shaw    
 Johannesburg Gaberone Dubai 2005 


SUMMMARY
This research is the result of fifteen years of reading totaling more than seven hundred books on subjects related to some degree. It is also more than concepts, most of these ideas have been talked through with providers who have informed the process about how things work in practice. As a result we have agreements with more than thirty individuals and companies (some very large) who stand ready to actually deliver what we are suggesting here. This is a business plan of sorts not just a conceptual exploration. 
The city is legally a tax free zone. To attract investors it also must be immune from certain Acts in the host country. Particularly it must have flexible labour markets, the right for landlords to evict tenants who do not pay and  a free telecoms/utilities environment. So the standard of living of the poor is instead improved in other far more effective ways. Everyone will be able to make as many telephone calls, either mobile or fixed line6 for $10 per month . Electricity will be less than a third of  the usual retail price.  Other bulk buying programs will reduce the average price paid for retail goods by 50%. The high density leads to lower costs. So clearly does the lack of tax on goods. See the relevant chapter for more strategies for saving people money. So the way people are uplifted is not by using restrictive laws which is highly counterproductive and simply means jobs for the poor are not won, but by improving the purchasing power of their incomes. Education in this kind of environment can be delivered in a highly technological manner which will ultimately make the The host country workforce highly internet literate. 
Without this legal status investors simply will not come and the project will not work.  There are a number of other key 'deal breaker' criteria that are very important. One is the tax free nature. After thinking about this I am of the opinion that income tax, capital gains tax, corporation tax, etc should remain at zero as per the original proposal but that Libertonian companies pay the general duties to SACU as its contribution to the The host country revenue. It is suggested that since  less radical attempts to attract investors have not been successful in The host country in the past even with some tax cuts ,that this supports the case that this more complete proposal is necessary. Furthermore if the project is to be sustainable the incentives have to be long term. We accept there are certain aspects of the local situation that affect the project. Not least the availability of funds with which  to participate in joint ventures.. As requested, we have a few ideas on the joint venture concept. 
The city itself drawing upon the latest "smart growth" thinking in Town Planning and Architecture is very dense.   This is not simply because we have limited land but because it enables us deliver many services to every class of person for an extremely affordable cost. This makes business profitable and also draws the poor out of poverty. 
Complying with WTO means the zone must not have specific subsidies, so it cannot be on the EPZ basis. The zero tax rate must apply to all companies are not to specific industries. This it core difference between our zone and the EPZ model
So we recall the benefit to Africa of such a zone. Firstly it would provide a large number of jobs to Africa citizens, secondly everything that Libertonians buy from Africa will have been already taxed and thus will contribute to taxes, thirdly   Motswana working in Libertonia will remit earnings back to Africa which  will then be taxed as it is spent contributing tax to Africa, fourthly Libertonia will pay duties under SACU which  will come to Africa,  fifthly, if successful it will lead to more private funding for infrastructure in Africa, sixthly  there will undoubtedly be greater investment in Africa as a whole and more tourist revenue, seventhly, all Africa companies that choose to operate in the zone will be more internationally competitive as a result.  All will contribute immensely to meeting the targets for economic growth, reduced dependence on diamonds and other economic goals that you have set. 
Libertonia also sports certain unique features, these help to draw people there. There is a network of tunnels underneath the skyscrapers to contain pipes and cables, being highly dense,  it is feasible that people can have their shopping delivered through this system. Roads in Libertonia are underground, all one way with no traffic lights only slip roads which  means cars can move from one place to another much more quickly than in most cities. On top of the roads above ground is landscaped trees, grass and shrubs with cafes and shops on either side. Libertonia is not grey it's green.  You can walk to mostly anywhere amongst pleasant surroundings. 
Some or all flats have not just their water but many liquids (coke, gin and tonic, soap, fabric conditioner, on tap- pay as you go. Privatised policing ensures that crime stays low and provides jobs for lots of people. 
In order to go forward from this point, we need to either pass the act and buy the land so we can fund this from selling the land on or if you prefer more details and action we can co ordinate a consultancy project that would involve commissioning professionals to produce still more detail and also talking to hundreds of multi nationals to get their views and sign up enough to guarantee the first stage of the zone. 


CHAPTER ONE

WHAT SHOULD A CITY BE? 

This book is about a city that will be privately founded and managed for the benefit of private business and thus the creator of hundreds of thousands of jobs for poor people. Yet this is not completely without precedent. Many European finest cities were founded by private entrepreneurs and managed by their heirs. After the revolutions starting in 1789, many of these cities were appropriated by the new states and have since lost their innovative character. 7

Values 
Cities are not simply about economics and engineering however, good cities have a personality. As James Naughtie says, `a city must have a sense of itself, or it hardly counts as a city'. He looks for the personality of his city [Aberdeen]: warmth, granite city, close links to the countryside, enlightened civic leadership and so on.8
In Libertonia, our ideal city the values centre on freedom and on the absence of theft. When we speak about the absence of theft we speak particularly about redistributory taxation. This was thought in the past to reduce poverty. It is our view that the protection of property rights and the absence of 'theft' taxation reduces poverty more. 

Theories about Cities 
Cities have been seen as centres of vice or of freedom, or of social mobility against hierarchy.
"9 Leonardo [da Vinci]  envisioned a multi-tiered city, with three distinct levels corresponding to social position in much the same fashion as the concentric circles of Plato and Bruni or the segregated neighborhoods of Alberti. Luxurious houses, spacious walkways, and hanging gardens adorned the highest level, reserved for the "gentlemen" and the upper echelon; the middle range, with its canals, mass-produced houses, and broad roadways, served the needs of the working class; and underground waterways for the disposal of sewage and "fetid substances" composed the third and lowest level (Mumford 360). Like Filarete, Leonardo's city designs indicate a portrayal of the city almost as a living being, exhibiting "a characteristically organic sense of dynamic function" (Kemp 117). A heavy emphasis on circulation spelled the frequent intersection of pathways between these three levels and the efficient passage between them, as well as the separation of pedestrian footpaths from areas of heavy traffic (Kemp 117, Mumford 360). Leonardo also paid special attention to hygiene, placing his ideal city next to a fast flowing river so as to quickly rid it of sewage and outlining legislation to compel waterfront property owners to aid in maintenance of the canals (Kemp 117, Masters 43). Leonardo's ideal city was a thoroughly innovative concept which, true to Garin's interpretation of Leonardo, marked the first attempt "to survey and organize the natural forces of a whole region so as to serve human purposes" (Masters 43)."

"Given these similarities of current trends to the Renaissance ideal cities, it is interesting and even amusing, to note the differences as well. For example, Sir Thomas More's Utopia, published in 1516, proposed the archetypal ideal city, whose citizens worked a mere six hours per day, devoting much of their abundant spare time to reading and studying (Mumford 326). Compare this model to that of the modern-day United States, where (between 1977 and 1997) the average work week surged from 43 to 47 hours, the number of employees working 50 or more hours per week jumped from 24 to 37 percent, and the U.S. overtook Japan as "the longest-working nation in the advanced industrial world" (Lardner 42). Coupled with accusations that "the young do not seem to read newspapers" and the fading popularity of pleasure reading, these statistics place the U.S. more than a little short of ideal (Leo 20). And while Venice employed sweeping zoning and differentiation to "minimize the wasteful journey to work," in Silicon Valley, arguably the economic envy of the world, the "wasteful journey" is often an hour and a half commute (Mumford 325, Lardner 42). Most striking of all is the total disregard in modern cities for the beloved natural order of the Renaissance, leading to sections in Lewis Mumford's The City in History with titles like "Standardized Chaos," "Urban Devastation," and "The Space Eaters" (Graphic Section III)."

Seperation 
Seperation of gentlemen and commoners was first mooted by Da Vinci. Forced mixing and forced separation have both had horrendous results in the 20th century and our preference is complete freedom with regard to where and with whom people want to stay. 
Claude-Nicolas Ledoux (1736-1806) drew an elaborate plan for a "built" city. A project, begun in 1773 when he was asked to propose some improvements in the residential quarters of a small, salt-producing town, continued all his life and resulted in the publication of L'Architecture considérée sous le rapport de l'art, des moeurs, et de la législation (1804).
"Ledoux planned five volumes, but completed only one. Filled with enthusiasm for J. J. Rousseau and the hope for an improved social order, Ledoux envisioned his ideal city and drew plans for it, thereby boldly combining traditional patterns with original motifs. The shape of his ideal town is a semicircle, with the factory
at its center and the important buildings on the rings. He thus anticipated both Ebenezer Howard's "garden city" and Le Corbusier's cité radieuse. Ledoux's poetic gifts become particularly evident in his plans for individual buildings which, although designed in the form of simple geometric shapes, are permeated by a personal, subjective symbolism."
We should comment that semi circles aren't the best shape for modern roads and zoning by use is convincingly opposed by the  smart growth movement as it absence hugely increases traffic flow.
"10Howard envisaged a self-contained town of strictly predetermined size (approximately 35,000 inhabitants) and plan. A well-balanced proportion between the urban area and agricultural land is essential. Any increase in population would be met by the creation of satellites, none nearer than four miles to the original city. Even nature is planned, being fundamentally recreation ground. Howard's close relation to what is known as the "English garden" is obvious."
Again this low density/ sprawl idea is met with opposition by the smart growth movement due to much high infrastructure costs and travelling times thus less interaction.
Clearly distinguishing between the different functions of the city (living, work, leisure, education, traffic), Garnier undertakes to design a town which will fully serve the needs of man in an industrial age. A bold innovator in the use of materials and in the shape of individual buildings (preferring an ascetic geometry), he is also highly original in the disposition of the town as a whole: he separates vehicular and pedestrian  traffic, designs a residential district without enclosed
courtyards but featuring continuous green areas, and plans a community center that anticipates contemporary social centers."

We do of course agree with his separation of pedestrians and traffic as it allows traffic to go faster and also reduces pedestrian accidents which is important. Another advantage of  high density is you can have your large green areas outside the city as they are still close to everyone. Unlike a sprawl situation where the green belt can be miles away from the city center. 

"11 His grandiose project for a Città Nuova was shown in Milan in 1914. In the catalogue to the exhibition Sant' Elia published a manifesto on the need of breaking with the past. The "New City" should correspond to the mentality of men freed from the bonds of tradition and conventions. In his many drawings a major theme is the architecture of a metropolis which is the result of a technological and industrialized society. In designing towering buildings with exterior elevators, multi-level road bridges, and imaginary factories ("monuments of the city of the future"), Sant'
Elia raised these modern forms to the level of symbols."

"Le Corbusier planned in detail for a city of 3,000,000 inhabitants. From the outset he steered towards the problems of the "change-over town" (as he later called it), a metropolis with diverse functions which must be disentangled."

"He also rejected the utopian ideas of limiting the size of cities, and contrary to Frank Lloyd Wright, who advocated the diffusion of urban communities, was opposed to horizontal spreading of the urban complex." Clearly Libetonia is more with Corbusier rather than Wright, at least in this respect. 

The establishing of an orderly relationship between traffic lanes, on the one hand, and living and working zones, on the other, is of primary importance in this context. A famous result of this approach is Le Corbusier's famous hierarchy of roadsv(the 7 V system), starting with 1 V, an artery carrying international and inter-urban traffic, and ending with 7 V, a fine capillary system in the zone reserved for
children and schools. The analytical character is expressed even in small details. "So great is Le Corbusier's need for logical organization that, having to lay out the vast capital of Candigarh, he divides the vegetation to be used into six categories, each of which receives a precise function" (F. Choay, p. 16).

