Walking City

For the Russian term of the same meaning, see Gulyay-gorod.

The Walking City[1] was an idea proposed by British architect Ron Herron in 1964. In an article in avant-garde architecture journal Archigram, Ron Herron proposed building massive mobile robotic structures, with their own intelligence, that could freely roam the world, moving to wherever their resources or manufacturing abilities were needed. Various walking cities could interconnect with each other to form larger 'walking metropolises' when needed, and then disperse when their concentrated power was no longer necessary. Individual buildings or structures could also be mobile, moving wherever their owner wanted or needs dictated.

Real-world examples

Railroad cities

During the building of the U.S. transcontinental railroad, a mobile town of support personnel, restaurants, saloons, and various recreation facilities (laundry, gambling, dance halls, etc.) followed the railroad; the town was colloquially known as Hell on Wheels.

Floating cities

Main article: City at sea
The largest supercarriers loosely fit the technical definition of a walking city

Various types of ships resemble walking cities in function and in scope. Seacraft are the largest vehicles ever built by humans, and the only ones that have reached a scale compatible with Ron Herron's original concept.

Aircraft carriers are the only modern device closely resembling a walking city in concept or scope. An American Nimitz-class aircraft carrier holds just under six thousand crewmen and is over a fifth of a mile long. An aircraft carrier could be considered a walking city whose primary resource or function is that of an aircraft maintenance, supply and launching center which moves about the globe fulfilling its function where it is most needed while stopping occasionally for resupply (Glassco, 2004).

The world's largest cruise liners are also equipped to hold thousands of people, with all the amenities of modern life - including shopping malls, ice rinks, radio and television stations and wedding chapels; however, they are not intended for the extended living that military vessels such as aircraft carriers are.

After audacious projects such as the Freedom Ship have failed, the only serious attempt to emulate a floating city is Seasteading, which aims to create permanent dwellings at sea, outside the territories claimed by the governments of any standing nation.

In space

Geoffrey A. Landis proposed in 1989 that a mobile base or city on the moon could move to remain constantly in sunlight,[2] allowing the use of solar power and avoiding the darkness and cold temperatures of the lunar night. He later suggested that the same concept could be used on the planet Mercury,[3] where a mobile base or city could be used to avoid sunlight by staying in the temperate twilight region near the terminator, although this concept had previously been anticipated by the science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson in 1986.[4]

On Mars and the moon, Robert Zubrin proposed that landing vehicles could be equipped with legs such that they could "walk" across the surface to link up to form larger habitat units.[5]

In fiction

See also

Notes

  1. http://www.environmentalgraffiti.com/featured/archigrams-walking-city-60s-architectural-vision-future/8368
  2. G.A. Landis, "Solar Power for the Lunar Night," NASA TM-102127, Geoffrey A. Landis; 9th Biennial SSI/Princeton Conference on Space Manufacturing, (abstract) 1989
  3. G. Landis, "Proposal for a Sun-Following Moonbase," Journal of the British Interplanetary Society, Vol. 44, pp. 125-126 (1991).
  4. Kim Stanley Robinson, The Memory of Whiteness, ISBN 0-8125-5235-0, Tor Books (1986)
  5. Robert Zubrin, The Case for Mars, ISBN 0-684-82757-3 (1996)

References

External links

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