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Walking city


The Walking City 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.

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.

Some ships resemble walking cities in function and scope. Seacraft are the largest vehicles ever built, and have reached a scale compatible with Ron Herron's original concept.

Geoffrey A. Landis proposed in 1989 that a mobile base or city on the moon could move to remain constantly in sunlight, 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, 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.

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.


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