Radburn had different ideas 
1  the superblock (30-50 acres) as opposed to narrow rectangular (this is low rise)
2 Specialised roads
3 The separation  of pedestrian and motorist
4 Bedrooms and living rooms face private garden
5 Center of block is a park

Radburn influenced a few cities in the US (Greenbelt, Greenhills, Greendale)

The Problems of No Planning 
It is alleged that the 'laisez faire environment of colonial Bombay eventually led to the plague. 12


The Problems of Planning 
The USSR built 800 new towns and 2000 urban settlements up to 1977. Central government initiated and planned each.13
There is no doubt that attempts in the first quarter of the 20th century by various Bombay powers to improve housing did more harm than good, clearing slums simply leading to higher rents and more floors being built on existing unsanitary buildings.14
The 28 planned new towns of the UK attracted more than 1.5 million people from the mid 1940s to the mid 1960s.15 Much of the central planning of this era would not be attractive today. Average acres for new towns was 8500 for a population of 117,000 which is 30,000 per hectare. The UK Development Corporations owned all housing, shopping centres and leisure facilities16 and as a result had to fund it from the public purse. Licensing in the 50s restricted private housing to 1 house for every 4 build by the government! 17 
This public planning created all the usual misallocation problems that private planning would have avoided. 18 Private firms had similar houses to those built by the Crawley Development Corporation for about a third less. The development housing was slow to sell. On the other hand, once private developers were allowed to build the houses were over subscribed.19  Similarly in the Bombay example most of the 'social' housing turned out to be too expensive: of the 17,000 one room tenements built, only a fifth ever came to be occupied, . The government being out of touch with the lower end of the market in a way a private developer could never afford to be.20
Clearly in the modern environment all the building and managing of houses and other properties would be private.

Nor would the vision of artificially trying to mix different income levels fit with the modern insights around club goods. The 50s planners vision of neighbourly fraternisation across the class divide simply led to association between people of similar interests not on a neighbourhood basis.21 Nowadays people of similar interests are thought to be best kept together so the public goods they purchase jointly will best fit their needs and preferences.

Similarly trying to locate industry across a country to areas of highest unemployment seems very anti-market today and the policy was dropped in the Thatcher era (Bruton 35)

Policies that restrict change of use from housing simply because the council thinks there isn't enough housing (Westminster District Council in Bruton 140) should not be permitted.

Planning in order to decrease density in general (Bruton 141) may have been very detrimental as we discuss in the chapter on Smart Growth. 

Haringey' District Plan is better in 'encouraging' industrial development in a particular area while not preventing it in any other (Bruton 142)

Planning on a Smaller Scale 
The British experience was not limited to large new towns. In 1958 40% of planning applications were for houses (more than any other single type of application. Mostly for single homes. In total 462,000 planning applications were received in 1964 of which only 18% were refused. The original Town Planning system under the 1947 UK Act was to permit/refuse permission based on whether it conformed to the local authority's 20 yr plan for development. (Reynolds 43) The conventional view is in fact that town planning essentially is the production of plans and thereby the control of development (Bruton et al 19). Clearly a plan such as this would have no ways of knowing what sites economic value would be and would inevitably reduce the efficient allocation of resources from their highest value uses. By the early 60s its inability to cope with rapid change was also realised (Bruton 21)
We should also note planning gives opportunity for corruption especially in developing countries.
Good planning is more to recognise the value of one person's land use to the people around: in other words to internalise externalities.
Planning to Internalise Externalities 
Would include:
1. Creation of property rights in views so that they could be traded.
2. For protection of the surrounding countryside, rather than control it by planning permission, float a number of trusts which own the 'countryside value' of the countryside around a city with their shares being subscribed by the public and the money used to lower taxes that year as a once off. Then the shares will be owned by the public and probably by developers. In order to develop an area, more than 51% of the share holders must vote for this. At the time of the decision other developers or people in favour of the countryside can bid for the shares.
The underlying rights to use the land remain with the owner not the trust. So for example a farmer can continue to farm, put up barns etc while the trust owns the 'countryside rights' to the land. This means that the land of least value in terms of countryside value to those who value countryside would be developed first.
3. Creating tradable noise rights in cities so that if people were going to make noise by having a party they could buy the rights online from their neighbours. Alternatively people could all agree to make noise/have a party and if sufficient numbers voted for it then the others would not be entitled to compensation. This would prevent the hold out problem.
4. Permission for mixed used, where it does not much affect those outside a community or block should be a matter of the vote of those in the community. This would include matters like whether to license pubs and other types of businesses within the area. This would also incorporate change of use on one house in an area. Perhaps someone denied the change by his community should be able to appeal that the change has no impact at all on the community and a court could allow the change. If the change is allowed by the community however, it should not be forbidden by other bodies.
5. Similar methods for determining mixed use in shopping areas would be to allow retailers and anyone else who is interested to bid for the right to exclude non retail from the shopping streets of cities. This is made a rule in the Leamington Council's Plan (Bruton 140) but allowing those affected to vote would be better. The keep retail retail is based on the idea that shopping benefits with being with other shopping. It is less clear that office space would not benefit from having a few shops to service it rather than from more office space nearby. Again, letting the community vote on such issues reveals their preferences. 
6. NIMBY22 situations: More ambitious would be to allow neighbourhoods to bid for the right to decide where an unpopular facility is located. For example, no one really wants a sewage works, prison, lunatic asylum or even a power facility on their doorstep. Zones could all contribute an amount not to have the facility and then the community that offered the least would be compensated. Some communities might even offer a negative amount (pay to have it) or the basis that if they were the lowest their compensation would be more than what they paid. 
7. MIMBY23 situations: citing an office complex in the middle of a community may or may not be popular with that community. In some senses people might feel it spoils the character of the community but other people might see it as a source of employment and a reduction in travel to work costs. Again a bidding procedure can be organised to encourage particular businesses to locate in the communities that most want them. Businesses will also have their own criteria, however, and may not affect the top bid. They may even decide to move in somewhere where the citizens require compensation if they build their office block in their leafy suburb...
8. Clearly in NIMBY and MIMBY situations factories would often end up together, away from residential accommodation as with today but the exact locations would be far more efficient. Light industry may be desired in the midst of housing rather than a long commute away.24
9. Preserving the aesthetics of a community can be achieved in similar ways. Firstly, if the residents themselves by a vote wish to preserve a particular specified aesthetic then that should be sufficient to make that a local law for the zone. On the other hand if outside forces wish to preserve the zone and the residents do not then compensation is in order. Of course this is problematic as residents may vote as if they do not want the aesthetic rule when they do with a view to picking up compensation. The solution is that if compensation comes from elsewhere then whoever it is that contributed the compensation now owns the rights to the aesthetic of the area. Most residents if they are genuinely concerned about the aesthetics of the area will not want outsiders dictating them, or selling those rights to unknown third party developers.
a. Note that this means that if someone wants to build a house in terms of the aesthetic of any area, they do not need to seek planning permission to build, they just build. If they build outside the aesthetic then they will have to pay significant compensation which may sometimes make it more feasible to knock down and rebuild.
b. One of the main achievements of the planning community in terms of aesthetics is thought to be the prevention of ribbon development and urban sprawl (Bruton 41)
Although many of these solutions are not perfect solutions from an efficiency point of view, they are far more effective than an arbitrary decision by a planning authority. 
Its also worth saying that when there is a vote mechanism that might trigger compensation it is sometimes best that people pay to vote since that eliminates some of those who have no real interest in the matter and would otherwise be receiving compensation for a loss they have not suffered. 
These decentralised solutions are market based even though they deal with groups rather than individuals and incorporate some voting mechanisms. Decentralised market solutions are necessary because of the complex nature of the problems and its inter-relations with other problems (Bruton 54). Central Planning cannot work in this kind of environment as the works of Hayek show so clearly. Chadwick's "Law of Requisite Variety" means that 'a complex system can only be guided and controlled by a system that is equally complex [and varied]."(Bruton 61)
Its worth noting that in terms of feasibility many of the methods above, while feasible before, are made a lot more feasible by the internet. In a similar vein some of the local council rules for an area could remain the default rules until communities use the techniques above to change the characteristics of their areas. 


Planning and Privatisation 
Some privatisation would reduce, though not always eliminate the need for some areas of planning 

1. Traffic planning would be reduce by allowing private parties to build and toll roads in the sense that congestion might simply be met by a private company building another road.

Rezoning Bounties 
The developer under the original UK planning system also had to pay the difference in the original use and rezoned use prices! But this system broke down because the seller now only got the former price. (Reynolds 43)

Visionary Communities 
"While great differences existed between the various utopian communities or colonies, each society shared a common bond in a vision of communal living in a utopian society. The definition of a utopian colony, according to Robert V. Hine, author of California's Utopian Colonies, "consists of a group of people who are attempting to establish a new social pattern based upon a vision of the ideal society and who have withdrawn themselves from the community at large to embody that vision in experimental form."25

"The Greek philosopher Plato (427?-347 BC) postulated a human utopian society in his Republic, where he imagined the ideal Greek city-state, with communal living among the ruling class, perhaps based on the model of the ancient Greek city-state of Sparta."26

'One of Luther's beliefs broke with the medieval conception of labour, which involved a hierarchy of professions, by stressing that all work was of equal spiritual dignity.'27

"Generally, most analysts of utopian experiments, from Charles Nordhoff to Arthur Bestor, Jr., have found that religious utopian colonies possessed a longer life then their secular counterparts.
http://www.lih.gre.ac.uk/policies/urban.htm"

Bruni28
"At the center were the Palace of the Signori and the temple. Stretching along a river, Bruni's city was divided rationally, with houses equipped with rooms for summer and winter built "beautifully and precisely" along streets which meandered into the hills. Echoing a design expounded in Book VI of Plato's Laws, Bruni's proposal in effect extolled concentric circles denoting these social strata (Garin 30)."
Note please that concentric circles are not ideal for modern road based communities.

"Like Leonardo after him, Alberti was a born perfectionist, encouraging would-be architects to rethink their designs up to ten times, "until from the very roots to the uppermost tile there is nothing, concealed or open, large or small, for which you have not thought out, resolved, and determined..."

"Rejecting the extravagance of many contemporary cathedrals and other structures, Alberti touted simplicity and frugality as central virtues (290, 293, 308, 326). Nevertheless he lauded the majestic elegance of many ancient edifices (most notably the Pantheon), and he aimed to revive the shunned style of Roman architecture (290, 320). As for the ideal city... 
 Constructed from scratch on the optimal site and organized into separate neighborhoods corresponding to class and occupation, the city's buildings would be divided further into spaces for men and women, as well as public and private areas"
 We do not agree ,of course, with areas for men/women of occupations, but more for stages of life.
Purpose Built Cities 
"29The greater Seoul metropolis is cramped-almost half of the country's 48m people are squeezed in there-and its dominant size is widely seen as hindering the development of the rest of the country.
"However, a blueprint for the move was approved by parliament last year. And on Wednesday August 11th the government said it was going ahead with the plan, which involves building the new capital from scratch on a 7,100-hectare greenfield site in the middle of the country.

"It is budgeted at a whopping $45 billion, but history shows that schemes to build new capitals tend to overrun their budgets wildly
"To give a few examples: the small Central American state of Belize was further impoverished by the construction of a new capital, Belmopan, in the 1960s-1970s, whose cost spiralled to four times its original estimate. Before that, the new-born United States of America waited for ten years for the White House and the Capitol to be built, only to see both destoyed by the British in the war of 1812. Likewise, Australia's project to construct Canberra, launched in 1911, dragged on into the 1980s. Brazil's concrete bureaucropolis, Brasília, was thrown together in just three frantic years in the late 1950s-but its huge cost added to the country's crippling debts. And in the 1990s, the huge cost of building Malaysia's new capital, Putrajaya, added to the country's economic crisis, forcing the then prime minister, Mahathir Mohamad, to scale back his extravagant plans for a futuristic "multimedia" city. 
"As with Canberra, a competition will be held for the best design for South Korea's as-yet unnamed new capital. History shows that the architects given the job of designing new capitals tend to get carried away with grandiose ideas that ignore both the geography and climate of the chosen site, and the needs of the people who will eventually live there.
"The occupants of Kazakhstan's new capital, Astana, have had to endure the frequent dust storms that blow off the steppes surrounding the city, as well as icy winters. Brasília has become a grotesque caricature of Brazilian inequality: the rich elite live in the mansions and fancy apartments in the architect-designed centre-whose broad, multi-lane highways make it a dream for drivers but a nightmare for pedestrians-while the servant underclass lives in the squalid periphery.
"Purpose-built capitals also struggle to create a cultural life of their own, especially since the politicians and their flunkeys tend to fly back to their constituencies at the end of each week's parliamentary sessions, leaving the city half-deserted. On seeing the young Canberra, a reporter from Britain's Punch magazine quipped: "Londoners may be all too aware of the disadvantages of living in a city without a plan, but these cannot be compared with the rival disadvantages of living in a plan without a city."
"One of the odd exceptions is perhaps St Petersburg. Establishing it took the forcible relocation of Russian noblemen and merchants, and cost the lives of many serfs and foreign slaves who were worked to death building it. Yet, though it is no longer Russia's political capital, it is unquestionably one of the world's great cultural centres."
Brasilia 
"Who would want to live in that dreary place in the middle of nowhere, when he could choose Rio? Actually, quite a lot of people. In 40 years, Brasilia, designed for 500,000 people, has acquired 1.8m.

