9 ms·

We need more buildings of up to six stories. We don't need more skyscrapers. The low hanging fruit exists in the general lack of this mid-rise range of buildin

We need more buildings of up to six stories. We don't need more skyscrapers. The low hanging fruit exists in the general lack of this mid-rise range of buildings in many places. Above six or ten stories, it's actually counterproductive in terms of things like energy efficiency. Many good cities, like Paris, limit skyscrapers by policy on purpose because it's not actually the best human environment. Good urban environments involve a lot of mid-rise buildings clusters together, not a lot of skyscrapers. that Roman residential buildings (insulae) maxed out at around 7 or 8 storeys, with 5 or 6 storeys being more common. One of the reasons for that is that apartment buildings could not include kitchens. Cooking tech was based on using fire to cook and you couldn't build a multi story building with kitchens in every unit because you couldn't put fireplaces in the units. Poor people in Roman cities bought prepared meals from street vendors. They didn't cook at home. Buildings are primarily about meeting human needs. This article seems to fail to adequately understand the ways in which human habitation and human use drive such things far more than physics, technology and similar.

micromacrofoot 5y ago
most places could be dramatically more affordable even if they allowed 3 story buildings… single-family zoning is probably the worst thing to ever happen to urban planning
- closeparen 5y ago
  I think one reason for the "missing middle" is that it's dense enough to make parking a serious challenge, but not dense enough to make a completely car-free lifestyle attractive. I am not sure I'd give up a car for anything less than Manhattan subway (multiple redundant grade-separated tracks, that go everywhere you need, every 2-3 minutes) and you aren't getting public transit that good on just duplexes.
  - micromacrofoot 5y ago
    there are still a lot of single-family houses near existing public transportation! if parking is really the limiting factor to medium density… we need more remote workers, bike support, and must improve our public transit!
    - closeparen 5y ago
      I think more often than not that "existing public transportation" is a bus that goes to a pretty limited subset of the city, 2-3 times an hour. If you happen to be going to somewhere on that line and leaving near a scheduled departure, great, but you'll still want your car for the many times you're not.
      - folkrav 5y ago
        You hit the nail right on the head. Right after high school, both my parents lived in the same small town on the outskirts of a larger city. From my father's house, it was a 30min walk to get to the bus stop, which had one passage every 30 minutes. Even from my mother's place, going to school was ~2h to get halfway to downtown. My only decent option was driving to the train stating further from home, and going straight downtown that way. Cut a good 30-40 min off my commute, just mean I hit traffic every day. Anyway, all this to say, public transportation gets pretty light past a certain distance from city center, and you most definitely needed a car if you want to have some sort of life outside commuting. Admittedly, we're 17 years past that time, but from what I've heard from a friend still living there, it's still the very same situation.
  - folkrav 5y ago
    I'm in a 3-4 story area, barely any garage doors and we can park on both sides, still parking is a shitshow.
  - Scarblac 5y ago
    This is where the Netherlands can contribute something: with awesome infrastructure for bicycles, you don't have to be that dense before using the car becomes a once or twice a week thing. I often have to park my car streets away because all the closer spots are taken. But it doesn't matter as much because we don't use it much. Car sharing systems are the next step, our car is old so the economics don't quite work yet. But when it breaks down we won't buy a new one, just sign up for one of the services that have cars parked nearby.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
zozbot234 5y ago
> We need more buildings of up to six stories. We don't need more skyscrapers. ¿Por qué no los dos? Skyscrapers for the highly productive business downtown where they can actually bring increased density compared to mid-rise buildings, and mid-rises for the rest of the city. You're right that skyscrapers are not "the best human environment" in any general sense; they're an adaptive response to very special conditions, that are generally not found outside the places where skyscrapers are common.
- tagoregrtst 5y ago
  Skyscrapers are not just inefficient for their own sake. They harm the city. Businesses that would otherwise be scattered around the city giving their employees a chance to live near them are concentrated in a small region core. Its a traffic double whammy. No one lives near and they have to drive to the same small footprint. Its far better to have mix use six-eight story buildings.
  - zozbot234 5y ago
    > Its a traffic double whammy. No one lives near and they have to drive to the same small footprint. These seem like nearly ideal conditions for good mass transit. The reason why businesses like to congregate in the city core is that this creates wealth for the businesses and their employees via agglomeration - I think this dynamic should not be ignored, even though it might not be immediately visible.
    - tagoregrtst 5y ago
      Public transportation doesn't work just because all the jobs are in one place. At best this creates a transportation system that craters to business and not to social interaction (since its inherently a spoke model with business the hub) Also in this business-concentrated city, the synergy you describe (and I agree exists) is set up to benefit business. What about synergies between people? Better small, concentrated, cities as existed before the automobile that, had jobs scattered throughout them. (To be clear cities’ downtowns are always more commerce oriented, the agora or the forum come to mind. But go to Rome and see how small the forum of the largest city in antiquity is. Place of business wasn't restricted to one place)
hypersoar 5y ago
