Create a walled city divided into zones connected by a plethora of tunnels and transport tubes. To be allowed in the city you must be questioned, examined and probed, after which you will receive an ID card. This will allow you access to those parts of the city for which you meet the criteria.
Enter the non-evangelical atheist district, find the philosphy bar, book the back room for halfbakers only and see who turns up.
As the city grows, new sections are added increasing the network of interconnecting tunnels exponentially thus turning the whole city into a spagetti of transport tubes until someone thinks of a better solution.-- st3f, Nov 05 2001 "Venn?", you ask? http://www.combinat...s5/VennWhatEJC.html [jutta, Nov 05 2001] I don't get the tubes part unless each neighborhood is walled off from it's neighbors.
Wouldn't this be rather like living in a prison? Still, I imagine it would appeal to some...-- phoenix, Nov 05 2001 Ooh, ooh, can I do the probes, please?-- DrBob, Nov 05 2001 [blissmiss]: All apart from the non-mandatory ID card bit around the edge.
[phoenix]: Alsolutely. It's either that or gunning posts. I'd prefer walls.
[DrBob]: Only if you change your name to Dr Groppler.
[Rods]: I guess that excludes that you from the pun-free bakery (and probably the German zone too).
[Marian]: No, no, I'll explain below. Ah. I'll explain below. I'll explain below. No.
Time for a bit of elaboration. Treat this as a thought experiment for a social model.
Firstly I imagine that most of the city would be inclusive. Say we're looking at the Christian district. Towards the centre it would fragment into the different churches within the Christian faith. At the centre of each of these zones would be a church. You would not have to be a self confessed Christian to enter most of the zones and probably not to enter most of the churches. You would, however, find that there would be local rules in some of these zones. For example the zones surrounding some of the churches would not allow drinking according to the rules of the church.
Government: Always a difficult one, this. I guess you'd gave something like a city council who would govern the borders of the districts and run the local courts which would arbitrate between the districts. Each district would have its own council which would look after locaal matters within powers that it would negotiate with the city council. Most local planning would come from this second body.
Small zones: Sometimes you just want to relax and to do so you will generally want to be with people of a similar interest. Following on from the earlier Christian example, a church might want an exclusive zone of Christians only or more speciafically Methodists only so that they can meet and discuss their religion and interpretation of the bible safe in the knowledge that there is a base level of agreement. A minority group (whether represented with its own district or not) would have to petition the disctrict council to be allowed its own zone within the district.
Very small zones/temporary zones: Call it a building if you will. It follows the rules of the zone in which it resides. Temporary zones can becreated by hiring buildings and enclosures. Again it is down to the governing body of the district (or any sub-committees they appoint to govern the zones within the district) to decide who can rent what and for how long.
Warring groups: Let's face it this is not going to happen. I'm under no illusions that this social model would allow the Al-Quida to reside in the same city as... well anybody really. The city council would probably have to exclude certain groups from the city.
Why 'Venn' city? The original idea was that the city would look like a typical Venn diagram from above. I can't how you would govern the intersections so although this would be a fairly closely planned city it wouldnot be a graphic as a Venn diagram.
I'll shut up now. Where *is* Vernon.-- st3f, Nov 05 2001 [Marian] Here at the HalfBakery we frown upon asking intelligent questions. Please keep this in mind prior to annotating.-- phoenix, Nov 05 2001 [waugs]: Is this segregation? In some instances I suppose it is. Mostly, though it is empowers those social groups. The Christian sector might decide that you have to be a Christian (by whatever standard they decide) to own property there, or to operate a business there. Then again, they might not.
Using your example of the Methodist who I shall chose to call Bill. Bill is a Methodist, a shop-owner and a harpsichord player. You'd think he'd probably live in the Methodist zone of the Christian district. In fact he lives above his shop in the 1950's zone of the historical analysts quarter and travels to church. He finds that the ground rent is lower, the business is good as the retro water heaters keep going wrong and he's not far from the Elizabethan zone where some of the best harpsichords are.
What would be interesting is if the City Council allowed something as controversial as a whites only area. The district councils would have to decide how they would react to people who lived in that area. Some districts and zones might not actually allow you to visit them if you'd even visited the white's only area. Social dynamics in motion.
This whole thought process was kicked of by UnaBubba's angry rant last week which created a mental image of a city with concentric zones spreading out around an ivory tower populated by brainboxes. I thought I'd bundle it up a little more generically and see if some interesting ideas could come out if we kicked it around a little.-- st3f, Nov 05 2001 This sounds an awful lot like the ultimate chess game, wherein progressively diverging preferences dictated the next move. Here, they (the preferences) dictate affinity groups. In that sense, it's baked; that is, infinite divergence trees outlast the number of dimension-limited personality-affinity profiles. So go talk to yourself. If you don't want to, decide how far back along the tree you're willing to compromise in order to avoid solipsism; then, if honest, you confront a question of line drawing instead of zones.-- hagfish, Nov 05 2001 This is Baked in the general sense. Administrative subdivisions can pass and enforce their own laws. Neighborhoods, districts, cities, counties, states and nations each have their elected officials and codes of law.