"The city was planned as a fearless celebration of a new world: as Mr Costa, the chief Brazilian disciple of Le Corbusier, conceived it, a statement of how people should live, not how they do. His partner in the project, and designer of its public buildings, Oscar Niemeyer, was (and, at 90, is) a communist. Here was to be a city where space was scientifically organised according to function, not by arbitrary criteria like human whim or market value.
"Hence Brasilia's Orwellian touches: addresses such as "the southern individual habitation sector, group K, lot 8", or "the northern hotel sector". And Mr Costa wanted no ugly slums: all the housing was to be in six-storey "superblocks". 30The social gradations of that temporary aberration, capitalism, he reckoned, could be handled by differences in things like the layout and finish of each flat. And since the car too was part of the future, Brasilia was designed with broad roads and clover-leaf junctions to let traffic flow non-stop.
"In vain. The capital today is Brazil's most socially segregated city, its poor huddled in favelas on the outskirts. until a civic campaign last year changed driving habits, its fine roads gave it an appalling safety record. And public transport is awful: only now, expensively, is a metro being built.
"Above all, Brasilia has succeeded in what it was meant to do: shifting the country's centre of gravity towards its vast interior, after 450 years in which settlers had clung to the seaboard. What Brazil's statistics call "the centre-west", a great swathe of plateau and savannah (yes, and cleared forest) is its fastest-growing region, producing large harvests of soya: by 1995 it accounted for 7.3% of GDP, up from 2.4% in 1959.
"Le Corbusier, the French modernist architect, called la ville radieuse -a garden city, lots of greenery, a lake, slab skyscrapers raised on posts, all wrapped in ribbons of asphalt. Costa's design for an aeroplane-shaped city won the contest.
"He and Oscar Niemeyer, the architect he chose to design the buildings, were in thrall, like Le Corbusier, to the motor car, for the 1950s an emblem of the future. Express lanes and feeder roads loop through and around Brasilia, rarely hampered by stop lights or street corners. But the city is more than a hymn to the motor age. Few architects have had such fun with reinforced concrete as Niemeyer. His buildings swoop and soar with vertiginous curves and startling precipices that seem to defy gravity. 
Akmola
"31JUST lately, the former Soviet republic of Kazakhstan has been busy moving its capital from the bustling city of Almaty to the rural backwater of Akmola. The new seat of government suffers frequent shortages of electricity, gas and water. Its site on the over-farmed and eroded steppe guarantees frequent dust storms, howling winds and icy winters. There is no overall plan for Akmola's redevelopment, despite the government's predictions that the city's population will double by 2005. The president hopes that tax benefits and the like will induce private investors to pay for the removal, but the government has said neither how much the project will cost nor how much has been paid for
Set back-for who knows how long-are grandiose schemes for a 270-square-kilometre "multimedia supercorridor", complete with its own "multimedia university" and an "intellectual property park".

"Dr Mahathir doubtless views Putrajaya as a bold innovation in the field of urban design, a far cry from the chaos of Akmola. But, at least so far as delays, shortages of money and public complaints are concerned, Putrajaya and Akmola are peas from the same pod. Every ready-made capital ever built has suffered from the same chaotic construction and popular scepticism. Worse, even if such cities are eventually completed (many are not), they inevitably fail to meet expectations: the development they are supposed to promote never comes, the images they are intended to project soon lose relevance, and, centuries later, they retain an artificial air which continues to hamper their growth.
"Much expense and delay springs from the use of ill-informed designs. Burley Griffin posted his winning design for Canberra from Chicago, using the Australian government's handy application kit (consisting of a set of panoramic oil paintings of the site, a fact sheet on its climate and geology, 12 pages of instructions and two contour maps on which to sketch a proposal). The second prize went to Eliel Saarinen, a Finnish romantic architect, who was presumably equally ignorant of conditions in Australia. When Burley Griffin eventually travelled to Canberra to supervise construction, he had to spend the next few years adjusting his plans to fit his first-hand observations of the site.
At least Burley Griffin did adapt. Belmopan's American designers, who were moving the capital in part to escape Belize's coastal hurricanes, drew up housing plans that omitted to consider the ferocity of Belize's tropical rainstorms, forcing the first inhabitants to spend the rainy season bailing out their homes. Without providing for public transport, the planners also placed the industrial zone half an hour's walk from the workers' cheap housing, in order to include an ornamental park in a hamlet already surrounded by jungle.
"Locals can be just as unthinking: George Washington himself helped choose Washington's waterlogged site, leaving the city unpleasantly humid to this day. (As if in retaliation, Abigail Adams, on first occupying the White House, decided to use the building's grandest reception room to dry the president's underwear.) Most of the Brazilian architects who competed to design Brasilia ignored the site's topography completely.
"Predictably, almost all the first citizens of artificial capitals are civil servants. Three-quarters of the original inhabitants of Belmopan were employed by the government, as were most of the original inhabitants of Abuja, Brasilia, Canberra and Washington. Urban monotony, in turn, puts off other prospective settlers. Belizeans did not want to move to Belmopan because it had no place to dance. Simone de Beauvoir asked of Brasilia, "What possible interest could there be in wandering about?" A visiting New Zealand city councillor said of Canberra in the 1970s, "The atmosphere is one of job security sans paupers, sans criminals, sans unemployed, sans vitality and sans colour." Washington, too, retains to this day its reputation as a drab, bureaucratic city, culturally not a patch on New York, Los Angeles or Chicago.
"To be fair, the designers usually intended as much. Brasilia was supposed to be everything that Rio de Janeiro, the previous capital, was not: small, sober and efficient. When the debate about a new capital was still in its infancy, in 1810, Veloso de Oliveira, an adviser to the Portuguese king, insisted that "the capital should be in a healthy, agreeable location free from the clamorous multitudes of people indiscriminately thrown together." Washington, Canberra, Brasilia and Belmopan were all conceived as quiet, orderly places where civil servants could get on with their jobs without distraction. As one Australian bureaucrat put it, "I love Canberra, because it's a place designed for middle-aged civil servants with children."
"Indeed, capitals designed to project a particular image, as Dr Mahathir intends with the futuristic Putrajaya, soon come to seem anachronistic, eccentric or both. Brasilia, for example, was intended in its day to be a city of the future, at a time when cars, aeroplanes and moulded concrete were the ultimate symbols of progress. The city itself is laid out in the shape of an aeroplane, with the federal government and the cathedral in the cockpit, commerce in the cabin, industry in the tail and housing on the wings. The centre of the design is an enormous motorway junction connecting the monotonous cinderblocks of the "Esplanade of the Ministries" with the monotonous cinderblocks of the residential zone. What was intended at the time to showcase a spirit of rationalism and modernity now showcases 1950s kitsch.
"Canberra's designer, Burley Griffin, wrote that he wanted "to treat architecture as a democratic language of everyday life." To that end, he laid Canberra out in the shape of a huge theatre of democracy, with the population in the racked seating sloping down the hillsides to an artificial lake, the government on the raised stage beyond, and the beauty of the mountains behind as an inspirational backdrop. Very clever, but would you want to live there? Quite possibly not. The end result of planning along these lines is usually a city that is neither inspirational nor functional. Brasilia's designers, for example, dreamt of a prosperous, mobile society. So they made no provision for the poor. Predictably enough, huge, unplanned shanty towns have sprung up beyond the sleek, rational city centre. Likewise, many of Washington's problems spring from its conception as a showpiece rather than a working city. And the capital's hybrid status-not quite a state, nor a municipality, nor a federal territory-hampers efforts to fix things."32

"Such man-made islands are quadrupling Dubai's tiny 40km (25 mile) coastline."
So that's the theory and history of how cities should be but what are our options and our optimal results in practice: above all our cities should be beautiful and they should be economical. The first to increase our quality of life, the second to lift the standard of living of the poor and of us all. 
Ways to increase Aesthetics33
Cities do not have to be grey. What if each building has a picture of a landscape of at least a colourful pattern? What if each  block had  a roof garden with a view? What if there was some kind of  incentive scheme to make it worth while plus legal obligation to keep the place beautiful. Window boxes full of flowers. 
Pyramid shaped towers  with gardens at different points. Tree lined pavements? Waterfalls on outside of skyscrapers? Offices blocks covered in ivy trellises or bougainvillea?  Outside blocks like a medieval castle wall? One hotel just off the Champs Elysee in Paris has more than 60 window boxes all filled with the most beautiful red flowers. 34

Key thing is that what people see as they walk about is green and pretty. Tree lines roads? Moving water along roads? 

Aesthetics could mean in some blocks that everyone has a balcony and must grow plants in it or pay damages to everyone within view. 
Facades of buildings could be drawn from history: sphinx, lion, taj mahal, castles. hanging gardens. Ivy. Waterfalls. Each block has an obligation to be beautiful which it then passes on to tennants in terms of flowers/ etc

Aesthetics: electricity substations, sewage treatment disguised as other things in keeping with Themes.

Water features are great for adding charm and beauty. If the city was near the sea of a lake then canals are particularly effective as with Venice or Chicago. There is no reason not to see waterfalls going down the sides of skyscrapers. 
Parks, Green Belts and Greenways
Beautiful can mean good architecture but to many people it also means greenness and countryside. The Garden City idea was part of that, so was the 60s idea to put vast green spaces between badly designed high rises. Communist China also adhered to the green belt idea.35 However an Elizabethan ordinance perhaps lays claim to the first green belt:
"all manner of persons, of whatever quality soever they might be, desist and forebear from [building any new] house or tenement within three miles of any of the gates of the said city of London"36
So there are different ways to have green space. 
Parks, for example are not often used by modern man, but green space that replaced roads as transit space would be appreciated by many as it is inevitable seen, a good use of green space. 
Green space is sacred in the West, headlines like the following are common:
"Up to 1,000 square miles of virgin British countryside is to be bulldozed to make way for the government's planned 4.4 m new homes, leaked figures reveal. Jonathan leake Sunday Times 18.1.1998."
The quote drew the following poignant response "One does speak of virgin forest being chainsawed. But when a square mile of farmland has lain on its back being ploughed to dust for centuries, the term seems inappropriate. If the poor land has also received lashings of EU-subsidised fertiliser and herbicide, one might prefer to speak of 'reclamation for housing'. Landscape architects can plan housing estates with better ecological and visual characteristics than barren fields. Homes can have beauty, porous paving, vegetated roofs and abundant wildlife. Instead of mindlessly 'defending' Green Belts, as though they were chastity belts, we should commission assessments to guide us in defending such landscape quality as exists and in making plans to create it elsewhere."
In other words, green belts may not be the way to go, rather one wants ones greeness in the space where one lives and works and walks. Rather let them build houses on the greenbelt if they can bring the greeness into our normal environments instead.
A landscape assessment, to determine the different types of quality which it possess, followed by:
1. A plan for public goods 
2. A plan for common rights 
3. A plan for scenic improvement 
4. A plan for greenways 
5. A plan for habitat creation 
6. A plan for new settlements 
'It is good policy not to build on 'green' land with high landscape value, but you will not find this land in belts. Most probably it will be what landscape ecologists describe as patches and corridors [belts are man-made]: 
Rather than green belts then or parks  for that matter (which are greatly underused),  he argues for greenways, with which I agree:
"Greenways should be planned in both urban and rural areas.. Greenways have recreational, ecological and aesthetic roles. In an earlier age, it was appropriate to plan public parks where industrial workers could rest in green surroundings after a week of strenuous labour. In our own times, when a majority of the population have sedentary jobs, the primary open space demand is for exercise in pleasant surroundings". And I might add simply having a pleasing backdrop whenever you go anywhere or meet anyone.  Open space is no good unless its beautiful space.
These leafy paths between the skyscrapers where roads would be could also host cycle paths and some could be used as children's playgrounds if schools are nearby. 
Greenways
"The 'greenway' idea developed in America in the 1960s, with the term formed by joining the 'green' from green belt to the 'way' from parkway. Greenways link the environmental objectives of green belts to the recreational objectives of parkways. A greenway can be defined as 'a route which is good from an environmental point of view'.
"In 1996, the international greenways movement can be said to have come of age with the publication, by Elsevier, of: Greenways: the beginning of an international movement. The book contains 26 papers of which the editors, Fabos and Ahern, state:
Greenless also is involved with building construction. 
http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=3422965 

ROADS
Pattern 
Grid iron is the best way to build roads. Its simply the quickest way to get from A to B. The maximum you would save from diagonal roads according to Pythagorus's theorem, would be 40% and that would be for an equilateral triangle. For most journeys the savings would be much less. Yet, diversions from grid iron have high costs in disruption of buildings 
The Romans were the inventors of the grid iron road network in towns and all their town were built that way.37 The medieval aberation, however romantic, is not practical for day to day life. Chaotic road networks are fine for the after-work/ weekend network of restaurants and riverside walks but not for the day to day getting to appointments. 

