kragen@pobox.com wrote:
> > People have decided they don't like living in gleaming Buck Rogers
> > towers that are half a mile high. It's because they sense they're
> > being turned into social insects, and they resent it. But that's
> > the average person. Eugene, maybe you're smart enough to want to
> > live in the giant hive? :-)
>
> I don't think most people have even seriously given it a thought,
> Matt. But there are a remarkable number of people who choose to live
> in Manhattan, which is our currently closest approximation.
>
> If I could get all the cultural, artistic, and economic benefits of
> living in a large city --- while being able to get to all of them with
> a fifteen-minute walk and five-minute elevator ride, and
> simultaneously cut my heating and air-conditioning bills to nil ---
> I'd do it in a minute. Especially if it meant that gorgeous parks
> were a twenty-minute walk away, right outside the arcology, instead of
> being several miles away, as in most places in San Francisco.
FYI, Fred Hapgood wrote a wonderful article on the underground city of Montreal
http://world.std.com/~fhapgood/texts/montreal.htm
"....For hundreds of years, from Dante's circles of Hell to the sewers of
_Les Miserables_, underground spaces have been portrayed as hellholes
of oppression, monotony, and confinement. And why not? Who wants to
live like a mole, like an ant? As open-minded and flexible as we
humans are about our addresses -- and we can be found in the hottest,
coldest, wettest, and driest neighborhoods on the planet -- it seems
only common sense to draw a line at moving into the realm of cellars,
vaults, and caves.
So a visit to the great underground city of Montreal comes as a bit of
an eye-opener. Even on a glorious day last September, with the
weather offering every inducement to be outside and on the surface,
the 20+ miles of underground lanes and passageways were flooded. A
visitor looking around would see commuters striding forcefully,
tourists meandering, suits networking, window shoppers appraising,
friends chatting in clusters, Gen-Xers slacking in the corners of the
many street cafes, pensioneers people-watching, and inevitably, drawn
from all over Quebec, packs of squealing mall rats, chasing through
the crowds like breezes through standing corn. 500,000 people are said
to pass through the Underground every day; some might suspect even
that number was an underestimate...."
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Fri Apr 27 2001 - 23:15:19 PDT