City Review: Seitseman

Trying to reverse engineer the optimal city

Epistemic status: Usually I try sticking to serious writing here, but sometimes you just have a weird idea and end up spending way too long optimizing it.

I spend an unreasonable amount of time reading about urbanism, city and transit planning¹. Mostly this comes in the form of criticizing various terrible planning or bad project management, or occasionally talking about real-world places that do it well. And I generally have a thing for city-states (I liked Singapore). But at the end of the day we have to ask the big questions: What is it all for? What are we trying to achieve here? What would perfect urbanism look like? A city with all the upsides of Singapore, Amsterdam, Vienna, and New York with minimal downsides? What is the optimum dream, and what would it take to achieve it?

Which brings me to Seitseman, the city-state I made up to solve this. I’ve messed around with history and geography to achieve this (partly as an attempt at psychohistorical reverse-engineering the circumstances for it, partly just for the historical aesthetics). CS Lewis once said everyone has their secret version of Narnia, though most of us never get to actually visit it; this one is mine².

Transportation and Architecture

Architecture wise, I’m imagining something of a cross between Amsterdam and Singapore: Pedestrian and bike-friendly walkable neighborhoods, with a lot of (fully automated) elevated metro lines. The architecture should be a bit of a mix, with Singapore-style solarpunk high rises downtown (and in some clusters around metro stations outside of that), but also more classic northern european midrise architecture.

The guy biking on the train tracks is perfectly fine, he’s biking with the direction of traffic.

There’s probably some underground train lines (especially around downtown), but most of them are elevated - elevated rail is twice as cheap and twice as fast to build (which means we can build twice the network with it), it’s pretty, and it’s a lot more visible and accessible³.

Outside of downtown I imagine a typical residential neighborhood looking like this. Something of an eclectic mix of older architectural styles (government imposed design standards aren’t really a thing; people build nice buildings because they like living in pretty buildings, which is much better at producing actual nice looking buildings but is not a recipe for uniformity). Local metro stations are an easy minimalist walk up some stairs (no mezzanines or needlessly huge stations: you walk up, swipe at the gate⁴, and board the trains. There’s a whole shebang of bikes, scooters, walking, buses and so forth. Cars exist but require a specific permit (which are sold by auction), and since roads aren’t a subsidized form of land use (as it typically is in real world Asian cities that do this), they’re uncommon for personal use (but reachable for trades or cargo that need it as a business expense). A permit comes attached to a primary parking spot (which are distributed across the island), and the number is managed in order to avoid congestion.

I’m also going to split from New York and not run trains on weekday nights, which can be used for maintenance. The higher density of elevated rail compared to underground (doable since elevated lines are cheaper to build) also lets us shut sections down for repairs more easily when we need to, since they’re easier to route around.

Geography

We’re going to put this city on a group of islands off the north coast of Europe, but we’re going to have to massively reshape geography for this to work.⁵

First we’re going go move most of Europe a bit further south, remove Denmark, and Break up Scandinavia into two or three Britain-style island nations. We’ll also expand the Baltic sea all the way to Kazakhstan as a sort of second northern Mediterranean, with the Russian empire along its northern shores and more central asian nations along its southern shores. Due to its moderating influence and rainfall there’s going to be a lot more population along its shores in central Asia, split between the Russian Empire to the north and various new nations to the south⁶.

Southern Europe is somewhat bigger to make the austro-hungarian empire (which still exists in this version) a large enough power to counterbalance Russia, but America is mostly gone - There’s a fairly large continent where Canada is but it’s too far north to be heavily populated (say about 50-100 million people overall, a bit smaller than our Canada but more densely populated since there’s no United States to draw people away). South America still has Argentina and Chile more or less as they are, but between them and Canada there’s not much more than a chain of islands.

Around the Mediterranean, the Iberian Peninsula extends further west, making it big enough to make Portugal a real country. Africa is smaller and further south, and more separated⁷, with less historical interaction with Europe and central Asia.