Now, for a variety of good reasons, the laws of macro-scale entities tend to dominate the laws of micro-scale entities. Nations have immigration restrictions, but neighborhoods don't usually (but consider gated communities and homeowners' associations). Traffic laws are similar (but not the same) from one state to another.
So, your Venn City sounds like a world where administrative control has largely devolved to the local level, *but* some sort of libertarian oversight exists that allows all these communities to coexist, and there's some facility for transportation from point A to point C even though you're not allowed to be at point B in the middle.
Stephenson's burbclaves and the less witty libertarian dreams that inspired it may not be too far off what you're talking about.-- egnor, Nov 06 2001 This is just another application for arbitrary/infinite-dimensional space, which I was going to post as an idea as soon as I found a decent implementation. In general you need an (n-1) dimensional space for a Venn diagram representing the possible regions of intersection between n sets, assuming none of the sets are disjoint.-- pottedstu, Nov 06 2001 It would be a great application for high-dimensioanl space, but until then he's got the tubes.
I think a better implementation wouldn't have the tubes, but rather one layer divvied up into comfort zones, and all transport between them through an entire layer of minimally-enforced You Must All Get Along.
Of course, that's pretty much how suburbs, enclaves, & 'developments' communicate through cities now. Deciding what 'minimal' and 'get along' is is hard, too.
I see a different problem, coming from the human tendency to not exclude the middle. Venn diagrams are binary. In Venn diagrams as I have known and loved them, there would be no 'inclusive' neighborhood in which both Methodists and non-Methodists were allowed - only a subdivision of each of the other classifications into M and non-M. I think humans actually want places to be sorted by trinary logic: 'M, not-M, don't-care-about-M'.-- hello_c, Nov 08 2001 [waugs]: If the historical analysts wanted to run a disctrict (which I admit is umlikely) they would have to petition the City Council to be allowed to set one up. The size of the quarter would be determined by the number of residents, contributing non-resident members and income from commerce. New districts would probably spring from zones within disctricts where organisations have already proved that they can run a small enclave and have the membership to move on to something bigger. The zones would be run by the district councils so the rules to set up a zone would depend on each district.
[hagfish]: Yes. How well this works depends largely on how well the City Council works; how much freedom it allows and what freedoms it curtails.
[egnor]: Only on a much larger scale. When you implement this on a small scale you can give more freedom to each group to define their local laws ince you can (fairly) easily move out of a district.
[pottedstu]: The more I think about this the less tunnels you'd need. Imagine the city dividing into districts which contain zones. Picture it like camouflage gear with freckles. I can't see the City Council allowing extremists (by their definition) to run a district so they will be fairly middle of the road. It is the zones and the buldings and societies within those zones that will exclude most of the population.
[Peter]: I'll have a hunt for the link. I hope it's worth it but fear the worst. [update] Can't find what Peter's talking about. Anybody else have a clue?
[hello_c]: [deleted]. I completely misunderstood what [hello_c] was saying.-- st3f, Nov 08 2001 This sounds to me like a very good way to start a fight.-- DrBob, Nov 08 2001 This is impossible with eccludian geometry but I'm pretty sure that you could do in a mud.-- Aristotle, Nov 08 2001 st3f: Either your districts are all binary or you need a different name. Venn diagrams are binary: for every trait P they consider, every point in the diagram allows P or ~P, no other choices. See Jutta's link. (The blue-and-white animation there is a beautiful idea in city zoning, indicating that you might need only a ring road instead of a spaghetti of tunnels, as long as you ahve arbitrarily skinny people.)
You seem to be trying to make this a Venn layout based on behavior - some Christian areas forbid drinking, e.g. - and for some behaviors you could have a Venn diagram based on that: P is "drinking forbidden", ~P is "drinking not forbidden".
However, as soon as you have two groups and a behavior required by one and forbidden to the other - accepting exactly one of two prophets as the voice of god on earth, for instance - you have a choice among total division of the city or not being a Venn diagram.-- hello_c, Nov 08 2001 too complicated.....I just want to buy Kentucky and throw everybody else out.....
I presume all the farmers will have their own "district" or shall we divide them by what they produce? Meet me in the Thoroughbred horse farm, dog kennel, non-political area.....and don't deny me access to the hay producing redneck coyote huntin' farm equipment repair district.....-- Susen, Nov 08 2001 [hello_c]: //Either your districts are all binary or you need a different name.// True, but I'm keeping the name.
[Susen]: That'll be $1,000,000,000,000.25 plus tax. Visa or Mastercard?-- st3f, Nov 08 2001 Wow I forgot what a great baker [stf3] was. I must go to the archives and reread much of what was posted by them. They were/are rather brilliant and oh so eloquent of speech.-- blissmiss, Mar 18 2009 Not so much "venn?", as "vhy?"-- coprocephalous, Mar 18 2009 random, halfbakery