Yeah, I agree that there's too much focus on highrises as a fix our housing supply. The units you get by replacing a block of detached homes with mid-rise apartments add up fast. Side-note: Learning about one-plus-fives was one of those "learning to see the lines of code in the Matrix" moments. They're everywhere. In my experience, for all their shine and gloss, most of them kind of suck. But kinda crappy housing is better than no housing.
- pottertheotter 5y ago
  Another issue is that a lot of the mid-rise apartments are built in complexes (at least in the US) that segregate the apartment from the rest of the city. You get density but no community. There’s no sense of place.
  - erosenbe0 5y ago
    That's usually because of modern parking lot/space requirements.
  - Talanes 5y ago
    The most dystopian version of this I've seen if my friend's old apartment outside San Diego. It was just a strip of land between two freeways with an exit, a McDonald's, Starbucks, and Food 4 Less. And the apartment complex. And you had to cross the single light on the strip of street between offramp and onramp to get to the latter two.
- edgyquant 5y ago
  Well that’s because you get way more units if you also build vertically when you replace the block.
- PebblesRox 5y ago
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/5-over-1 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/5-over-1
mlinsey 5y ago
A moderate spread of six story buildings might be optimal for energy usage of just the buildings, but total energy usage/environmental impact are also shaped by other human factors for where people want and need to live and work...eg without tall buildings in Manhattan, you would get a lot of extra energy expended in more people commuting back and forth from further distances. And the a high density of people makes public transit even more viable which brings further environmental and health benefits. That said, I do agree that there are only a few areas in the country where the main barrier to an ideal density is allowing more skyscrapers instead of mid-rises. Manhattan north of the financial district and south of midtown is one such area, parts of SF are another. But many, many more cities would see more benefits of moving from low density single-family homes and detached lots to mid-rises.
closeparen 5y ago
I have a human need to live among skyscrapers. From the time I was a little kid, my favorite thing to do on a weekend was anything downtown. I found it incredibly depressing when we would go back to our postwar-sprawl house at the end of the day. Later we moved to an older inner-ring suburb, and that was a little better, but only some. Day trips to the nearest proper city would be the highlight of a year. New York was one of the best experiences of an entire childhood. It still boggles the mind that people refer to Manhattan like a cautionary tale. To me it's nirvana. This obsession never went away. I can't really explain it. Maybe the sensory stimulation, maybe the comforting premise of an active hive of other human life, maybe something else, but it remains as important to me as ever. I think the skyscraper city is a little like the symphony orchestra: it has an object-level aesthetic, but on the meta level it's a celebration of civilization itself. It is incredibly fortunate that my interest in computers translates to one of the few jobs in America that will pay enough to live in a place like this. By the same token, it's distressing that such places are so precious and so rare.
- hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
  Are you me? :) Glad to hear someone else with the exact same viewpoint. Ever since I was a little kid I dreamed of living in a city with skyscrapers, and my partner's demand that we move out to the suburbs nearly ended our relationship.
  - LightG 5y ago
    What was the compromise? If there was one (!)
    - hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
      Well, at first I lost. But it did help me discover that the most important thing for me was walkability. I could compromise on the highrise living, but we moved to a car-dependent neighborhood, and that's the part I despised most, and it significantly negatively affected my physical health, and thus then my mental health. I strongly believe that car-dependent suburbs are just plain awful. In the end, money cured it for the most part. We rented a small studio pied-à-terre downtown and would spend a couple days there a week. We actually didn't do this for too long because it wasn't long until Covid hit and downtown basically died, so we didn't renew our lease. Not sure what's next.
voldacar 5y ago
>Buildings are primarily about meeting human needs. ok, what if a human wants to live in a very tall building?
baybal2 5y ago
> The low hanging fruit exists in the general lack of this mid-rise range of buildings in many places. Above six or ten stories, it's actually counterproductive in terms of things like energy efficiency. I will challenge you on this. 80m-120m buildings are the most economic choice almost everywhere: material costs, infrastructure cost, service cost.
bjelkeman-again 5y ago
One benefit in building lower is that one can built a substantial part in wood. This leads to better carbon capture and lower carbon prices. [1] Here is a modern example in Sweden, in Västerås. https://www.e-architect.com/sweden/swedens-tallest-timber-building-in-vasteraas https://www.e-architect.com/sweden/swedens-tallest-timber-bu... If you really like to build taller, here is a twenty storey building in Skellefteå, Also in Sweden. https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2021/oct/14/skelleftea-swedish-plywood-eco-town-20-storey-wooden-skyscraper-worlds-tallest https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2021/oct/14/skellef... [1] “the study found that the CO2 intensity (tons of CO2 emissions per dollar of output) of lumber production is about 20 percent less than that of fabricated metal products, under 50 percent that of iron and steel, and under 25 percent that of cement. In addition, shifting construction toward lumber products lowers the GDP cost of meeting the emissions cap by approximately $500 million and reduces the carbon price.” https://news.mit.edu/2019/taking-carbon-out-construction-with-engineered-wood-1211 https://news.mit.edu/2019/taking-carbon-out-construction-wit...
- kolinko 5y ago
  This is an oversimplification. Building lower you get lower population density, and need to spend way more co2 on transportation and infrastructure. If you’re comparing a 4-story building made of wood compared to comcrete then sure it has less emissions. But if you want to build four 4-story wood instead of one 16-story concrete, it’s not mecessarily so.