Junctions  and Road Space 
The key to making roads more efficient is to make them alternating one way streets and to makes them go under and over so theres no traffic lights and thus much faster movement. The average speed of traffic in London has been 10 miles per hour for the last 50 years. With the fast junctions described above speeds of six times that can be reached . If traffic travel 6 times as fast, its only on the road for a sixth of the time, hugely reducing congestion. 
If everything is one way then at each ' junction' you only need one sliproad off and one sliproad on . 
For example 100 by 100 roads each 5 km long is 1000 km with 4 lanes each and with cars 2m long is space for 2 million cars at a time and 10 millions cars owned if everyone has one plus they aren't on the road for long if the roads are fast. 
About a quarter of the space is roads. 
If 10 million adults all go to work between 8 and 10 and spend 20 mins each then that's 6 journeys that take place in the period which is 1.6 million at once. 

Advantage of a one way system is that you do not have to cross the traffic when you turn left or right into other one way streets As an intersection approaches the road narrows into one less lane and that's where the traffic comes in? So no lights required to join someone in.

Ideally you should separate pedestrians and cars. 
LA tried to hard to separate pedestrians from motorists apparently.
Pedestrians then are either underground getting taxes  or walking on the surface through the trees. 

With a dense city such as we advocate then to go  3km at 100km/ hr is  2mins. So the journey for any meeting is 2mins. 

The cost of bridging (so that the roads go over or under one another and avoid junctions is about 4 times the normal cost but if this is only on perhaps 10% of the road area. If it thus enables traffic to travel at 100 km/hr instead of 20 km/hr it avoids the need for 5 times as many road. Traffic traveling five times as fast is as good as five times as many roads! 
A road will cost roughly R300/m2 for a low traffic situation or R450/m2 on a long term spec. Bridging costs about R1500 per m2 although it can be as high as R5000 for a really complex system. 
This is just for the road and not for sidewalks. 38

Blocks 
Urban planners tell us that cities with more narrower streets have better traffic flow than ones with fewer wider ones, due to traffic flow. They also tell us that buildings have to have  to be no wider than 30m wide for light to reach the inside of the building. 

Block sizes vary Johannesburg has 7 million square meters of space in 63m square blocks. Pretoria has 2 million square metres of space in much larger blocks of 150m x250m. Sandton has 1 million square metres. New York's blocks are about 266m x 63m.
More, narrower roads as in the Joburg model leads to far less traffic congestion than the wide, few roads model in Pretoria and Sandton. 39


Crisis Management 
If there's a crash and people slow down there must be a electronic bill board that tells people to move to other parallel roads and trucks to lift them out quickly. Similarly with people that park illegally or do not move in time 

Privatisation and Variety 
Roads being privately owned may segment the market. Some might have high speed limits for the time conscious, others lower limits for the safety conscious. 
Some people might subscribe to only 2 or 3 road companies, others to them all
Although we have no traffic lights at intersections, we can still use red lights in roads without intersections to slow down cars when further cars would cause congestion ahead (or even to redirect them). 
You do not actually want too many road companies or there is never a way to get to one place using only one ? This isn't a huge problem though as long as you are not compelled to use a particular one. 
Reynolds suggests not general road pricing but simply pricing at congested times (Reynolds 36)


Roads and Aesthetics
Roads are functional rather than beautiful and people prefer not to walk in grey concrete but rather amongst green grass and trees.  So although roads are built on the ground level, people actually walk over them on a garden built above floor two with the roads far below. 

To do this requires the garden to sit on a double strength concrete slab costing from R1500 to R3000 per square m including waterproofing. For a road the length of a block say 150m that is 20m wide, that is 3000m2, the cost would be R450,000 per street, although it could possibly run to double that. However compared to the cost for the neighbouring skyscrapers with at least 90,000 square meters each, the cost is only R2.50 per m2 extra. Against a building cost of R4000 per m2, this is insignificant. 

.Compared to the slab the costs of  ventilating the road are not hugely significant. The capital cost would be  R300/ m2 or less with nominal maintenance

It might even be sensible to place initial roads 3 or 4 floors underground near the skyscrapers foundations so that if traffic increases then there can be 3 or 4 more floors of roads if traffic volumes justify it in the future. This will of course be  a decision for the road companies. Under block car parks will thus be able to exit on a number of levels to the road system. This would also require other roads to be also on the higher level of course or people would need to drive into a car park somewhere else to go down on to the lower level again! 

It might similarly be an idea to have roads on a slightly different level depending on whether they are going north/south or east west to reduce bridging costs at the intersection. They shouldn't be too different however or the slip roads on and off would be too steep. 

Under the Roads
Space for subways, sewers, incoming water, telephones, pipes, 
In some ways we leave this open in the manner of von Mises to recognize we do not  necessarily realized what they could use them for. In some ways we start with an initial use and strong ownership rights and see how things evolve. 
 
Ideally for sewages and even for goods delivery. Building on a slight incline is best . 

In an existing city you would make the roads at high level and the pedestrians underneath like Thailand or the way the M2 goes through Joburg central.


So what stops Libertonia becoming congested? 

1. Faster traffic because no traffic lights only slip roads on one way streets. 
2. More road space per ha.
3. High density means people can walk for most of their errands and some can walk to work ( errands are more driving than commute). It also means children and teenagers can get places (walking) and do not need to be constantly run places.40
4. Walkable communities and density means many people do not even need to own cars. 
5. Delicensed taxis means anyone can get anywhere without having their own car. 
 


Systems 
A system that measured traffic flow and then redirected people to other routes could either work by knowing where everyone was going or simply by electronic signs that say: if you are leaving the 41city, go this route. Or if you are going to XYZ district then go here. For people going close by, it shouldn't matter that much, not much they can do about congestion on this block (maybe next block ) but not if you are going just to the next block after that. 
It would have to be someone other than the road companies doing this as they are not going to redirect to other people's roads. 

Varying height
Start at the edge of the city 20 stories going to 50 stories at the center so everyone can see out from the top of their block.42
Tops must be public open and attractive, able to see for miles to green outside the city. 
Outside the city's view rights are owned by the people in the city. As assets are always sold to their highest value users, any damage to that aesthetic will cost a lot. 

Orientation 
The direction that the city faces is also important. In the southern hemisphere buildings usually face north. Living rooms get the sun and its not so important with bedrooms as people are only sleeping there.      
Similarly, most office lights are on most of the time and if the light is bright people put up blinds to avoid it.  
Parking Minimisation 43
The Petronas towers in Kuala Lumpur are 452 m in height (88 floors). Fifty thousand people per day use it, though many of them may be shopping there rather than working there. They have 4500 parking bays for such a tower.44

Basement parking bays cost R50,000 each to build, R40,000 for sub basement and R30,000 for above ground. That's why we want to minimize the need. Above ground parking only costs R1000 but used up huge amount of space which defeats our objective to be high density. 

In fact for every m2 of office the rule of thumb is that you need 1.2 m2 of parking ! That's 30m2 per bay parking. Now the actual bay is only 2.5 x 5 =12.5 m2 (or sometimes  3 x6 ) but if you count access, ramps etc, it adds up to 30m2. 

Parking and Traffic.
If offices and residential are mixed then everyone goes in different directions in the morning and parking for one by night becomes that of the other by day. Some people can walk or take taxis. 
For 1600 people/ high rise and 100% adult car ownership = 800 cars at 2m by 1m ie 1600 m2. ie either two stories or one and the space round the building and offices. 

Roads better to be many narrow ones than a few wide ones so that there is parking after the rush hour.
If slots are owned then enforcement of people in the wrong space is easy. Some will walk to work because of the short distances: a large health benefit. 

Use the roads that are used for rushhour (6 to 9) /(5 to 8)  for carparking after that time and during the night for houses in the area. Only problem is where you park if you get home between these hours. Fine if you go somewhere else like gymn or meetings after work.

Note most water in urban areas is used on gardens and washing cars. Car minimization means less water usage as well. 

Population/ Infrastructure Calculations 
If you have 100 x 100 in  5km ( 40m buildings plus 10m of road times 100 = 5km) and if this can accommodate 5 million households. Actually a lot more if the inner city goes up to 50 stories. That would mean no expansion into the greenbelt until all the central buildings are built.  If average flat is 100m2 45 that's 16 flats per floor @ 20 floors that's 320 households, with 10,000 blocks that's 3 million household. But if the number of floors averaged 100 then we have 15 million households!  We have not allowed for offices, retail, etc. If they are 1 in 3 parts of space we still have enough for 10 million households or 40 million people. If we expand into the greenbelt the height will be low because it will be under 20 stories. But say we do another km in each direction that's roughly 9 x 9 now ie 50 sq km as opposed to 25. Double the area. But with 20 stories only that's only another 3 million households. Maybe better do another one somewhere else, the returns on the division of labour must be getting into diminishing returns at 40 million people! 


If everyone's house takes up 2m by 1m (smallest)  then to house 20 million people you need 40 million m2 ie 40 sqm km or 7km by 7km. 
If everyones house is 2000m2 (including land) (100 x20 ) then to house 20 million need 1000 times the space ie 40 billion m2 ie 40,000 sq km =  200 km x 200 km. 46

Figures above are for households so need to multiply by 4 for population. 20 million people then can stay in 2000 sq km which is 40 by 40 .Most populated areas of Kansas are 13441 per sq mile = 32,000 per sq km. My idea is 20 million people in 2000 sq km = 10,000 per sq km. HK has 50,000 people per sq km in some districts. 

The population density is 456 /km2 in Kansas City as a whole, total area of 331 km2  , 3% water.  146,800 people, 61,000 housing units,  55,500 households, 36,200 families. 190  housing units /km2. Singapore has  4 million people in 682 sq km = 8000/ km247

While office space per person net is about 6m2 (the space of a person's desk etc), gross its more like 15-25 m2. You get the second figure by taking the whole space of an office (corridors, lifts, conference rooms, toilets, stairs, reception) and dividing by the number of people. 

On average the percentage of floor space taken up by residential, office and retail is 70%, 15% and 5% respectively.

NEIGHBOURHOODS

There's no question of course about telling people where they must live, but one can design areas with particular types of people in mind in order to cater for their needs more effectively

Ethnic/Religious
Greek/Italian/etc or by community around a church: ie particular type of church in the bottom of that block. Matters could be organized so a particular church could take a floor or a number of churches take a whole block. 

It's also possible to have building targeting different communities, one with French architecture, French multinationals, French shops. One could do the same for German, Spanish, Japanese, US, UK users. All have particular tastes and would value reminders of their country of origin. Chinatowns and Indiatowns are similar concepts present in many cities., as I'm sure they would be in Libertonia. 

Families 
Family accommodation needs to be near schools but also near potential sites for things like ballet, sports, swimming
Being highly dense and with private policing to reduce crime, children can walk to most of their activities which density insures are close by. Medical facilities are important for families as well as older people.

