This is technically true, but Phoenix has long since outgrown the local water supply. The local surface water resources only represent a small portion of the water used in the catchment
Water is brought in 200+ miles from the Colorado using the Central Arizona Aqueduct, that is apparently
~40% of all the water used in the catchment. Even the "local" Salt River project moves water distances that would cross a substantial chunk of England.
All the agricultural parts of Phoenix are pretty much gone at this point, buried under sprawl, except the local Native American reservation.
Phoenix could be anywhere in the South West of the US and it would barely matter.
By the same token, I think a major city could be built in most of England (certainly the southern half of England) and if it was well designed and of sufficient scale, i would be successful.
Car centric design in Skelmersdale is not done anything like as well in MK though. Milton Keynes is built from the ground up for cars and lorries in a way that no other urban area in the UK is - just look at aerial photography of Skelmersdale and MK and you will see what I mean. I think Skelmersdale is also way too small to be successful, it appears to be yet another failed attempted at building the fabled "market towns" - which have long since stopped having any real economic raison d'etre in the UK.
As for London - it does fine because London's scale creates a self reinforcing loop unlike anything else in the UK - it can't really be replicated without building another city of 8+ million.
EDIT:
Skelmersdale was an early move towards car cognisant design, but it's a much earlier version of the ideas that would later be brought to realisation in MK. There is ~6 years between their designation as New Towns after all.
And yet some of the most succesful cities in the US have awful public transport (by European standards) and in the case of tech company hotspots like San Jose, are renowned for having overly low density zoning laws that prevent the sort of densification you are proposing.
NIMBYs are so powerful in Silicon Valley that enormous court battles are fought over minor zoning changes.
I agree that building houses in area of low demand is not a great plan, but I think the problem is the only viable alternative to national housing targets is no housing targets at all.
You may want to tear down cities and rebuilt them with massive blocks of flats to pack the people in, but the industrial capacity for this does not exist, even if you can get political licence for evictions on a scale never before seen in the UK. It will be a struggle to add a few million more housing units, let alone tearing down tens of millions of housing units to rebuild them.
There is a lot of land available in the South East to replicate the success of MK.
Why not?
Low density, low population cities are capable of using technology to get inexpensive metro systems, why can't we do it here?
The operating costs of fully automated metros are very small.
The capital costs of a metro that has to be somewhat longer will be more than offset by avoiding the tearing down and rebuilding tens of millions of housing units, complete with putting down massive riots as communities are ground into dust beneath the bulldozers.
It's absolutely possible to use modern industrial technology to make development viable in places. Modern irrigation (including things like the Hoover Dam) are absolutely critical for settlements in the south-west of the US. Air conditioning is absolutely critical for development in the Sunbelt, like Florida and Texas. Further afield, we have places like Dubai which are fundamentally dependent on desalination plants. Technology has enabled these places to work, but these places are still only viable because they serve a strong economic purpose. Obvious examples include oil and gas in the US and the Middle East. Dubai now has a critical role as a world aviation and logistics hub which justifies its existence. It's not really that hard to keep desalination plants running if your main business is servicing A380s and 777s.
London and other traditional cities in the UK and Europe, plus the colonial outposts in the US, are interesting because they where these enabling technologies were developed in the first place. London has been able to develop just fine over millennia without the need for imported technology to unblock things in great leaps and bounds. New York wasn't able to develop until the Colombian exchange brought Old World farm animals and other things that have enabled cities on this side of the pond for millennia. The Pearl River Delta cities couldn't grow the same because China needed to build railways first to bring the coal down from elsewhere in the country.
The fact is though that these old advantages don't really go away. London and similar cities might have developed coal powered industry and air conditioning but they weren't pre-requisites for growth. Where they are useful, these cities have been able to adopt them. Some technologies have been harder to integrate, like how London is less suitable for massive modern shipping than New York. Even then we've been able to cope by moving our ports further downstream to places like London Gateway, along existing infrastructure corridors (roads, railways) that were already built and viable.
The US west coast has some of the best places to develop cities in the world, bar none. The Bay Area is basically perfect. The only problem is that there are so many mountains that separate it from the rest of the US. The Panama Canal is/was so important to the US because for so many things, it's actually the most efficient way of transporting goods to California. The state has its own separate gasoline distribution system disconnected from the rest of the US because it hasn't been worth building the pipelines to connect it up to the rest. What this means is that it took too long for development to really build up, and a lot of the growth happened only after various technological improvements made suburban sprawl viable. The initial sprawl around cities was driven by new forms of public transport like the streetcar; most of London sprawl is Metroland. That means the US west coast cities were never able to build up a dense urban core to match New York, and so they don't have the reference frame for proper urban development. There are plenty of fights over densification in the wider New York area but it's not like a local politician in New Jersey would struggle to understand what dense urban development might be able to look like given that they have lived experience of Manhattan.