  - Scandiravian 5y ago
    Not necessarily. One of the problems with high density is how to handle peak loads, like for rush hour. There's a limit to how many people can be on a metro, grocery store, etc. There's also a hard limit on how much you can scale the infrastructure before residents start choosing transportation options, that make the issue worse (like cars). The infrastructure also have to support a significant increase in garbage creation and resupplies for stores. If one of the main traffic arteries are blocked, the spillover to alternative routes might exceed the capacity and create delays, which are incredibly expensive. A lower density neighborhood, might not use the infrastructure as close to its maximum capacity on a day to day basis, but that creates redundancy for when a road is closed for maintenance and significantly lowers the risk of expensive delays. As with everything, there's several trade-offs between the options, and I think it's hard to give a definitive answer on what has the lowest emission, etc in a cradle to grave analysis. My personal preference is to take all such estimates with a significant "milage may vary" disclaimer
seanmcdirmid 5y ago
30 stories is a fairly hard limit in China because concrete construction techniques with low skilled labor don’t scale much beyond that (otherwise costs increase and they have to use steel/skilled engineers and construction workers). Given that these techniques are exported to many Asian and middle eastern countries (via Indian or Chinese construction firms and migrant workers), you have a whole continent of cities filled with these ~30 story apartment blocks. But then the argument would be for not going above 30 stories because of the costs involved. I get the feeling that six story limits would only work for the developed west.
- tonyedgecombe 5y ago
  China has been restricting the height of buildings for several years now. https://indianexpress.com/article/explained/why-china-is-cracking-down-on-the-construction-of-super-skyscrapers-7597210/ https://indianexpress.com/article/explained/why-china-is-cra...
  - seanmcdirmid 5y ago
    Yes, but a 30 story concrete apartment block that make up 99% of their construction efforts come nowhere near those limits.
Tade0 5y ago
> Many good cities, like Paris, That is a very unfortunate example.
rtpg 5y ago
I agree with this sentiment. Too many people believe that “build more and more densely” is saying to build everything 30 stories up like in China but for example if you look at Germany there are only a handful of residential buildings even over 15 floors , and a lot just caps out at 3 or 4. If you just decided tomorrow that half of residential 3 floors should instead be 6 floors, that would already go some way to helping things! And if you space stuff out nicely you can have a very nice city! Just like… build a bit higher.
- ant6n 5y ago
  Skyscrapers in parks don't make for very good cities.
  - rtpg 5y ago
    A 6-story building isn't a skyscraper! A 10-story building isn't a skyscraper!
rahen 5y ago
You're right. Skyscrapers don't achieve any meaningful density because of all the space between them, which offsets their height. The City of Paris (the classical mid-rise downtown without the La Défense skyscraper CBD), has a population density of around 20000pp/km2, climbing up to 50000pp/km2 in 11th arrondissement. Downtown Tokyo and London are about the same. In the developing world, some cities achieve much higher densities with only low rise buildings. Cairo is twice higher at around 40000pp/km2, but granted, the lack of urban planning and mass transit makes it inefficient too, and quite frankly, unlivable. The only skyscraper district than can rival those is midtown Manhattan, which shies at around 20000km2. However it takes tightly packed skyscrapers to achieve it, at a much lower overall energy efficiency.
- ceras 5y ago
  Skyscraper districts are typically office buildings, which make population density comparisons a bit misleading. From your example, Midtown Manhattan has few residential buildings vs office buildings, but it gets very packed during the day from commuters and population density numbers don't include any of that. (Manhattan as a whole doubles in population during the day; Midtown Manhattan grows at a much higher multiple.) Depending on what your definition of "skyscraper" is, they do tend to either add density, increase average unit size, or both. Comparing apples to apples, NYC's densest 5-6 story residential neighborhoods (e.g. East Village) are less dense than the high-rise residential neighborhoods like Upper East Side and Upper West Side. And on top of that, I can tell you that apartments are larger on the UES and UWS. This Wikipedia article conveniently compares city districts by density. You can see here that Yorkville (part of UES) is extremely dense compared to the densest districts in other cities like Paris, and much denser than community board 3 in Manhattan which is a very dense residential mid-rise neighborhood: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_city_districts_by_population_density https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_city_districts_by_po... Note also that Yorkville isn't even full of high-rises. Most of the side streets are mid-rise like east village. It gets the 50% extra density from consistent high-rises along the avenues, and a smattering of high-rises peppering the side streets.
kqr 5y ago
As a sibling comment of mine points out, we need skyscrapers. They just aren't the be-all end-all of buildings. We need some skyscrapers. We need a lot of other types of buildings too. Diversity makes for a great district.
Razengan 5y ago
Shortscapers linked with bridges/“skywalks”? But that won’t happen between buildings constructed by different companies so it would have to be mandated in some way. Maybe modular cable cars that can be put up between buildings later?
numpad0 5y ago
> Above six or ten stories, it's actually counterproductive in terms of things like energy efficiency. um, those crumbling, 40 years old, 15m across, entirely uninsulated, six stories buildings obliterating every surfaces within 25 miles in every direction from the Imperial Palace in Tokyo...those are...not exactly wonderlands always.