Buildings, however high, clustered round a central square are conducive to children as parents can watch them. Even better when the central square is owned by a child care company or person who can actually look after the children while they are there. 

Since the streets between buildings are grass and trees and the cars are underground if makes sense to have play areas for children in these  streets so children can play while their parents talk to friends in a street side café. 

In non high density surroundings, such specialization can cause problems. The New Town of Crawley was found to have 60% married and under 40 vs 25% in English population as a whole! 
This causes problems as they all grow up and get older, the nursery schools are empty and there are no facilities for teenagers! 48

Singles 
Singles like to be with people. They want common areas (privately owned) like bars, coffee shops, TV areas, movies, party places where they can meet people and socialize. It's also young singles that often come to the city to seek their fortune.

Teenagers
Teenagers must be provided for if one wants them not to hang about on street corners. The very high density of the place helps a lot however as there is always plenty to do. 

The Elderly 

By Personality 
Myers Briggs personality testing is one of the most amazing inventions of the 20th century. The 16 types work extremely well in cataloging the clusters of traits that tend to be together in certain types of people.49
Zones of cities or parts of blocks then can be designed specifically round certain personality types. People who want to be constantly learning will be catered for in the bookshop zone, with libraries, electronic boards in lifts and landings providing facts and information50. This type of personality also usually likes the latest technology as well.  Peace seeking personalities on the other hand wouldn't want such disturbances but rather more plants in landings and a pet friendly design.51  Extroverts may like a block designed to have lots of interaction and common areas to walk through in order to get anywhere. Introverts might prefer a design were common areas are completely separate from transport routes in order to leave you alone with your thoughts undisturbed. Order based personalities might prefer a higher level of block maintenance than Freedom based ones who would tolerate more disorder and could save money thereby.52  Practical people might fix a lot themselves, Ideas people would want to delegate a lot more to other people and therefore have  a  higher level of maintenance contract. There is also a connection between common interests and personality. Some blocks might cater to the sporty with sports centers and so on. 

Other Factors 
For many people the investments decisions can involve factors you might not expect like 'is there a synagogue' or the closeness to particular leisure activities. Religious and social activities need to be thought through. 

Community 
Is it good for residents to meet each other if they have nothing in common. Reason to sort residents by personality? by religion as well as my income. that would be a reason to have different sizes of houses all together.

Are leaders going to mix with one another for no reason. Easiest way to facilitate learning or deal making encounters, or romantic for that matter is to make people close together. 

We must also take into account that the average American only stays in a given community for 5 years. If that is the way of the world then building community is of less value. Alternatively, our dense city means employment opportunities are likely to be nearby rather than in other cities. 

Transport Costs 
At some point transport costs to likely places of work overcome extra land cost of living near work. Maybe should have lots of really low cost rental place (2m) throughout the city. Not because of the time cost to the poor but the travel cost. May increase crime. Maybe out of the main complexes. 

More area means more infrastructure in terms of sewers, electricity ,etc. 53

One might say that to some degree having lots of skyscrapers in the city center is counterproductive because people cant use cars to get to away from them because there are so many people in them that the roads would be really conjested unless you had multistorey roads or big spaces between the buildings. This is solved by having roads with no intersections so cars travel fast and aren't on them very long together with making public transport and walking possible and by having 20% of the city roads. 

Services 

Two water systems. One for drinking and the other for toilets and showering which can be fed from the water falls outside the buildings? 

Height and Efficiency
54"Executives in the City of London, Europe's largest financial market, contend that even in a non-earthquake-prone area, once a building rises much above 50 storeys the demand for additional elevators, stairwells and structural supports makes them unacceptably inefficient."
"True, up to a point, says Paul Katz, the architect at KPF in charge of the Tokyo and Shanghai projects-but the most efficient building is not necessarily the most valuable. There are some explicit benefits from skyscrapers, notably efficient energy usage, plus less tangible ones such as the savings and benefits that come from clustering employees in one place. Typically, where firms most like to operate, sites are scarce. As a result, it often makes sense to add floors, even at ever greater cost."
"Skyscrapers have risen slowly in Japan due to earthquake fears, but now they are going up. The central Roppongi Hills building will be just under 60 storeys and may be the sturdiest in the world, claims KPF, because of the breadth of the floors it stacks atop each other-many of as much as 5,500 square metres (60,000 square feet), compared with the former World Trade Centre's 3,600 square metres. Early tenants include such investment banks as Goldman Sachs and Lehman Brothers."
"The new plans have already run into critics, concerned that both repeat the World Trade Centre's inability to mesh with life on the street, undermining the vitality that characterises neighbourhoods in great cities. But the business of erecting large buildings unfolds over decades"
"Even before the events of September 11th, construction techniques were changing to resolve shortcomings that existed in the 1960s when work began on the World Trade Centre. Rather than being supported merely by steel curtain walls and thin connecting beams, the new skyscrapers have concrete cores linked to strong columns in the outer walls. Stairwells are pressurised to repel smoke and entered only through air-lock-style vestibules. Space is reserved every dozen floors or so for refuges. Special elevators are reserved for firemen."
"Nobody now underestimates the devastation that would be caused if an aircraft strikes a building; but at the least, the new crop of tall buildings are designed so that they would not collapse if hit by even the largest passenger plane. That may not sound particularly reassuring to anyone asked to work on the 100th floor
Trade Offs 
The normal quotes rate for building in South Africa is about R4000 per m2 for houses and offices. Of course for high finished housing it could go as high as R9000 and for warehouses and factories with little finishings required, R1500-R2000 is possible.  55

These costs are building costs. They do not include what developers add in, VAT, costs of waiting for planning/zoning decisions, the finance cost during construction and so on.

Some of these costs are eliminated in Libertonia however, such as VAT and planning permission costs. Labour costs should also be lower and also untaxed (as against about R12 per hour in South Africa for a labourer). Labour costs are usually about the same cost as the material itself, but this should be less in our environment. 

In other parts of the world, building costs can be a lot higher, particularly for the better buildings on the world: 

1. Sydney Horizon $41 Million US, 43 Floors Of Apartments,, bigger the higher they are, 32,000 M2 ($1300 Per M2, 1 Mil Per Floor Of Appt, Say 100k Each) 
2. Sydney Altair 12,300m2 , Cost $16 Millions, 139 Apartments Sydney Cbd ( 1300 Per M2, 110,000 P A) 
3. Sydney Aurora $180 Mil US, 50,000 M2 16 Stor Res 40 Storey Office  ($3000 Per M2)
4. Australia Cult Forum Nyc 2,700 M2, $29 Mill Us ($11,000 Per M2)
5. Westin Hotel NYC 61,000 M2, $300 Mil ($5000 Per M2)
6. Telekom Malays 179,000m2  $158 Mil Us ($800 Per M2) 
7. Uk 12,000 M2, $41 Mil  ($3000 Per M2)
8. Shanghai $540 Mil , 278,000 M2, 88 Storey, 468 M  ($2000 Per M2)
9. Vienna 7100m2, $10 Mil Us  ($1300 Per M2)56

Higher building costs translate into higher rents. Lower rents in Libertonia compared to the West is another factor that would draw business. 

Prime Sandton rents are about R75 per m2 per month for blue chips
R60 with bulk discount. 


Skyscrapers cost around about the same to build per m2 as other kinds of housing. The highest estimate of the difference is about 20% more on build and maintenance.  Lifts can cost R300,000 but money is saved in roofs and foundation since you only need one of each for lots of people as opposed to single or double storey housing where you need theses structures for just one family. This applies even though skyscraper foundations are very extensive as the costs are spread over a large number of people.57 Land cost per person are also minimised with larger numbers of stories. On the other hand above 8-10 stories its harder to get building material up to the top and above 50 stories further problems that to occur. 

High Rise for the Poor as well as Rich	
How do you make skyscraper accommodation cheaper so that its accessible to the poor. A lot of it is in the detail. Building costs can drop to R2100/ m2 instead of R4000 with less finishings. Making the building a rectangle rather than some more complicated shape saves considerably. The façade can make a big difference. In a lesser finished apartment there will be no appliances, 1.5m of cheaper kitchen cupboards instead of 8m of better quality ones. A cheaper flat will have steel windows not aluminium. Internal doors will be hollow instead of semi solid. 
The big question is how to prevent the lower cost areas becoming the slums they became when built in the 1960s in the Uk, amongst other places. 
Partly their problem was a design fault. Too much unowned space. Too much access to everyone's flat from anywhere. Too little 'defensible space'. 
Part of it was lack of management or management by intrinsically inefficient methods, like local governments. Management is key to the maintenance of value and regeneration developments in Joburg city center spend around 20% of rents on management. 
The common areas may be correlated with that era's incorrigibly socialist bent. In today's more enlightened world, people would know not to create so much common area. We wouldn't have drying areas but competing  drying companies which specialize in drying your clothes and take up much less space. We would have parks supervised by people whose business it was to do so. 
Large numbers of poor immigrants moving into New York and Paris has  partly caused the flight to the suburbs yet private policing and zero city taxes would have reduced this considerably. 
It's worth mentioning one obvious relationship that is often ignored: the more people earn the more space they buy. Hillbrow used to have 57m2 per person when it was a middle class area. Now the same flats have a density of 18m2 per person. Smaller units and higher expected densities should be designed into flats for the poor. 
Increasing density is one way to reduce cost and make things affordable. Broadly there are only a a few ways to do this : reduce road width, reduction in communal space, reduce gardens or reduce size of dwelling, 
In some areas of Soweto 3m2/ person is common though below 5m2/person is thought to create anti social behaviour in prisons. Prisoners however are not known for their pro-social behaviour in any case. 
Approx 100,000 flats a year were built in the sixties to house 4 times that in Moscow These were mostly high rise 12 to 22 stories. Socialist cities mostly prefabricated. They were badly built by government process as is normal but one has to understand what went before. 
Working class suburbs in Europe were also high rise and large scale: the 'grand ensemble' of Paris housed 80,000 and in Amsterdam 100,000 in Bijlmermeer 58
The new flats were usually 2-3 rooms /family as opposed to one family per room as in 1950s and before!59

In an African context we need to understand that to provide for the poor we are competing with non-structures, with shanty towns. In Africa 10-20% of people live in shanty towns. We need to create mortgagable properties where the deposit is less than the cost of building a (non mortgagable) shack.

Any kind of flats are better built as rectangles as you get more usable space. Diagonal lines are usually a waste. For a typical 60m2 space 4m x 15m is usually idea as then you maximise the number of flats with access to light. Most internal walls are 100mm plasterboard (drywalling) even in expensive apartments.60  These are quick to put up (concrete can take 21 days to set!) and quicker assembly means lower labour costs and lower finance costs. 

Berlin is also a city of appartments and seems to have no inclination to change in the post communist era.  This has been the case not just in Soviet times but from the time of Holbrecht where 7 storey buildings hosted an average 5 per room. Decried by many, they were nevertheless extremely popular,61 probably because they were cheap. 
New Building Technology 
Concrete has been a high-tech material since Roman times, when it was discovered that adding volcanic ash to the mix allowed it to set under water. Similarly, the Romans knew that adding horsehair made concrete less liable to shrink while it hardened, and adding blood made it more frost-resistant. In modern times, researchers have added other materials to create concrete that is capable of conducting electricity. It heats up when a voltage is applied, making it possible to build runways and drives that clear themselves of snow

"As soon as people encounter the term, even people who aren't architects or designers, they are full of desire, full of excitement," he says. He has visions of cities that glow from within, and buildings whose windows need not be flat, rectangular panes, but can be arbitrary regions of transparency within flowing, curving walls.

