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I think the issue is more subtle than this, and I would also not put European cities in the same bucket as North American ones. In North American cities, there
by athrun 5y ago
I think the issue is more subtle than this, and I would also not put European cities in the same bucket as North American ones.
In North American cities, there's a clear low density issue at play. Most of the previously dense urban cores were completely hollowed out to make room for roads, highways or parking lots.
One can argue that the current reluctance to the pulling down and rebuild mindset is a direct consequence of the misguided development policies of the post war era.
So much damage was done—and continues to be done—that people get very cynical of large scale development/infrastructure projects.
Whereas big European cities like Paris are very dense already. Maybe we could make them even denser, but I think at some point you start getting into negative return territory. I'd personally hate to see a bunch of magnificent 7 floors Parisian buildings getting torn down just to build sky scrapers. (Note: Sky scrapers are cool—but I don't think they are a scalable solution to housing, and by nature tend to require big developer involvement with political connections which then lead to perverse incentives—my personal preference would be to have a lot of smaller developers working on a lot of medium density projects, rather than very tiny number of big developers with very large pockets working on very few projects).
The focus should instead be on bringing areas surrounding the old city limits to the same level of density than the city proper—which is actually starting to happen in Western Europe now that we're starting to roll back some of the car centric policies of the past.
- Ericson2314 5y agoEuropean cities that are not Paris do indeed have some density issues. It's nothing like the North American shit show, of course, but it still shows an issue. Fine if you want to keep your historic downtown, but you should build a modern dense "La Défense". UK fails, Anglosphere housing shortage issues too. London is not dense enough and has no strong CBD proportional to its size. Germany fails, as Berlin should be bigger than Paris if it weren't for WWII and the division. Germany is full of bad austerity and the "polycentricity" is simply a failure to catch up after development was interrupted. (Consider if they properly developed Berlin maybe there would be fewer AFD issues in the former East.) Not sure what the situation is with Milan.
- athrun 5y agoI know La Defense well and I don't think this is the solution. La Defense is not dense from a housing perspective. And it was built with a car-centric mindset. The Esplanade itself is public transport friendly (thank god) but the surrounding area is a shit show. Thankfully most of the recent developments in the area are trying to reverse past decisions, but it's hard. Also, it's obviously very subjective, but to me La Defense is an ugly concrete jungle and not a nice place to live. Fundamentally, my core issue with la Defense is that it was centrally designed and planned with an Ivory Tower type of thinking. Today, we recognize the design was deeply flawed. But for some reason, we think we can play the same game again and design a new place from scratch and not make awful mistakes. I'd much rather see us grow existing cities and areas organically, making them progressively denser, rather than pursuing more of these big money-type projects that don't end up creating places people want to live in.
- Ericson2314 5y agoI don't disagree with those specifics, but fundamentally marjor cities need dense high rise focal points. We should have less ugly architecture, and certainly not car-oriented development, but I will take ugly concrete density over no density.