micromacrofoot 5y ago

most places could be dramatically more affordable even if they allowed 3 story buildings… single-family zoning is probably the worst thing to ever happen to urban planning

closeparen 5y ago
I think one reason for the "missing middle" is that it's dense enough to make parking a serious challenge, but not dense enough to make a completely car-free lifestyle attractive. I am not sure I'd give up a car for anything less than Manhattan subway (multiple redundant grade-separated tracks, that go everywhere you need, every 2-3 minutes) and you aren't getting public transit that good on just duplexes.
- micromacrofoot 5y ago
  there are still a lot of single-family houses near existing public transportation! if parking is really the limiting factor to medium density… we need more remote workers, bike support, and must improve our public transit!
  - closeparen 5y ago
    I think more often than not that "existing public transportation" is a bus that goes to a pretty limited subset of the city, 2-3 times an hour. If you happen to be going to somewhere on that line and leaving near a scheduled departure, great, but you'll still want your car for the many times you're not.
    - folkrav 5y ago
      You hit the nail right on the head. Right after high school, both my parents lived in the same small town on the outskirts of a larger city. From my father's house, it was a 30min walk to get to the bus stop, which had one passage every 30 minutes. Even from my mother's place, going to school was ~2h to get halfway to downtown. My only decent option was driving to the train stating further from home, and going straight downtown that way. Cut a good 30-40 min off my commute, just mean I hit traffic every day. Anyway, all this to say, public transportation gets pretty light past a certain distance from city center, and you most definitely needed a car if you want to have some sort of life outside commuting. Admittedly, we're 17 years past that time, but from what I've heard from a friend still living there, it's still the very same situation.
- folkrav 5y ago
  I'm in a 3-4 story area, barely any garage doors and we can park on both sides, still parking is a shitshow.
- Scarblac 5y ago
  This is where the Netherlands can contribute something: with awesome infrastructure for bicycles, you don't have to be that dense before using the car becomes a once or twice a week thing. I often have to park my car streets away because all the closer spots are taken. But it doesn't matter as much because we don't use it much. Car sharing systems are the next step, our car is old so the economics don't quite work yet. But when it breaks down we won't buy a new one, just sign up for one of the services that have cars parked nearby.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