Skyscrapers 
"Oddly enough, few Brummies seem bothered by the sheer size of the tower. "Most people we spoke to said marvellous-can we have it taller than the tallest building in Britain," says Martin Field of Hampton Trust.
"The development, especially the tower, is so big that it could have the unintended consequence of shifting the city centre rather than just extending it. The new tower would be opposite Birmingham's Symphony Hall, which opens on to Centenary Square, which is used for big open-air events. If the government approves the plans for the skyscraper, it is almost bound to become the image of Birmingham and, in most people's minds, the centre of the city. But since many people still associate Birmingham's centre with the underground awfulness of New Street station, that might be no bad thing.
ONCE again, the south shore of Lake Michigan may be graced by the world's tallest building. The Chicago Plan Commission has given the go-ahead for a 108-storey skyscraper in the heart of downtown Chicago that would soar to 1,550 feet, or 2,000 feet (610 metres) with the antennas on the top. That is well above both the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur and Chicago's former record-holder, the Sears Tower. Chicago has been fuming ever since the international body that pronounces on tall buildings decided to count the spires on the Petronas Towers, but not the antennas on the Sears Tower. 
The developer, European American Realty, says it has financing in place for the $500m-dollar project and commitments to lease a chunk of its 765,000 square feet of office space. The building will contain 40 floors of condominiums; the developer expects some units to fetch $1.5m or more. It also counts on revenue from two 450-feet antennas broadcasting digital television signals. 
The city's establishment had bet heavily on the Fortune-500 version. After all, the evolution of cities the world over seemed to follow a clear pattern: the better a city did, the more it concentrated on running and financing things, not just making them.
Last week Southwark council received a planning application for a spire-shaped tower that would, at 306m, be the tallest building in Europe-twice the height of London's giant Ferris wheel. The London Bridge Tower, designed by Renzo Piano, an Italian architect, would contain offices, a hotel, apartments and public viewing galleries. Judging from the experience of other proposed skyscrapers, Mr Piano's tower faces a tortuous planning process. The Heron Tower (222m, including a 39m spire), proposed for the City, is to be the subject of a public inquiry. Plans for two towers in Paddington have been sent back, with a 100m height limit. But along with the gherkin (180m), these proliferating schemes suggest a new vertical ambition in the capital's property industry.
Will it get built? The City Council still needs to approve the project. One hurdle is the economics of skyscrapers. Richard Green, a property economist at the University of Wisconsin, argues that they are disproportionately expensive to build and operate. And this project carries two more uncertainties.
LONDON is a great city with a dull skyline. Take a walk up Primrose Hill and see for yourself. It's not just the grimy 1960s tower blocks, dimly visible in small clumps from Shepherd's Bush all the way to Woolwich. Most of the buildings that pass for skyscrapers are duds too. Centrepoint, a grim grey headstone; the Park Lane Hilton, dreary even by cold-war standards; the British Telecom Tower, a gigantic ray-gun barrel that fell to earth. The sleek, flirtatiously winking spires of Canary Wharf, to the east, are shining exceptions. 
The current bête noire over which conservationists and developers are coming to blows is Heron Tower, a 37-storey, £290m ($436m) glass-and-steel confection which Gerald Ronson, a property magnate, wants to throw up in Bishopsgate, at the very heart of the City.

When projects are put on the table, lenders now demand more equity from developers and more pre-leasing. The growth of real-estate investment trusts (REITs), publicly traded companies that invest in commercial properties, has also brought more transparency to an industry in which deals were often made in secret.62


The first is that most companies benefit greatly from their proximity to other firms in the same business. Charles Woo, head of MegaToys, says that he encouraged other toy companies to move close to him when he started up in the early 1980s because they could share suppliers and meet the demand if orders came in too fast. The second is that, thanks to its ports and freeways, LA enjoys good communications with both the Pacific rim and Latin America, not to mention the rest of the United States.

Which begs the question of why London's skyline has not been extended so far upwards before. The area's geology is less amenable to high-rise development than Manhattan's, and the need for increased office space has in the past been answered in other ways.

In reality, of course, London's choice is not between Canaletto and Manhattan. In comparison with Paris (whose tall buildings are ghettoised in La Défense), London has evolved anarchically.

BEAUTIFUL or historic buildings are preserved nowadays as a matter of course. But should the same be done for views? The London Planning Advisory Committee (LPAC) thinks that it should, and this month, responding to a spate of applications to erect very tall buildings in Britain's capital, it is suggesting stricter rules to that end. In particular, it is recommending the adoption of a London-wide high-buildings strategy comparable to that in other capital cities such as Berlin, Paris, Prague and Washington.
In a city fringed by hills, any large new building is certain to impinge on a familiar view. In 1991 LPAC, formerly a limb of the late and sometimes lamented Greater London Council, listed ten "strategic views" that ought to be preserved, meaning that no modern structure should be allowed to destroy the composition. Mainly from hilltops, the ten chosen vistas all embrace either St Paul's Cathedral or the Palace of Westminster. Those who oppose freezing these tableaux in time-mainly, of course, people whose building plans would interfere with them-point out that those two buildings themselves radically compromised then existing and doubtless much-loved views when they were completed in 1710 and 1870 respectively

Public Transport 
From the Economist: 
"Prescott is far from alone in his enthusiasm for trains, trams and buses. Athens, currently served by a single creaky underground line, is building two more. Seattle, which built a monumental downtown bus tunnel a few years ago, is designing a $3.9 billion tram and commuter-train system. The beams and pillars for four different rapid-transit schemes, in various stages of construction, cast shadows on the streets of Bangkok. Sheffield, a struggling industrial town in the north of England, boasts a shiny new tram line. Even Dallas-Fort Worth, where 4.7m people sprawl across 23,000 square kilometres of Texas prairie63, recently got its first commuter train. All of these projects were promoted with a similar rationale: better, faster public transport will make commuters' lives easier and unclog the roads.
Turning drivers into public-transport passengers is not an impossible goal. In a handful of cities, notably Vienna, the combination of excellent and highly subsidised public transport, high petrol taxes, lofty parking fees and strict regulation of on-street parking has succeeded in keeping the streets uncongested (although the peripheral motorway is another story). But these benefits can be elusive. To see why, it is worth paying a visit to Toronto.
Not all that long ago, Canada's largest city was a textbook case study for urban planners. The first of the city's two subway lines opened in 1954, giving residents quick access to the financial and shopping district near Lake Ontario. In 1967 the province of Ontario started a commuter rail service for downtown workers. Rather than surrendering to sprawl in the 1970s, Toronto tried to guide the process by promoting "town centres", office-and-shopping complexes that could be reached by subway and bus, not just by car. Since the 1980s, a network of pedestrian tunnels has spread beneath downtown streets, allowing subway and commuter-train riders to reach their offices comfortably even in the midst of a Canadian blizzard.
But, like most of the world's metropolises, Toronto is decentralising rapidly, which is undermining its efforts to create a transit-friendly city. 
The city's spine is no longer Yonge Street, which stretches north towards the Arctic, but rather Highway 401, a 16-lane east-west motorway 10km north of the centre, which is bumper-to-bumper by 6.30am and stays that way well into the evening. "On the one hand, people are griping about it," says Doug Floyd, until recently the city's transportation commissioner. "On the other, people seem to want that single-family detached house with access to an automobile."
The city's traffic studies track the trend. In 1985, 1.05m vehicles crossed the city limits each day. A decade later, the daily count exceeded 1.5m. The number of vehicles entering areas closer to the urban core, however, has barely grown. Almost all of the additional trips are to or from low-density regions where public transport is infrequent. Bus, subway and tram lines have lost 100m passenger-trips a year since 1991. GO Transit, the commuter rail system, has increased its ridership-but 96% of its users are headed downtown to Union Station in the morning or home from Union Station in the late afternoon. "Transit is sort of becoming irrelevant," says Mike Wolczyk, GO's head of marketing. "We do a real good job of getting people downtown. But most people aren't going downtown."
Public transport does have indisputable advantages. A single bus can carry as many people as 60 cars. A single train does the work of 1,000 cars. For some journeys, public transport can be the fastest means of travel. When it is operating near capacity, any form of public transport is more energy efficient, more environmentally friendly and makes better use of scarce road space than the private automobile. Yet in many cases public transport does little or nothing to relieve congestion
There are four main reasons for this. First, as in Toronto, public transport is not efficient in serving areas with low population or employment densities. Low usage means infrequent service, and infrequent service, in turn, deters users. Decentralisation is an almost insurmountable challenge for public-transport systems. Baltimore, in the American state of Maryland, offers a clear example. The city's sole heavy rail line stretches 14 miles from Johns Hopkins Medical Centre, a big employer, to Owings Mills, a suburb where office parks and shopping centres are seemingly springing up everywhere. Yet those new developments are scattered over such a wide area that they are not within easy walking distance of the Owings Mills station. To get there, people need to take first the subway and then the bus. No wonder that few of them travel by subway from city homes to suburban jobs.
Second, fixed transport systems, such as rail lines, can quickly become obsolescent as travel patterns change. Mexico city's rubber-tyred Metro is a case in point. Although trains are so full that breathing can become difficult, usage has declined over the past decade even as the system has expanded from 119km to 178km. For those who do not mind the crowds, the Metro is unbeatable to central destinations, but it goes nowhere near the booming commercial districts of Lomas, Santa Fe and Perisur. Passengers to those areas typically use taxis or minibuses, which only add to congestion.
Third, many types of public transport have high, and often unrecognised, opportunity costs. Flashy rail systems frequently consume resources that could serve far more people if devoted to improving bus travel. Athens, for example, is building two new metro lines, 90% financed by the EU, even as bus usage is plummeting. Yet almost no money is being spent on creating bus lanes on city streets or giving buses priority at traffic signals. Rio de Janeiro, having struggled to finish a portion of its first underground line in the 1980s, nearly had to close it down for want of spare parts. In London, the extension of the Underground's Jubilee line has consumed billions of pounds while other parts of the Underground and bus services have deteriorated.
Lastly, public transport is simply not what people would choose for most of their journeys. For the majority of trips, bus, rail, tram and underground connections are too complicated, too unpleasant or too time-consuming. Kuala Lumpur's Light Rail Transit line has empty seats even during the rush hour. In America, where a dozen cities have built rail-transit systems since the late 1970s, total ridership in 1995 was no higher than in 1977 (see chart 5)-in part, perhaps, because the average speed for fully fledged underground lines was less than 34km per hour (21 miles per hour), for tram lines only 23km per hour. In the EU, despite huge investments, passenger mileage on urban rail systems has risen by a scant 9% since 1970. The Dutch transport ministry, which wants such systems to handle a greater share of urban travel in the Netherlands, reckons that trips by public transport should take no more than one-and-a-half times as long as by car. No wonder that people continue to favour their cars.
The average speed of a Bangkok bus is 9km per hour. Since only 5% of Bangkok's surface area is given over to roads, less than in any other major city in the world, converting existing traffic lanes into busways is impractical. So the government has turned to "megaprojects" as the only way to get traffic moving. First it granted concessions for building elevated tollways. Now a rail system is on the way.

Without subsidies, and with investors in the public-transport projects demanding a return on their money, the average rail trip is likely to cost 25-30 baht ($0.60-0.75), about one-third more than the fare on an air-conditioned bus and eight times that on a regular bus. For an unskilled worker earning less than 200 baht a day, that may be beyond reach.

of the financial-services sector, than to a speculative glut. British developers, in particular, became more cautious after the last downturn, during the early 1990s, in which several of their number went bankrupt. In Tokyo, by contrast, lessons have gone unheeded: despite a spectacular property crash in recent years, low interest rates have tempted developers to erect no fewer than 111 skyscrapers this year, around twice as many as have been built in New York. This splurge promises more pain for Japanese developers and for their hapless financiers.

Most people also miss that the reason that we have so little public transport is because we license taxis. With a free (or automatic licensing) environment for taxis we would have many more. Before the licensing of the taxi, anyone would stop and pick anyone else up for a small fee. 64  That is the most effective and prevalent public transport system you could possible have, much cheaper than rail etc. 





