Cities IV: Supurbia: The compact city: Layer upon layer, the wedding cake metropolis marries systems design and city planning

Two principles guided George Dantzig and Thomas Saaty in their design research for the compact city: conservation of space ¿ namely, an effective use of vertical space; and conservation of time ¿ namely, a set of urban facilities that would be utilized 24 hours a day. They started unabashedly and squarely with systems science and operations research, aiming at a city design that would maximize efficiency and minimize cost. Out of this approach, they derived a cake-shaped, cylindrical, totally enclosed city structure that minimizes transportation costs, minimizes energy losses, minimizes traffic congestion through vertical and horizontal flows, and that supposedly modulates peak loads on service functions by arranging life and work across a 24-hour ¿day.¿