zozbot234 5y ago

> We need more buildings of up to six stories. We don't need more skyscrapers. ¿Por qué no los dos? Skyscrapers for the highly productive business downtown where they can actually bring increased density compared to mid-rise buildings, and mid-rises for the rest of the city. You're right that skyscrapers are not "the best human environment" in any general sense; they're an adaptive response to very special conditions, that are generally not found outside the places where skyscrapers are common.

tagoregrtst 5y ago
Skyscrapers are not just inefficient for their own sake. They harm the city. Businesses that would otherwise be scattered around the city giving their employees a chance to live near them are concentrated in a small region core. Its a traffic double whammy. No one lives near and they have to drive to the same small footprint. Its far better to have mix use six-eight story buildings.
- zozbot234 5y ago
  > Its a traffic double whammy. No one lives near and they have to drive to the same small footprint. These seem like nearly ideal conditions for good mass transit. The reason why businesses like to congregate in the city core is that this creates wealth for the businesses and their employees via agglomeration - I think this dynamic should not be ignored, even though it might not be immediately visible.
  - tagoregrtst 5y ago
    Public transportation doesn't work just because all the jobs are in one place. At best this creates a transportation system that craters to business and not to social interaction (since its inherently a spoke model with business the hub) Also in this business-concentrated city, the synergy you describe (and I agree exists) is set up to benefit business. What about synergies between people? Better small, concentrated, cities as existed before the automobile that, had jobs scattered throughout them. (To be clear cities’ downtowns are always more commerce oriented, the agora or the forum come to mind. But go to Rome and see how small the forum of the largest city in antiquity is. Place of business wasn't restricted to one place)

hypersoar 5y ago

Yeah, I agree that there's too much focus on highrises as a fix our housing supply. The units you get by replacing a block of detached homes with mid-rise apartments add up fast. Side-note: Learning about one-plus-fives was one of those "learning to see the lines of code in the Matrix" moments. They're everywhere. In my experience, for all their shine and gloss, most of them kind of suck. But kinda crappy housing is better than no housing.

pottertheotter 5y ago
Another issue is that a lot of the mid-rise apartments are built in complexes (at least in the US) that segregate the apartment from the rest of the city. You get density but no community. There’s no sense of place.
- erosenbe0 5y ago
  That's usually because of modern parking lot/space requirements.
- Talanes 5y ago
  The most dystopian version of this I've seen if my friend's old apartment outside San Diego. It was just a strip of land between two freeways with an exit, a McDonald's, Starbucks, and Food 4 Less. And the apartment complex. And you had to cross the single light on the strip of street between offramp and onramp to get to the latter two.
edgyquant 5y ago
Well that’s because you get way more units if you also build vertically when you replace the block.
PebblesRox 5y ago
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/5-over-1 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/5-over-1

mlinsey 5y ago

A moderate spread of six story buildings might be optimal for energy usage of just the buildings, but total energy usage/environmental impact are also shaped by other human factors for where people want and need to live and work...eg without tall buildings in Manhattan, you would get a lot of extra energy expended in more people commuting back and forth from further distances. And the a high density of people makes public transit even more viable which brings further environmental and health benefits. That said, I do agree that there are only a few areas in the country where the main barrier to an ideal density is allowing more skyscrapers instead of mid-rises. Manhattan north of the financial district and south of midtown is one such area, parts of SF are another. But many, many more cities would see more benefits of moving from low density single-family homes and detached lots to mid-rises.