The city itself is a cluster of seven islands just off the coast off the German/Polish border, close enough to the shore to have several causeways built up for road and rail. There’s three main residential islands with very narrow (and heavily bridged) straits between them. The central island has the main downtown and is the most heavily settled, but each island has its own downtown area with its own character (something like la Defense or Long Island City), and various other density clusters in places that used to be village squares when the islands were more sparsely populated. The other islands are less heavily settled - there are some neighborhoods (at the outskirts, they get pretty sparsely populated), but they’re also where a lot of the more land use heavy portions are (the civilian airport, military air base and shipyard, power plants, and heavy industry - back when heavy industry was a main component of the economy - are mostly on the four outlying islands). The container port is split into two main ports - cargo going into the city goes into the older port on one of the main islands, while traffic intended for transshipment or rail transportation to the continent mostly goes through the newer, larger port on the outlying island nearest to the mainland. Some of the outlying islands also have major parks, and a lot of them have some pretty steep hills and cliffs (the central island is the only one that’s almost entirely flat). while there’s many small-to-medium sized parks or plazas even in the dense parts of the main islands, there’s no major open area like New York’s Central Park, the lsrge parks are all on the outskirts.

Overall the city should be somewhere around 16 million people, not counting daily commuters coming in from Germany or Poland. We’ll make it around three times larger than Singapore overall, and add some suburban density, to keep it with a reasonable amount of open area and room to grow despite the slightly higher overall density.

Neighborhood park. Street cats hopping across streams are a necessary part of any city.

History

The alternate history here needs to explain a few things. It needs to explain how the city ended up independent and how it got so big (there are some real-world cities in the area and they’re all much smaller, so we have some explaining to do). We also need to explain the culture - how it ended up as a tech hub, how it ended up energetic and forward-looking when so much of real-world europe is aging and in decline, how it ended up with a competent mostly-apolitical governing structure.

Let’s start some ways back. The islands were originally settled by some Finnish settlers who named the seven island cluster Seitseman (Finnish⁸ for “the seven”). Over the next few centuries the islands provided homes for villages of Germans, Finns, Russians, central asians, and the English, all groups who had left their homes and ended up in these out-of-the-way fishing villages in one way or another. The islands were technically near the german shore,but the main centers of German population and governance were historically much further south while the lands near the north sea were emptier, so historical governments like the HRE had at best a weak hold over the islands.

The islands were at times claimed by various european powers (the HRE, Napoleon, probably the dutch or the british at some point), but they were isolated enough and not especially rich in natural resources, so they were mostly just self-governing. Historically the council of the five clans (composed of a representative for each of the five peoples who had originally settled the islands) was the main governing authority, although over time as more immigrants came from other parts of the world (mostly Europe or central asia) a secondary people’s assembly elected by direct popular vote gained more power (the council of five is largely ceremonial in modern times).

Since Scandinavia was broken up into islands and placed a bit further away, we mostly don’t have Gustavus Adolphus intervening in mainland politics, which causes German unification efforts to start a century or two earlier in our history. While Germany claimed Seitseman for its own, it was a point of tension with Russia (and, when it was independent, Poland), and various treaties kept it demilitarized even when under German control.

Seitseman in the 17th century, under German rule.

Eventually some variation of the world wars started, but without America, the Austro-Hungarian empire ended up as the central power of the western federation. In the postwar world order, Seitseman (like IRL Berlin) was disputed between the powers. Since the actual locals weren’t particularly affiliated with either side, the compromise ended up leaving them independent, with the condition that they couldn’t themselves join either alliance.

Note that at this point, Seitseman was still a small to medium sized, fairly poor city without many natural resources. It had spent the last few centuries at best technically under the flag of some government or other it didn’t particularly feel affinity towards, and at worst being actively oppressed by someone. Now that it was, finally, genuinely independent for the first time, it was intent on taking full advantage of the opportunity.

The first effect was a push towards military buildup (as well as economic independence) in the postwar period. It couldn’t, under the terms of its non-alignment, directly import most weapons from either side (in particular, large ships or military aircraft; munitions, small arms and such were fair game). As a result, it embarked on a project to develop its own shipbuilding and aerospace industry from the ground up, maximizing its ability to do that with limited resources. This ended up having serious long-term cultural implications.