The understated part of the densification problem in the US is about race and crime. Suburban development and the racial politics of the 20th century are intertwined with both causation and correlation. Public transport and urban density in the US fails politically because they have ended up acting as a homeless shelter of last resort, and cities have been unwilling or unable to tackle deep antisocial behaviour problems because of the socioeconomic and racial issues involved. Ironically and tellingly, more rural areas like the Dakotas where these social and racial dynamics are less present have been less sceptical of greater urbanisation in some forms. Doug Burgum, the Republican former Governor of North Dakota and now US Secretary of the Interior, has been more pro-development than mayors of various supposedly left-wing cities.
We need to build up the industrial capacity required for our built environment. We'll only be able to do that if we commit to a long term plan for housing. Housing and our built environment lasts and has impact for decades, if not centuries. If the general outline of the plan doesn't work for the next hundred years, then it's not much of a plan. That's where the status quo falls down, even when we're talking about these developments like in Cambridgeshire. The actual volume of housing being proposed is nowhere near enough to saturate a long term industrial build-up, nor to satisfy our housing needs for today. When we've got a population of 70 million people, 100k houses is a drop in the bucket.
We might not know the absolute specifics of housing over the next 100 years but we can learn a lot by looking back 100 years. Technological innovations come and go but housing hasn't really changed that much, in the grand scheme of things. Housing still needs land, obviously, but it also clearly still requires boring commodities like concrete and wood and earthmoving equipment, and we still need water supply and sewer pipes. We still make windows out of glass, so you're unlikely to go wrong with a factory that can produce windows. And, the way that water and wind and fire and cold and heat work haven't really changed either. The fireproof materials of 100 years from now are probably the fireproof materials of today: inert stone, brick and ceramics in various forms.
Our existing housing stock is rotting away because all houses do, over time. Windows and roofs need replaced. Leaks happen and ruin interiors, requiring them to be rebuilt. Houses burn down. People want to extend houses to make them bigger. Our current ambitions with our housing are based around minor tweaks to the houses we've already built, but that means we can't build up economies of scale. You can't design a factory to churn out millions of individual ad-hoc extension plans, but you can design a factory to churn out millions of prefabricated components to build a house from scratch. That demographic shift and our lack of young people means we need to find ways of maximising the productivity of our construction workforce and you can't do that with ad-hoc renovations. Just as insurance companies increasingly choose to write off cars rather than dealing with the costs of fixing them, it'll make more and more sense just to demolish buildings and start again with factory-built components than to waste working hours on fiddling with them.
The nice thing about the capital costs of a metro is that you can actually reduce them by integrating the construction of new housing and other developments. That's what this thread was initially about. No need for expensive tunnelling techniques if you're able to knock down more crappy old houses on the surface and replace them with new build flats, which in turn provides a lifetime guarantee of passengers for the metro. If you're building the concrete supply chain for housing then that helps you with metros and vice-versa.
This is based on the false premise that a city has to have one centre. Cambridge is now multi-nodal. There is zero need for high density residential near the old town centre in Cambridge, apart from accommodation for students.
No we don't. The post Grenfell fire regulations mean that Cambridge won't have any residential development higher than 6 storeys. And as we have already established, even with CPO, it is well nigh impossible to assemble the land. New developments in Cambridge already include some medium density apartment blocks (where I live has 4 storeys), but there aren't more of them because there isn't the demand. Most people, and especially families with children, want to live in houses not apartments.
This is full on Gove fantasy Case for Cambridge stuff, only advocated by a few Tufton Street scribblers.
In any change management it is important to remember that, between where we are now and where we want to be, a plan for change has to know how to get there. Cambridge can't get to where you think you want it to go because there is no feasible option for how to get there, even with CPO. That's because the disruption and economic damage during the construction phase would be too great. While you are building your tunnel under the city and your wide boulevards the existing economy would grind to a halt. Big cities like London can absorb the impact of such disruption (look at the Crossrail construction sites for example), but a small city like Cambridge cannot.
