City Rebuilt - A Modernist Idea

Here is a piece I wrote a while ago about an idea of mine for a series of rebuilt cities. After learning about modernism I noticed how modernist this idea is in the way it wants to streamline the world as series of carbon copied urban havens. It is the starting idea for a unified society and world to live in.

Here and now in our cities we are always trying to adapt to changing technologies, installing WiFi, wider roads and better rail networks. But this task is becoming herder and herder as we have no more room to adapt, we do not have room for wider roads, new railways or solar fields.
So why not build a whole new city from scratch? After the second world war central Berlin was left in ruins and has been rebuilt with eco buildings, effective subway systems and legible graphic design. So it makes sense to build from scratch rather than give a run down city that has been built over for hundreds of years yet another facelift.
The only problem with this of course is that there is no room for the new cities, and the infrastructure around the city is still going to be outdated. So can’t we flatten our urban areas and outdated technology part by part and stat again.
This way we can eliminate problems like oil shortage, landfill and lack of recycling, global warming, transport delays, unreliable internet networks and roadworks. We can introduce solar roadways which solves the energy crisis but also provides easy underground maintenance for gas, electric and telephone infrastructure. We could build homes that face the sun for optimal solar panel efficiency. We can build useful road and rail links t key areas and build electric car charging points with integrated WiFi hotspots and domestic device charging facilities. Problems solved.

Of course there is many problems with this idea such as what will we do with the people within these areas and their opinion on being forcefully moved, and the human rights breached in doing so. So in a way this is not just a modernist idea but one of a world dominating villan in a cartoon. It is too drastic to be practical however it is a starting point for real change to be made int he modern world.