Shipbuilding was a new industry, but one that grew quickly. In the age of sail, Seitseman had not been a very good port since the Baltic sea (its main route to the East) has bad weather for sailing⁹, so it never developed a serious port or shipbuilding industry before. Things were actually all in line to develop it though: The age of steam meant that it was right by one of the modern world’s busiest trade routes, which gave a great opportunity. The discovery of north sea oil nearby gave it a convenient source of fuel with which to resupply passing ships (and, incidentally, to power its own heavy industry, including shipbuilding).

Despite this, it was slow going until the container shipping revolution of the 1960s gave them an opening. While unions across europe and the UK resisted containerization and port modernization, Seitseman, which had managed to avoid monopsonistic docker unions, jumped at the opportunity to have the first modern container port in Europe. Between that and their rail connections to both the western bloc’s Germany and eastern bloc’s Poland, they managed to leapfrog London and Rotterdam and become the primary container port in the continent. This finally gave them a local industry that could fund real development efforts in the city.

This goes to explain why the city is still growing and dynamic in current times, though: While much of northern europe got its main economic growth push in the postwar period, Seitseman had to wait a few decades until they started getting their boost. This means their peak growth period is in living memory, but it also means they spent a long time with a chip on their shoulder and an always—present national security threat to propel them to actually care about state capacity and growth.

The other military need was a homegrown aerospace industry, since defending a city-state on a group of islands would primarily require air and sea power (if you’re down to using land power to defend inside your city, you’re in major trouble).

This one was motivated by a very specific limit on importing completed military aircraft. It would be effectively impossible to build an entire aerospace industry in a single city-state, so they decided to follow the Embraer model: Import as many components as you can (parts, avionics, missiles and so on), and just do the final assembly and construction locally. This also required building up local expertise, which meant aggressively recruiting aerospace engineers from both sides whenever possible (which wasn’t easy, both because the governments on both sides got a bit worried about losing aerospace engineers, and because Seitseman was, at least to start with, much poorer than either side; still, it was a national priority and they put in the resources to make it work¹⁰, as well as doing as much as they could to train up their own people to take over the industry).

This had three main downstream effects. First, it meant the Seitseman got a lot of good engineers, and a lot of good homegrown engineering programs, which put it on the path to become a global tech powerhouse.

Second, the requirements of this national engineering program being a top political priority meant that a lot of the top civil service posts got filled up with people with a strong engineering background, and the politicians in charge of those departments developed a culture of listening to them and making technocratic decisions whenever possible. The high status of the engineers also meant the next generation of political leadership has a lot of people with an engineering background, which helped with that¹¹.

Third, it developed a culture of using pragmatic, do-what-it takes engineering to solve problems, and to import both people and best practices to do it. This is how we end up with an automated mostly-elevated metro system (choose the elevated rail because it’s simpler and more efficient to build; import the best train engineers in the world, which is easier than getting the best aerospace engineers, infrastructure engineers are typically government employees and are cheaper to lure away with competitive salaries. Then build the best system you can as fast as you can¹²).

This also lay the roots of the modern immigration system. While Seitseman was always pretty immigrant-friendly and multicultural given its history, the modern economy (and national security) was built on the back of high-skilled immigration, which made figuring out how to have good high-skills immigration was and remained a national priority.

Starting in the seventies, the economy enters a virtuous cycle that produced decades of solid improvement. We get some of the patterns of the growing East Asian economies, but with a more open culture and immigration of skilled engineers to build things, the transition from running factories for the rest of the world to having homegrown elite high-prestige design and production was faster and smoother, and didn’t rely nearly as much on tariffs (which wouldn’t have worked as well anyway this close to the richer mainland). High immigration also brought higher population growth (if not so high as real world America had during its own high growth periods; This is a fairly open society, but they’re still a lot more focused on skilled immigration and do filter people). This enters a hard feedback loop, where once it became seen as an up-and-coming economy you could immigrate to (originally mostly by people in poorer countries in central asia on the south shores of the extended baltics, then increasingly, as it got richer, by more parts of the world), which brought more investment and allowed more growth. Like any country with a sudden population growth spurt, it had its teething troubles (both in building infrastructure - the focus on building the metro and other non-car transportation uses began because the influx of cars brought most traffic to a deadlock - and in culturally integrating the influx), but it lucked out in having built up institutions capable of solving real problems right at that time.