CHAPTER TWO
THE PRIVATISED ECONOMY

Clever design is important but it will not make investors come from all over the world if that's all it has. To make a city really work in the current globalised world, there is no doubt that it has to fully embrace the future with a tax free, completely privatised system. 
I have written a 400 page book on how (and why) to privatise those areas of the economy that have not yet been privatised with explanations of where this has happened round the world and what lessons we can learn. 65  In this chapter this background is assumed and we simply describe how we are going to organised and implement that privatisation in Libertonia. The book on privatisation can be accessed by clicking the links below:
There are a number of areas covered here and in that book: 
1. Policing and crime 
2. Roads 
3. Infrastructure
4. Courts 
5. Noise 
6. Beauty and the environment 
7. Education
8. Health 
Policing 
$5 each per household in a skyscraper translates into about $12,000/R84,000 per month per household66. There are a number of security and guarding roles. Two people have to be available to man the entrance/reception to the building and watch the various banks of video screens. Two must patrol in the areas around the building, especially at night to give people a feeling of safety. Two people must be situated in the car park and available to move to potential break ins if people view them on the radar. The cost of this at African wage levels is no more than R1000 per month each. R6000 for all six with three shifts is R18,000/ $2500.  If there is a big incident then those off duty can be called in, first those not likely to be sleeping, then those that area. Every block will have comparable forces so they can call in reinforcements if need be. They must have a contractual duty to aid each other in specified ways when the need arises for reasonable payment. 
The rest of the funds must be used to reward people who catch criminals anywhere in the city. This is by far the larger amount. Ideally the law should state that a criminal must be made to pay back double what has been stolen and then work it off if he has no funds. However until/unless that system applies, the blocks will pay double the costs of police companies that catch a criminal. The reason double is appropriate is that police will not catch every criminal and must have the incentives to investigate. Small one man shows may investigate small crimes and large, well organised professionals will investigate more serious matters. Blocks will be able to commission someone to investigate, but if another company catches the criminal then they must remunerate the actual catcher as well as whoever they commissioned. 
They have an obligation to pay those catching criminals that have committed crimes against anyone in the block or pro rata with other blocks if the criminal has also been causing problems there. The court will decide the exact arrangement. 
This arrangement is an initial position. Blocks after two years or by agreement with the Libertonian authority can agree with their members to do it differently but must do so in a way that catches criminals on a consistent basis. 
If block crime rate and the city crime rate  has gone down that year and all the funds are not required, the block has an obligation to take remaining money from the levies for the next year. And can after the first two years, adjust the rate at which funds are levied. 
If the crime rate of the block or the city has gone up then the rate cannot be decreased and can be increased. It is legitimate to send personnel to help other blocks in other parts of the city. Those sent from the block who catch criminals elsewhere will be able to claim the double costs from that block. Blocks cannot exclude other private police from their blocks. Competition in catching criminals must be preserved. Police have free entry into public areas of blocks and may get warrants into private areas. 
In the event that police companies doing the patrolling need further backup they can contract in advance with either neighbouring block's police or rapid response third parties to provide extra bodies where needed. 
There are aspects of the design of the city itself that help reducing crime. In his 1972 book Defensible Space, "which showed that the safest neighborhoods maximized private space and minimized common zones. Safe areas also minimized "permeability," that is, the ease of entry to and exit from the neighborhood or housing area. Cul-de-sacs are thus a crime-prevention device, and any breaching of cul-de-sacs will predictably increase crime. Newman didn't include suburbs in his study because they had much lower crime rates than the urban neighborhoods he did examine. This, he believed, was because the suburbs were less permeable and more defensible."67
Another aspect in the same debate is mixed use. The bottom line is that giving criminals more access to households increases burglary rates. Ideally you close off residential/office space from retail space or public space if you want to reduce crime. 
This can be done however without preventing the communities that New Urbanism want to create. It simply means that the community areas in the retail mauls in the blocks and on the gardened, cafed areas between the blocks separate from the housing areas. 
Its possible to make the levy higher for anti-crime to start  with a higher number of police to send a clear signal and create a reputation for being tough on crime. This then could be quietly decreased as a % of the levies as time went on and crime stayed low. 
Whatever rate it was at it, with such low barriers to entry it would attract many people into its ranks. No one need be unemployed when there are criminals to catch. Even people who did other jobs would be on the look out for crime so they could get commissions from the private policing companies. This happens to some degree today in the police but would be hugely increased if there it was a commercial affair.  
Because of the density, anyone walking anywhere in Libertonia should always be within shouting distance of the police at any time of the day or night. Very reassuring, particularly to women. 
On top of the highly incentivised private police forces, Libertonia is equipped with the latest in security technology. Access control is implemented by smart cards. Your smart card can open your house, let you into and out of the car park, into the main building and it may even be impossible for people to use your PC without it. 
That means you can comfortable send your children to a play area a few floors below knowing that no one else will be able to access the area. It means that you can authorise your staff to access your home on their card knowing that you can easily check the records to confirm they were indeed the only person to access your home on the night of the burglary. Added CCTV in the lobby, lift and streets can find out if anyone left carrying a heavy bad or box. More affluent dwellers can even install finger print recognition or even iris recognition using the same system. 68

CCTV with the appropriate software can even detect suspicious movements like loitering outside a bank, cars driving in the wrong direction, or identify a particular person somewhere in the city. Anytime a suspect or convicted criminal steps outside or into a public areas, the system can identify him immediately. This is all automatic, no one has  to search through video tapes.  This amazing new technology is quite expensive69 but divided amongst everyone in the blocks would be only about $10 per flat once off capital cost. Smart card readers are around $300 and the cards themselves about $30, so although everyone can have a card, it would add too much to the cost of each flat to install smart card readers on low cost flats. Rather a number of flats or the floor would require a smart card to enter. 70
When visitors arrived whose cards were not already enabled to enter your building and come to your floor (only). Reception would phone you and ask if they should be admitted. Their access would expire the next day. You would be able to view the reception area CCTV from your TV (any TV will do). 
Another aspect of the software is the ability to detect when packages are removed from a place and to also flag this to security. This is great for detecting shop lifting. This saves us all money when we shop. It can also detect when you left something behind by accident.  
These same cards can be used for shopping. Even the poorest people can pay using cashless method which means mugging people is of little benefit, all you get is a card you cannot use because you do not know the pin. 
All this information about people's movements is of course only available to block security and in the event of a crime. Privacy is not invaded, it would be legally actionable to sell such information to the press. Due to privacy concerns it would normally be the practice to put cameras in landings but if the area was high crime then they could be erected temporarily until the crime rate came down.
Basic alarm systems also include panic buttons in every house along with smoke detectors for fires. Panic buttons are also fitted in streets. People walking home at whatever time of day or night are in any case only a scream away from the security of each of the blocks that they pass. 
All this technology should make any crimes that in fact somehow manage to happen very easy to solve. In fact the security guards will be able to solve many without recourse to outside detectives and pick up the premium for so doing.   An average block might have 2 shifts of 6 guards each this would cost R40,000 to R80,000 per month depending on the quality or the people and their training. Reinforcements could come by car from elsewhere in the city when necessary.      
The technology also means it is possible for landlords to lock out tenants that have not paid their rent very easily and without getting involved in a potential violent exchange when trying to change physical locks. On top of legal support for easy eviction which is essential if we want people to be competing to build flats for the poor on a long term basis, this easy in practise will also lead to more landlords entering this market. This, incidentally, will also lead to a strong market for very short term accommodation paid for by the day while tenants get their rent sorted out. 
Smart card technology also can be used to help employers keep track of what time employees or contractors were in the office and even of where repair men or sales people have  spent their time in a given day or month. It gives cleaners, for example, access to clean an office at certain times but no access at other times. It means you do not have to stay at home to let a workman in, he can simply be let in remotely from the office. A cell phone can be used to open the door from a distance or to do many of these other functions.   

Another aspect of security is guarding against 9/11 and Oklahoma style attacks. There are various ways of dealing with this including the practice in London of putting servers in nuclear bunkers under the ground and also making the glass bullet proof to at least the 3rd storey of a skyscraper. 

Roads 
In Stage One and Two  of the building of the city, the roads will be paid for by the blocks as tolling isn't feasible at that stage. This adds less than 2% to the price of a new flat. 71 As the rest of the street gets   built they pay back the first blocks for the roads which reduces the levies of that block. 

The next street of blocks to be build have a street going in the other direction and the first one becomes one way. Lateral streets are added with slip roads. 
When there is enough roads to support a tolling system, the roads are sold to 5 or more companies with the remit to create as much competition as possible. The returns from these roads are used to pay levies or in direct payments to flat/office owners and people start to pay directly for their road use. 
Road companies will not be able to own the roads on both sides of any building. Carparks show allow people to exit to any of the four roads around about (to promote competition). 
Roads in most cities are about 6m for the road and then 2m each for the pavements totalling 10m. Bus stops add a further 2m. In our city of course, the whole area is used for either roads or pedestrian depending on what level we are on.   
Infrastructure Competition
Infrastructure because of its cost involves a bit of thought to make it competitive, or at least potentially competitive. Electricity for dense city involves a sub station in every block so electricity comes into these stations at 11kv. There is nothing then to prevent each block from contracting with a different provider. The key two for a Africa location would be South Africa's Eskom and the national power company. Most blocks will have back up generators but its not usually economic to generate power this way. It does however provide an upper limit for what the power companies can charge and is thus potential competition.
Roads are not tolled to start with, but the blocks are obligated to sell them to competing providers when it becomes feasible. Creating competition in roads then is not an issue.
Telecoms again are sold to competing companies who each own one of the 7 interconnected servers that are installed initially. Similarly with interconnected mobile network servers. Blocks can easily switch from one to another for the price of another cable running along the underground tunnels. 
Water services are a bit more difficult. Its not feasible to have  multiple competing sewage and water pipes in the same way as you have with electricity cables or fibre optic telephone lines. In this situation then its better if all the blocks on one side of a road72 jointly own the sewage lines73 and then potentially choose their sewage processor at the point just before the sewage works. Thus if we can envisage one sewage works a discrete distance away from the where the skyscrapers stop at the foot or every road of skyscrapers. Due to the high density, one gets economies of scale at this level. It is feasible at this point to redirect a pipe to the sewage works for another street if it is offering a better deal and run the pure water back to the street from this sewage company. This would not be a simple exercise and would involve clearly more pipes and some pumping but the volumes would justify this work if one company was considerably cheaper than another. Economically, its the possibility of this happening that is important as that competition leads to continual price and quality improvement by the sewage company.  
Block Responsibility
1. To connect to delivery system
2. Collect for Public Goods
a. Defence (if not provided by host country)
b. Aesthetics: to create more beauty
c. Education $5 a week, can download anything up to a point. 2/3rd of funds go to most downloaded material, rest to maintain system. Blocks vote on provider each year.
3. To connect to services 
a. Telephone
b. Water
c. Sewer
d. Gas
e. Delivery System
f. Bulk purchasing
g. Electricity
h. Rubbish collection
4. To provide services 
a. Police patrols
b. Payments to detective companies 

What the difference between this and government providing these services? 
1. The actual providers (Telecoms /Police companies etc are competing) 
2. People can opt out of the whole block choice and make their own arrangements (ie be disconnected from the Telecom go and just use cellphones)
3. There are many buyers and they can change their suppliers. No monopolies. 

Block Process
Block companies are companies like any other but are voted for my the block based on how many meters squared the person owns of the block. 
The directors must however act according to certain basis rules:
1. For anything they contract for they must get comparatives from lots of companies.
2. They must discuss them on an online discussion forum or blog so that everyone can contribute and circulate all quotes for at least a week or two before the board meets to decide
3. A vote on the system of more than 60% overrides the board
4. The contracting must be arranged so that different contracts come up for renewal at different times in the year 
5. Directors can be 'recalled' by a vote of the members of 51%. Any person in the block can start a recall referendum.
6. Solutions should be based on the hierarchy below

Hierarchy
1 Where possible private competing companies should supply each member of the block individually. 
2 If that's not possible then private competing companies should supply the block as a whole,
3 If that's not possible then the block contracts with one (or if possible more)  company(s) to supply for as short a duration as is feasible. 

To start with as an initial position there would be minimum amounts to spend on police, for the first two years. Blocks can of course choose which company. Since each block is legally liable to refund to any company that catches criminals there is no maximum that they can spend in policing. 

All the usual items are also included in the levies: common swimming pools, maintenance painting, road maintenance until the roads are sold and tolled, roof garden74  Levies should be kept as low as possible as its surely better for people to charge entrance fees for users and keep levies low. If there is a block owner then they may do this.

