>Making high density living bearable and even desirable that's the art we need I think a lot of this could be solved with a couple of improvements to building

>Making high density living bearable and even desirable that's the art we need I think a lot of this could be solved with a couple of improvements to building codes: 1) require far stronger noise dampening, equivalent to that of detached homes. That is, regular day-to-day life should not register at all - including e.g. watching a movie with the sound system turned up (including bass). There should also be almost no tolerance for vertically travelling noise, you should be able to stomp around or drag furniture without disturbing your downstairs neighbour. 2) Force arrangement of shared interior walls such that your bedroom will never be adjacent to the neighbours living room, so that if noise does leak through it should not be able to disturb anyone's sleep. This should also affect the routing of water pipes and such, so that water flow and pipe knocking does not intrude. 3) The above points should be enforced by random sample testing of some proportion (somewhere in the range of 15-30%) of the buildings apartments before it is certified for occupancy. As in, testers would randomly select two adjacent apartments, set up loud music in one and measure the noise bleed-through in the other to see if it's within tolerances. Basically, there will always be a subset of the population of a high density building who are selfish jackasses. Construction should be changed to reflect the fact that people are unreasonable and compensate for it, instead of turning it into an externality e.g. making everyone install carpets in their apartments to reduce floor noise. I don't want to be aware of my neighbours existence outside of seeing them in shared hallways.