Culture and economy

So this was all a long walk to explain how we ended up with my ideal city. It’s a snapshot in time of where I’d want to live today, but I want it to be somewhere that keeps looking forward, not a place at its peak. So I’ll go through the culture and economy as it is now, and how I tried to set it up to keep moving forward.

Immigration

I’ve talked about how the attitude towards immigrants came to be. The priorities, from the government’s perspective, are to have lots of skilled immigration in priority areas, and to culturally integrate them (this is especially important when you want some of them to work on military projects).

The basic immigration system is a straightforward point and filter system - immigrants get points by being able to prove they can contribute to the economy, society, or a national priority industry (also the standard things, like not having a criminal record). The push for integration is backed by a two-ended quota program - on the one end, there’s quota limits on place of origin. These are somewhat hidden and non-public - it’s not exactly a hard cap by country as the US has, there’s some kind of PCA split into cultures going on (for example, people from two neighboring countries with very similar cultures use up each other’s quotas to some degree; two people from opposite ends of a very inhomogeneous place like Austria-Hungary probably don’t). This is also adjusted somewhat by how well those groups have done at integration in the past. The office running this is one of the quietest government agencies, since they care a lot about living in harmony and don’t want to keep cultures on a competitive score card¹³.

The other part is trying to keep from getting ethnic ghettos (or even variety immigrant neighborhoods). The city wants immigrants to interact with the natives and integrate. An immigrant visa comes attached to a specific neighborhood set to scatter people from the same group across the city (an apartment block within a neighborhood that tried to be that neighborhood’s immigrant spot would likewise get leaned on by the city to cut it out). Immigrants who want to move have to send in an application (this is mostly automated; in principle there’s a map of where somewhere is considered too crowded to move to, although since it’s non-public the immigrant is limited to one query a week to avoid being able to reconstruct the map easily. A negative answer comes with a suggestion of a nearby neighborhood that person would be allowed to move to. Moving in with someone you marry is always allowed).

There’s no such thing as a temporary work visa; all immigration visas are citizen-track and can be converted to citizenship after five years of continuous residency, assuming good conduct. The only non-citizen migrant workers are day labourers who live on the mainland and commute in (this is a shared program with the Polish and German governments. There aren’t huge numbers, and some of these people also later apply for immigration and citizenship).

The one other feature is that immigrant families with young children are prioritized. The theory is that the top cause of fertility is cultural influence, and integrating, successful young people with children are a good cultural influence to help keep the local fertility rate above replacement level¹⁴. The immigrants are scattered around the city as much in the hope that they’ll influence the locals as that the locals will influence them.

Civil Service and Governance

Classically, the ruling body in the city was the Council of Five, but the postwar constitution (written in the advent of Seitseman achieving true independence) reduced them to a ceremonial role, accepting the reality that the city had changed too much from the council of five specific ethnically-homogenous villages (especially with the postwar refugee influx). They went with a fairly simple governing structure of a single proportional-representation legislative body. In order to keep some representation for local interests, there’s a weak secondary local-representative based system. This group can’t directly vote on rules but can vote to repeal things by supermajority. This is just enough power to keep the main assembly willing to listen to them about local concerns and give residents a direct point of contact, while not enough to empower nimbyism (since local concerns can’t override a law without a supermajority).

Politically, though, most of the power is in the civil service. Given the historic ethnic tensions (and concerns about integration), politicians are strongly incentivised to look like they’re making decisions on technical rather than partisan grounds (any decision that looked like it advantaged one group would be pounced on by the other four and might not even get support from its own faction, which would see it as corrupt). The government can, however, remove civil servants for corruption and incompetence when it has a convincingly non-political case for it. This tends to incentivise fiercely chasing noncontroversial national priorities. The high immigration rate (especially since most immigrants vote) also helps keep a check on local craziness getting out of hand (if you’ve ever seen a crazy politician that only stays in power because of decades of cultural drama and thought “man, any objective outsider would just realize he’s nuts and want him out immediately”…).