closeparen 5y ago

I have a human need to live among skyscrapers. From the time I was a little kid, my favorite thing to do on a weekend was anything downtown. I found it incredibly depressing when we would go back to our postwar-sprawl house at the end of the day. Later we moved to an older inner-ring suburb, and that was a little better, but only some. Day trips to the nearest proper city would be the highlight of a year. New York was one of the best experiences of an entire childhood. It still boggles the mind that people refer to Manhattan like a cautionary tale. To me it's nirvana. This obsession never went away. I can't really explain it. Maybe the sensory stimulation, maybe the comforting premise of an active hive of other human life, maybe something else, but it remains as important to me as ever. I think the skyscraper city is a little like the symphony orchestra: it has an object-level aesthetic, but on the meta level it's a celebration of civilization itself. It is incredibly fortunate that my interest in computers translates to one of the few jobs in America that will pay enough to live in a place like this. By the same token, it's distressing that such places are so precious and so rare.

hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
Are you me? :) Glad to hear someone else with the exact same viewpoint. Ever since I was a little kid I dreamed of living in a city with skyscrapers, and my partner's demand that we move out to the suburbs nearly ended our relationship.
- LightG 5y ago
  What was the compromise? If there was one (!)
  - hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
    Well, at first I lost. But it did help me discover that the most important thing for me was walkability. I could compromise on the highrise living, but we moved to a car-dependent neighborhood, and that's the part I despised most, and it significantly negatively affected my physical health, and thus then my mental health. I strongly believe that car-dependent suburbs are just plain awful. In the end, money cured it for the most part. We rented a small studio pied-à-terre downtown and would spend a couple days there a week. We actually didn't do this for too long because it wasn't long until Covid hit and downtown basically died, so we didn't renew our lease. Not sure what's next.

voldacar 5y ago

>Buildings are primarily about meeting human needs. ok, what if a human wants to live in a very tall building?

baybal2 5y ago

> The low hanging fruit exists in the general lack of this mid-rise range of buildings in many places. Above six or ten stories, it's actually counterproductive in terms of things like energy efficiency. I will challenge you on this. 80m-120m buildings are the most economic choice almost everywhere: material costs, infrastructure cost, service cost.

bjelkeman-again 5y ago

One benefit in building lower is that one can built a substantial part in wood. This leads to better carbon capture and lower carbon prices. [1] Here is a modern example in Sweden, in Västerås. https://www.e-architect.com/sweden/swedens-tallest-timber-building-in-vasteraas https://www.e-architect.com/sweden/swedens-tallest-timber-bu... If you really like to build taller, here is a twenty storey building in Skellefteå, Also in Sweden. https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2021/oct/14/skelleftea-swedish-plywood-eco-town-20-storey-wooden-skyscraper-worlds-tallest https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2021/oct/14/skellef... [1] “the study found that the CO2 intensity (tons of CO2 emissions per dollar of output) of lumber production is about 20 percent less than that of fabricated metal products, under 50 percent that of iron and steel, and under 25 percent that of cement. In addition, shifting construction toward lumber products lowers the GDP cost of meeting the emissions cap by approximately $500 million and reduces the carbon price.” https://news.mit.edu/2019/taking-carbon-out-construction-with-engineered-wood-1211 https://news.mit.edu/2019/taking-carbon-out-construction-wit...

kolinko 5y ago
This is an oversimplification. Building lower you get lower population density, and need to spend way more co2 on transportation and infrastructure. If you’re comparing a 4-story building made of wood compared to comcrete then sure it has less emissions. But if you want to build four 4-story wood instead of one 16-story concrete, it’s not mecessarily so.
- Scandiravian 5y ago
  Not necessarily. One of the problems with high density is how to handle peak loads, like for rush hour. There's a limit to how many people can be on a metro, grocery store, etc. There's also a hard limit on how much you can scale the infrastructure before residents start choosing transportation options, that make the issue worse (like cars). The infrastructure also have to support a significant increase in garbage creation and resupplies for stores. If one of the main traffic arteries are blocked, the spillover to alternative routes might exceed the capacity and create delays, which are incredibly expensive. A lower density neighborhood, might not use the infrastructure as close to its maximum capacity on a day to day basis, but that creates redundancy for when a road is closed for maintenance and significantly lowers the risk of expensive delays. As with everything, there's several trade-offs between the options, and I think it's hard to give a definitive answer on what has the lowest emission, etc in a cradle to grave analysis. My personal preference is to take all such estimates with a significant "milage may vary" disclaimer

seanmcdirmid 5y ago

30 stories is a fairly hard limit in China because concrete construction techniques with low skilled labor don’t scale much beyond that (otherwise costs increase and they have to use steel/skilled engineers and construction workers). Given that these techniques are exported to many Asian and middle eastern countries (via Indian or Chinese construction firms and migrant workers), you have a whole continent of cities filled with these ~30 story apartment blocks. But then the argument would be for not going above 30 stories because of the costs involved. I get the feeling that six story limits would only work for the developed west.