A tram in Cambridge will remain a fantasy because digging a tunnel would be too expensive and disruptive. Tunnels need underground stations, and tunnels don't just "pop up" onto the surface. Turning single carriageway roads into wide boulevards would also be too expensive and disruptive, where does the existing traffic go while you are doing it?
And Cambridge doesn't need this. In the short to medium term what Cambridge needs is what is in the Greater Cambridge draft local plan. That is adequate and coherent for the period up to delivery of East West Rail and the Reservoir in the Fens in the late 2030s, with lots of land allocated for both commercial and residential development. It is no good building lots of new homes if no water comes out of the taps and toilets can't be flushed. Cambridge isn't going to expand more rapidly until the water supply is fixed, and the Reservoir in the Fens is the quickest way to deliver that, because it already has detailed plans, whereas other options still haven't made it onto the drawing board.
What happens after that will be a matter for the Development Corporation. My hunch is that further expansion near Cambridge will be eastwards along the railway line to Newmarket, on land that is currently green belt agricultural land that relies heavily on fertiliser and irrigation. Cambourne and Tempsford will also grow even bigger, on the back of East West Rail. But I don't expect to be alive to see much of that!
Cities have to be internally coherent. It's fine for dense areas to be built outside the traditional core, but that means you're defining a new core. The problem is then all of the uninteresting, non-historical and non-aesthetic sprawl housing that was built around Cambridge over the years. It's these estates that need CPOed more than the city centre.
I'm using Cambridge as an example of a city which is absolutely, clearly held back by planning and local veto. It might suit some of the locals to pretend that the place should remain a nice little town but it clearly does not serve the interests of the UK as a whole, nor arguably the world as a whole. Oxford and Cambridge and the areas around them are perfect candidates for bio-tech and other critical research labs. Why should some retired NIMBYs be allowed to prevent the construction of a laboratory where we'll discover some parts of a cure for Alzheimer's, or the housing needed for its staff?
The same basic principle applies everywhere else too. Cities like Manchester and Leeds and Newcastle are held back by our development policies. They're unable to grow and to adjust to the role they could have as counterweights to southern urban dominance. The troubles that Leeds has had in getting some sort of a Metro system built are a case in point. Manchester just about managed it because they could link up existing railways with a minimal amount of street running track in the non-residential city centre. In Leeds, that ease doesn't exist, and the only way to make a scheme wash its face will be to redevelop much more of its route. A Leeds Metro is absolutely financially viable if we set up a development company that is allowed to CPO all along the route, in order to physically provide the alignment and also to provide dense new housing and customers. E.g. it would make a lot of sense for the city to be able to CPO to widen the viaduct to the east of Leeds station in order to provide track separation between local and longer distance services. We can't continue to squeeze everything along two tracks, but we can't afford the immense cost of tunnelling given the existing low land values. The Victorians wouldn't have hesitated a moment before demolishing the buildings nearby but we've decided that they should stick around, basically forever.
The building regulation changes are an absolute disaster and are the product of people who don't understand fire safety risk. The problem at Grenfell was piss poor execution of a terrible design which invalidated all of the core assumptions the original building was designed around. Our construction and housing sector has essentially forgotten how to design, build and maintain tall buildings. This is an absolute disaster and we cannot fix it by pretending that it's 1860 and the passenger lift hasn't been invented yet. It is really not hard to build tall buildings that don't catch fire, so long as you use materials that are inherently fireproof.
There is no clear safety benefit from putting in two stairwells, because it is the complete package of safety that matters and not each individual checklist item. Denser cities generate more wealth and that means there is more money and importance placed on fire safety in the first place. We also see nowadays that structure fires are a minority of the callouts for fire and rescue services. Most of their job now is dealing with car accidents. It is illogical in the extreme to prioritise fire safety by preventing densely populated cities, when those cities don't then generate car accidents as much as suburban sprawl. Each individual suburban sprawl house might be easier to access with just a ladder, but it's more likely to go up in flames (including being built of wood which will just collapse), and will statistically take longer for a fire service to reach.
That last sentence needs qualification though as a significant portion of those “people of London who do” want them to be available, but not on their street! It’s easy enough to be in favour of other people’s objections being overridden (as of course they must be at times) - less easy when it’s your own. Tannery next door, anyone?
To some extent the problem is that people aren't willing to give up housing that clearly isn't suitable for them any more. If you're old and want a quiet life, then why on earth do you keep living in an area meant for nightlife? Likewise when people buy flats in areas which were previously not residential, because we've got a housing shortage and non-residential areas are the only ones we are able to build new housing in, and that means noise complaints end up closing existing venues.