Economy

I talked in the history section about how aerospace tech got a foothold in Seitseman. It also jumped on the computing revolution, managing to become a tech hub almost comparable to San Francisco¹⁵ (except with a sane housing market).

On the other hand, I wanted to avoid being a tech monoculture. I want to have blue collar workers and just people with families who don’t work in tech¹⁶. So I kept the ports, the shipyards and some defense industry local, so that we don’t end up with a monoculture.

Also, I just really love container ports. They take the theoretical cold calculation of optimizing the economy and turn it into a real physical world thing that's half industry and half a magical sailing adventure. When I imagine a port, I picture standing on the docks and watching ships sailing everywhere in the world, ready to take you off to some adventure like Sinbad or Odysseus, Jason and the Argonauts or Luffi and the Strawhats. There's a reason an epic has to include a voyage by ship.

Military

The military mostly focuses on air and naval power. I don’t think it’s big enough or has strategic needs for an aircraft carrier, but I imagine a bunch of missile cruisers, destroyers and the like. Historically, since there were import restrictions on missiles, they were unique in relying more on cannons than other modern navies, but with the growing local aerospace industry producing more homegrown missiles that’s not as true anymore.

The other needs are water and energy. Energy historically came from north sea oil, but Seitseman doesn’t have any in its own territorial waters and had to import it. However, our alternate geography has northern europe much more tectonically active (hence breaking up Scandinavia into islands), which means there’s good sources of easily-available geothermal energy around. Those started being developed in the seventies and eighties to replace the oil plants, as much for national security and pollution reasons as for the price savings on importing oil. The increased energy this provided also helped kick off the economic boost.

More recently, there’s been a lot of offshore wind development. On the other hand, there’s still a couple of inactive oil plants left around in an easily-activatable state in case of emergency (and the city needs to keep major oil supplies on hand anyway, for the ports)¹⁷.

For water, there’s a few small lakes on the islands but it’s mostly obtained through desalination now, to avoid having to pipe it from the mainland. The lakes probably wouldn’t scale to the current population anyway.

A naval exercise off the south coast of the Norwegian islands. One thing I’m trying to get at here is that outside of Seitseman itself and a couple of suburbs, the north coast is mostly faily desolate - it’s a global hub, but one surprisingly surrounded by wilderness.

Afterthoughts

After writing something like this, I have to ask myself, what was the point.

Partly it’s that it made me happy. I don’t do enough active things that make me happy these days, and this was one, and it was good to do it.

Partly it’s that someone who comes up with these ideas and puts actual effort into them is a sort of person I want to be. It’s not just that I enjoy it, it’s that I like people who enjoy this sort of thing, so doing it makes me like myself more.

And partly - well, the world seems in pretty bad shape these days. Pretty much every single country I can think of is declining in one way or another, and it seems like no one believes building things that can be better, so a lot of discourse has become either attacking people over how their thing is even worse, or meaningless signalling that’s not meant to actually do anything. And I wanted to take a stand and say, here’s something that would actually be worth building, that doesn’t require people or technology to be better than they are.

Also, I just really like this city. and wanted to tell people about it, it’s awesome.

1. If you too want to spend an unreasonable amount of time on this, this is a good starting point.

2. Hopefully I’ve passed the valley where you’re too old for fairy tales, and gotten back to where you’re old enough to unironically appreciate them again

3. Some people complain about the noise, but modern elevated rail with noise barriers where needed can be fairly quiet. How quiet exactly is hard to figure out - this paper seems to have peak noise levels of anywhere from 60-75 db for elevated trains in Taipei and Singapore (for comparison, a main road is about 70-80 db on average). Overall it seems like a modern elevated train with reasonable noise mitigation measures should be fine anywhere you’d put a main road, but noise proof windows might be nice if you live right by it. This matches my anecdotal experience, where staying within a block of elevated rail in Paris, Singapore, or even New York (where trains are much older and louder) wasn’t really much of a noise issue.