tonyedgecombe 5y ago
China has been restricting the height of buildings for several years now. https://indianexpress.com/article/explained/why-china-is-cracking-down-on-the-construction-of-super-skyscrapers-7597210/ https://indianexpress.com/article/explained/why-china-is-cra...
- seanmcdirmid 5y ago
  Yes, but a 30 story concrete apartment block that make up 99% of their construction efforts come nowhere near those limits.

Tade0 5y ago

> Many good cities, like Paris, That is a very unfortunate example.

rtpg 5y ago

I agree with this sentiment. Too many people believe that “build more and more densely” is saying to build everything 30 stories up like in China but for example if you look at Germany there are only a handful of residential buildings even over 15 floors , and a lot just caps out at 3 or 4. If you just decided tomorrow that half of residential 3 floors should instead be 6 floors, that would already go some way to helping things! And if you space stuff out nicely you can have a very nice city! Just like… build a bit higher.

ant6n 5y ago
Skyscrapers in parks don't make for very good cities.
- rtpg 5y ago
  A 6-story building isn't a skyscraper! A 10-story building isn't a skyscraper!

rahen 5y ago

You're right. Skyscrapers don't achieve any meaningful density because of all the space between them, which offsets their height. The City of Paris (the classical mid-rise downtown without the La Défense skyscraper CBD), has a population density of around 20000pp/km2, climbing up to 50000pp/km2 in 11th arrondissement. Downtown Tokyo and London are about the same. In the developing world, some cities achieve much higher densities with only low rise buildings. Cairo is twice higher at around 40000pp/km2, but granted, the lack of urban planning and mass transit makes it inefficient too, and quite frankly, unlivable. The only skyscraper district than can rival those is midtown Manhattan, which shies at around 20000km2. However it takes tightly packed skyscrapers to achieve it, at a much lower overall energy efficiency.

ceras 5y ago
Skyscraper districts are typically office buildings, which make population density comparisons a bit misleading. From your example, Midtown Manhattan has few residential buildings vs office buildings, but it gets very packed during the day from commuters and population density numbers don't include any of that. (Manhattan as a whole doubles in population during the day; Midtown Manhattan grows at a much higher multiple.) Depending on what your definition of "skyscraper" is, they do tend to either add density, increase average unit size, or both. Comparing apples to apples, NYC's densest 5-6 story residential neighborhoods (e.g. East Village) are less dense than the high-rise residential neighborhoods like Upper East Side and Upper West Side. And on top of that, I can tell you that apartments are larger on the UES and UWS. This Wikipedia article conveniently compares city districts by density. You can see here that Yorkville (part of UES) is extremely dense compared to the densest districts in other cities like Paris, and much denser than community board 3 in Manhattan which is a very dense residential mid-rise neighborhood: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_city_districts_by_population_density https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_city_districts_by_po... Note also that Yorkville isn't even full of high-rises. Most of the side streets are mid-rise like east village. It gets the 50% extra density from consistent high-rises along the avenues, and a smattering of high-rises peppering the side streets.

kqr 5y ago

As a sibling comment of mine points out, we need skyscrapers. They just aren't the be-all end-all of buildings. We need some skyscrapers. We need a lot of other types of buildings too. Diversity makes for a great district.

Razengan 5y ago

Shortscapers linked with bridges/“skywalks”? But that won’t happen between buildings constructed by different companies so it would have to be mandated in some way. Maybe modular cable cars that can be put up between buildings later?

numpad0 5y ago

> Above six or ten stories, it's actually counterproductive in terms of things like energy efficiency. um, those crumbling, 40 years old, 15m across, entirely uninsulated, six stories buildings obliterating every surfaces within 25 miles in every direction from the Imperial Palace in Tokyo...those are...not exactly wonderlands always.