3 ms·
The New (quite old) Town of Edinburgh is mostly 4 or 5 story buildings of flats (a lot originally very grand town houses) with shared private gardens for each s
by arethuza 7y ago
The New (quite old) Town of Edinburgh is mostly 4 or 5 story buildings of flats (a lot originally very grand town houses) with shared private gardens for each small area. It's a great place to live (we lived there for ~25 years, with kids growing up there) and is pretty desirable.
NB I don't know it would be economically feasible to replicate the New Town - but it does demonstrate to me that if you get the layout and quality right then people will happily live in an environment like that.
- rwmj 7y ago4 or 5 stories is very different from 20+ story tower blocks. Also those flats have private gardens at the back.
- arethuza 7y agoThe private gardens at the back are, in every case I knew of in the New Town (although not elsewhere in Edinburgh), owned by the lowest flat in the building. The trade off being that get a garden but the flats themselves tend to be darker and dingier than higher flats.
- altacc 7y agoIn many places (I'm thinking Scandinavia as that's where I currently live) low rise housing developments are really nice. The balance of housing and community spaces & services is important. The 1960s high rises were trying to build vertical communities but failed vertical separation seems to matter and it was just too dense. Ironically I think the reason why the new multi-million pound high rise apartments are popular today is because of their seperation from the community.
- cameldrv 7y agoCentral Berlin is mostly 5-6 story buildings, and this is a very nice scale. There's enough density that you can walk to everything, but not so much that the street feels inhuman. It helps to have wide streets and sidewalks.