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But taller buildings equals wider streets to such a degree that the density you win by building high mostly gets eaten up by the lost real estate used for wider
by Thlom 8y ago
But taller buildings equals wider streets to such a degree that the density you win by building high mostly gets eaten up by the lost real estate used for wider streets.
- tormeh 8y agoWhy do you need wider streets? Moving people is what the metro is for.
- ckarmann 8y agoExcept if you plan to build an underground city, people still have to walk from/to the metro station to/from wherever they live or work. And people also still strangely favor having a bit of sunlight. As a French living now in Canada, Paris streets are narrow in general, and especially the sidewalks are ridiculous, most of the space is for cars. One of the first thing to do would be to reclaim that street space for pedestrians and cyclists, which is an ongoing, slow and painful battle.
- st26 8y agoSunlight. People go crazy if they live in darkness everyday. I'm pretty sure this was discovered & studied in the history of American east coast cities.
- woodpanel 8y agoThen why not raze Paris' buildings down to one story? (The difference in sunlight exposure for pedestrians between an 8-story building and a 16-story building is not remotely as large than between an 8- and a 2-story building) Because sunlight non-exposure is one of the pinnacles of unfounded, futile arguments against density.
- geezerjay 8y ago> Why do you need wider streets? For public health reasons, enable emergency and disaster response, contain potential propagation of collapses, enable large volumes of people to evacuate in a timely manner, etc. Europe has lived with narrow streets for some centuries and learned to avoid that mistake. It's a shame that somr people have forgot or never learned those lessons.
- woodpanel 8y agoThe narrow streets were never the problem. Sanitation was.
- ckarmann 8y agoActually at this time, when Haussmann started its transformation of Paris, people though that the circulation of air was very important for health, and that was one of the reasons of widening the streets and limiting the height of buildings, but the main reason was for allowing traffic of goods and people, and to improve security and control of the population (revolts in Paris had made 3 different political regimes collapse in less than 70 years before that). Today people still value seeing the sky and freedom of movement. I have not been everywhere in North America but usually I saw that big buildings mean wide streets around them.
- dragonwriter 8y ago> Why do you need wider streets? Moving goods. > Moving people is what the metro is for. People aren't the only thing that needs moved to support a city.