Making Markets Even Better
While markets may fail (not perform perfectly) sometimes, they are nevertheless orders of magnitude better at delivering the goods than government processes in every country of the world. That's why the response to 'market failure' is seldom if ever, for a government department to take over or intervene.
That doesn't mean that landowners and communities might not privately want to do things that make the operations of the market even better. Hence then price watch, contract watch and subsidy watch. 
Price Watch 
Insurers would quote for the main categories of insurance  to price watch website distinguishing between things that affect premium a lot and the minimal factors. 
Price watch companies do not operate on their own entirely however they  also  co ordinate, check  and record the views and discoveries of the community recorded on online chat sites and similar forums. 

Contract Watch 
This function makes people aware of contracts that are unreasonable or unfair. This knowledge means if people continue to buy from those with 'unfair' contracts then they should be enforced fully as they've done it with full understanding (prices might well be cheaper.) On the other hand people may decide to pay more for companies with more reasonable terms in their contracts. 
This function might also be used for insurance were claims tat were not paid were referred ere and they would decide if the company was acting fairly or not. 
Opportunity Watch 
Opportunity watch is where there seems to be a lot of public debate about a certain industry 'ripping people off', such as 'loan sharks'. Usually one finds they just have high costs (people that do not pay back). But lest that is not the case, opportunity watch points out these areas so that if there is a genuine opportunity that sellers will flood the market and bring down prices once again. Of course this is happening anyway in any economic system. Opportunity watch just helps to make the information available to everyone as quickly as possible. 
Subsidy Watch 
Subsidy watch looks not at Libertonia but at other countries and particularly at what they are subsidizing. Subsidies are bad, they hurt the third world by not allowing it to compete where it can. They distort the local economy also. Exporters in Libertonia are vulnerable to sudden changes in the regimes to which they ship their products. 
What better then than to take advantage of other people's subsidies rather than loosing through them. If America subsidises steel, then lets buy their steel and take the subsidy of the US tax payer! If France wants to subsidise its farmers then let's buy our lamb from them.75 If people in Libertonia do not want to spend hard earned cash in the more expensive of university degrees, then let's simply import people with these skills who have been subsidised by those who still think state education is a good idea. 
Funding of the watchers
Funding of the watcher is through a tiny increment to the levy. There is a fixed price for the first year. Four companies get a sum of money to analyse prices, contracts, opportunities and subsidies  in the zone and publish on a particular page on the Libertarian website For the next year, the funds are distributed according to the companies people vote provided the best service. The two companies that are lowest are replaced with other companies  thought the original two are welcome to continue to provide their services for free in the hope of getting voted back in the next year. The new companies are also voted in based on their promises or existing (free) performance. 

Dear Peter 
In South Africa there is a web service which has successfully identified which companies responds to comments from people and fix wrong situations and which do not. This kind of service could certainly be an effective part of a watcher company's repertoire. 

Who is Who
Other useful services would include information about how to set up and be successful in particularly businesses and who the right people are to talk to in certain industries. Again publicly funding people to research this and put what they gain on the internet could be publicly funded with those putting up the most rates or consulted information getting the lion's share of the funding. As usual the people who do the work are private companies or individuals and its just the funding that is public.

Full Information 
These  all move our economy closer to the ideal of classical economics that markets work in terms of perfect information. There is another mechanism to do this also. 
All the mechanisms that we are talking about are funded through levies, though unlike taxes, people can choose to opt out in some circumstances.
One way however to reduce these levies while increasing the information flow is to allow companies to send ten emails a week to each person advertising some new business, new product or special offer. These would be filtered to make sure they were something of interest and genuine, they would also be charged for so anyone receiving these emails and reading them each month would get deductions from his levies. 
Those who opted to get more emails might get even more deductions.
People could choose not to get any and thus pay more levies. 
Ideally however, people would express their preferences on the internet so the emails they were sent were about things they were genuinely interested in. 
Better still, if products were sent to a small number of people first and you rated how interested you were in four or five new products in a certain area. The best offers then go onto the second round where they compete with other offers that are voted more highly. Thus the offers that reach the mass market are only the best offers. 
Everyone gains  from this process. Not being known is a real burden on start up companies. It takes many painful and expensive years to become well known, even if your product is much better than established brands. The marketing cost to reach you can only be built into the company's pricing. Enabling us to find better companies and products more quickly cuts out that marketing cost and makes products cheaper. Plus it gives much more effective competition to the encumbents,  keeping them improving and innovating. And all of it moving us closer to the voluntary full information economy.

(And of course we must realize that perfect information is not a static state. The market itself is a discovery process by which we discover what people want and need)76
Disintermediation of (some) Retail
There is a burden on blocks to employ every year a company that attempts to bulk buy products for as many items as possible. That is not to stop block members also going with other competing companies but it is to insure in the short term that the scheme gets off the ground. Basically consumers sign up on the website and pay for what they want at greatly reduced prices and the buyer puts in the order when the minimum number of units is reached. He then arranges their delivery to block members. This cuts out retailers thought depending on whether he aggregates the goods before delivering, the distributor sorting function may still exist. 
A few examples of commodity goods that could be bought in bulk would be : staples: tinned meat, toilet paper, razor blades, bottled water, soap, shampoo, wine, hard liquor, make up, moisturiser, clothes esp socks, underwear (but sizes), coat hangers, batteries, light bulbs, soap powder, fabric conditioner, hi fis, leather jackets , tables, chairs. Durable goods that come in standard sizes are the best for this kind of scheme but other types of goods become possible as the buyers get more sophisticated. 
Goods can be high or low quality depending on the demand. 
Even fresh food can be delivered this way  if it arrives quickly, the buyer can go directly to farms to order a large number of butchered animals. Similarly he can go to local and foreign factories and deal direct with them. This kind of system might even make it feasible to manufacture things in Libertonia that would otherwise be made in China. 
Having to order different sizes isn't really a problem in the ordering of the goods. Its must more hassle to deliver. 
Higher value goods make even more sense that the lower value ones we have been discussing (though low value goods often add up over time.) It's quite feasible that buyers could negotiate deals with car companies to move thousands of cars at a time to Libertonian buyers. Similarly with kitchen appliances and other white goods. The strategy wouldn't need necessarily always to be cheap and cheerful. A 50% discount on some really exclusive items might be effective. 
On goods where particular tastes are an important part of the selection, bulk buying could be done on a wine of the month/ book of the month basis where people pay a fixed sum and experts select what they think is good or that you will like. You will come to know which experts you trust or who think like you. 

Programs could even work out your average consumption and automatically send you more when you need it (light bulbs, shampoo, etc)
With other things with different types and sizes, it wouldn't really matter at all compared to the value of the goods. In some cases the company selling such goods as Hi-Fis or Large TVs could probably be persuaded to label all the boxes so the buyer could easily deliver them. 
People of course would not usually be allowed to cancel or the buyer will be left with huge amounts of stock he cant sell. But substitution would usually be fine. By that I mean if one person backed out but he found someone else to continue the order. Buyers might even allow that as long as there was someone somewhere that wanted the goods, even if they were unknown to the original orderer that the person would be allowed to back out. 
There is no reason why bulk buying should not also work for computer supplies (though margins are pretty low so no huge savings there).   Ipods, mobile phones etc can be ordered this way. Commonly used, non prescription pharmaceuticals can also be ordered in bulk: head ache tablets, 

Another way that it could work however is  if you bought, say the top 10 novels each quarter or the top 10 best selling clothes in your style (and size). 

Note also there are two ways to play this. The very cheapest solution is to bypass the brands and get no-name brands of goods at wholesale prices. However, in many cases, especially at the start of the program it is going to reassure customers more to go with well known brands and the saving will still be significant (30-50% on average).

Adding a financing provision to this service would also help it to succeed considerably. 

Common practice would be that everything sold must be at least 25% cheaper than in the average store before the deal was offered and the company must try to get the maximum possible discount for the bulk purchase. Company doesn't make margin on this but charges an explicit fee. No back handers or presents of any kind can be received from suppliers.  Sometimes the factory might deal direct with the block if the buyer is not willing to deal with him. Any resident of a block can raise deals on the internet system. 
Any violation allows immediate termination of contract. 
Can ally with other companies to get even bigger discounts but any collusion to raise prices is punishable by damages law. 

Retail gross margins vary. Edcon has about 40%, Exclusive books about 48%. These are both bad examples for disintermediation as their products are very differentiated. However, it does give an indication of the savings to be made in other areas where the products are more commoditised. Retail margins most fund the rental of stores and all the people that work there;  Edgars has  230- 250 people working in their Eastgate or Sandton stores. 

Large shopping chains of course have huge buying buyer with manufacturers, where a single buyer can spend R300 million per annum and the whole chain in the tens of billions. It may it fact be the retailers themselves that run the bulk buy companies. 

There are many related areas where bulk buying may make sense. Group life insurance for a whole block may well be cheaper per person than individual policies. Group licensing of software is possible as it may well be with CDs and Movies. Possibly the city could pay a certain amount per year to the music and film houses  equivalent to what they would earn in a city of the same size then the material could be copied freely within Libertonia. A similar principle applies at a higher level in paying once to make all the academic journals available online to anyone in the city.

Retail changed not eliminated 
It's worth saying at this stage that I do not anticipate this process eliminating shops, in fact, I expect there will be as many shops as before, they will just sell different things. 
Those things that are familiar to everyone, that can easily be bought in bulk, that have become commodities, will be bought through the bulk buying process. Other items that need to be tried on, or that you have not seen before, or that you do not understand, or that are sold fresh  will continue to be sold from shops. So will things you could get in bulk, but want right now! The end result is a much wider range of new things in shops as shelf space in freed up through buying the standard stuff in bulk. 
Retailers will do well in Libertonia, their store in Libertonia will most likely have the highest profit per m2 in the world. With densities as high as this it is hard to do badly! There is a market for almost everything.
Ways of saving time
In some ways saving money and saving time are two sides to the same coin. Money you could say, is time is foldable form. 77 But its worth thinking about them separately. People in the modern world are sometimes even more concerned about saving time than money. They will pay for a more cost effective solution. 

People do not have to waste work time 
1. :Queuing at banks, everyone has internet banking
2. Queuing at government offices.
3. Queuing on roads due to congestion. 

Minimizing the Time costs of the movers and shapers.

Most significant cost is deal cost. 
4. Minimised by making things close to each other, easy to meet with someone and make a deal. Even with all the new communication technology people still like to meet. 
5. Minimised by eliminating time to get permissions and licenses and company formations.
6. Minimised by putting info about all types of business on the internet for people to see costs of each business and the way it works.

Reducing interruptions through 
1. Reliable power, etc through competition 

Faster Delivery due to our underground delivery system
Applications 

Aesthetics 
1. With this model consider aesthetics or the beauty of a place as a public good since once you have made something beautiful, everyone benefits and cannot be excluded
2. So we do not get a government department to provide aesthetics but competing private companies. Contribution is compulsory and paid by all but they choose which aesthetics company to pay it to. 
3. Here there seems to be no way to effectively set the levy as with defence, so we need to vote on a level perhaps. The difference is that defence is basically an insurance situation and aesthetics is not. 

Freedom/Variety in Areas
There seems to be some demand for areas that are completely void of regulation (as opposed to just mostly like the rest of the city). There is no reason why some areas of the city should not be set up this way, if that is what people genuinely want. 
It might also be possible for different areas of the city to represent different personalities. Contemplative areas would have low tolerance for noise violations, party areas would have high tolerances.
Some parts could be very moral with restrictions on drinking after certain times, on the sex industry/ pornography etc. Family values would be paramount. Churches would be based there. Others areas might want to be more liberal. 
Some towns in the UK have become focused on families which is a problem as families get older and there are no facilities for young adults. This is better served by different areas focusing on different stages of life and making it really easy to move with the low transaction cost of the computerised deeds transfer system. 
Other Key Principles
Libertonia rests on the principle of the general impossibility of economic planning. It is not desirable to try as they did in the Soviet Union to try and guess what goods people wanted to buy without any feedback from them via the price mechanism to tell you if you guessed right or not and how you can change.   
Ludwig von Mises puts this very well when describing the process as by human action but not by human design. In other words optimal results are achieved in an economy because the price mechanism co ordinates the plans and preferences of millions of separate individuals without any one indivi