Some other people object to elevated rail on the grounds that they don’t like how it looks, but those people are wrong and should be ignored, elevated rail looks awesome.

4. Having a gate you swipe at is the first place I’m getting into culture issues: It’s a thing in America and East Asia, but not in northern european systems like in Germany and Denmark, which typically have no faregates and just occasionally check for proof of payment.
As much as I love the german thing, I don’t think it would work here. It requires a stable, high trust and probably homogenous society (see Megan mcArdle’s piece on Denmark here (paywalled)). I’m going to have a lot of cultures and a lot of immigrants when we get to the culture and history sections, which means you need a high-legibility society but not a homogenous ones. So having to have faregates is my first concession to a downside I probably can’t optimize away.

5. I tried to get Dall-E to make me some maps, but turns out it can’t actually do that - if you ask, it will give you either an ordinary world map, or some weird grid of circles or something. And I can’t actually draw for beans. If you’re a good artist and want to draw maps of this, I’d be open to paying for a commission.

6. We’re not getting into a detailed description of those, this ain’t about them.

7. In particular I’m getting rid of the history of the transatlantic African slave trade - I don’t want to make the alternate history unrealistically idyllic, but I do want it to be nice where realistically possible, and I think messing with geography like this does at least plausibly lets us get rid of that ugly bit of history.
There’s a school of thought that objects to sanitizing the bad parts of history. I mostly object to this; we should keep humans as real flawed humans, but we’re allowed to dream of a better world. That’s kind of the whole point of this exercise. A better world doesn’t mean all the people in it are perfect. It just means we’ve set up the dynamics to get better results.

8. I had to dig through a lot of languages until I managed to find one where some variation of “the seven islands” sounds like a good city name.

9. I thought I was going to have to come up with some complicated explanation for this one too, but turns out this is actually true in real life, which saved me the effort.

10. An interesting real-world anecdote here is that in the 1970s, Israel spend something like 10-20% of GDP on the air force. Not 20% of military spending. 20% of total GDP.

11. It occurs to me that one of the problems I’m trying to solve here is to make a place as well governed as Singapore without having a singular Lee Kuan Yew figure, which makes me appreciate just how hard that is, and how hard it would be to do what he did.

12. Like in many countries that only got around to building metro systems in the 70s or later, traffic at that point was a nightmare on the edge of being a complete catastrophe. It needed hard solutions, fast.

13. To what degree is all this necessary? In real life most high-immigration countries don’t do this (it’s rumored Singapore might, though I’m not clear on the details), and what integration problems they do have are mostly with low-skills migrants and refugees. So this may be me finding a solution in search of a problem. Still, that is at least a realistic thing I can imagine this government doing, even if it’s not necessary.

14. Nobody seems to know what the real life cause of declining fertility is, or why Israel’s the only rich country in the world that manages to have it, but I think the likeliest explanation is that Israel has cultural influence from the high-fertility ultraorthodox population, which are high-fertility everywhere but only connected enough to the culture to be influential in Israel. I’m going to hypothesize that this is true here and manages to keep fertility at, well, let’s say just below replacement level (at 2 children per family on average, just below the 2.1 replacement level), and once immigration is factored in we still have a slowly-growing population.

15. One thing San Francisco had in real life that Seitseman didn’t would be access to massive amounts of domestic VC money. I can partly get around this by saying Seitseman makes foreign investment relatively straightforward and partly talk about how it manages to capture San Francisco’s other main advantage, a massive immigrant labor pool, even better than the real SF did. Still, on net it’s not quite as much of a tech hub as SF is, but it’s probably still the biggest one in its world.

16. People in tech can also have families, as a treat.

17. I wanted to have an outlying island with a nuclear plant, but that wouldn’t really work either geographically (nuclear power still does take up a lot of room) or culturally (it’s too much of a single point of failure).