8 ms·

Skyscrapers are not just inefficient for their own sake. They harm the city. Businesses that would otherwise be scattered around the city giving their employee

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)
dhosek 5y ago
I've lived my whole life in two different metropolitan areas: Chicago and Los Angeles. The former has most of its businesses in or near the Loop, the downtown area.¹ The latter has them more scattered like you argue in favor of. I find with businesses concentrated, it's much easier to make decisions about housing. In Los Angeles, it was difficult to predict where my next job might be. It could be downtown, it could be Santa Monica, Marina Del Rey, the valley, Pasadena, Orange County, etc. I could face a 90 minute drive or a ten minute bike ride to get to work. Even if I didn't change jobs, a company might move from one side of L.A. to the other (and this did happen to both my wife and me while we lived in L.A. although her location change was less dramatic than mine). Dispersed job centers often meant passing up on jobs because the location was inconvenient. In contrast, in Chicago, the key thing is being able to get to downtown reasonably quickly by public transportation (or, when I was single, I had an apartment that allowed me to easily bike or walk to and from the Loop if I so chose and the weather wasn't awful). One thing I noticed was that in the 90s, many tech companies were located in those outer suburbs and living anywhere but near downtown made commuting challenging. In contrast, since I moved back to Chicago 11 years ago, almost all tech jobs are downtown, which seems a likely consequence of the fact that being close to competitors makes it easier to find employees. ⸻ 1. There are, of course, bits of exceptions to his with some scattered business areas in some of the suburbs, most notable Oak Brook, Evanston and Schaumburg being the primary examples in my experience.
- dredmorbius 5y ago
  Understanding and sympathising with this viewpoint, the issue is far more one of urban planning and transit than it is of structure height per se. San Francisco hasn't been known for its soaring towers (though recently the leaning sort are making headlines), but it is centralised and well-served by transit both within the city and from surrounding communities. To this extent, it resembles Chicago. At the same time, the Bay Area as a whole strongly resembles Los Angeles, with various tech hubs ranging from San Jose to San Francisco, and including Sunnyvale, Fremont, Mountain View, Palo Alto, Menlo Park Redwood City, and Oakland. If you find yourself job hopping between these spots, commutes get long fast, and there's no one best place to live. Chicago was built around rail with both the urban CTA and regional Metra rail service. Suburbs first emerged as points on spokes radiating out from downtown. Those have since filled in considerably, and inter-suburban commutes are both real and every much as horrible a mess as you'd imagine them to be. Los Angeles grew up as an automobile city with boulevards and freeways, and looks it. Absent the constraints of terrain, what defines Los Angeles is a grid-pattern of both streets and freeways. Whilst Chicago does have a street grid, that grid does not define the city in the same way Los Angeles does. If LA had instead opted to build distributed clusters of both high-rise (office/commercial) and low-rise (residential) towers, on a hub-and-spoke transit system, it might offer a far more reasonable set of commute and living options. There's no strict need for towers, so much as there is for connections between them. Arguably, another element that defines much of Chicago is its greystone and bungalow residential styles. These don't reach the density of 5--6 story apartment construction typical of Europe, but are far denser than the predominantly single-story fully-separated housing of the Los Angeles area. As with elsewhere, density makes transit service, whether bus or rail, far more viable.
  - DoreenMichele 5y ago
    Los Angeles grew up as an automobile city with boulevards and freeways, and looks it. LA is the way it is due to the history of how it was developed. It's a desert city and they had to develop large tracts at one time to finance the water infrastructure to bring water in from elsewhere. LA was spread out like it is before it became the poster child for the cult of the car. It was like that when it was served by trolleys and foot traffic. I don't know what the solution is going forward, but planning around cars is not how that got started in the case of LA.
megablast 5y ago
What a ridiculous take. Spread businesses out more rather than in one place. Let me guess, you never go anywhere without your car??
- tagoregrtst 5y ago
  Let me guess you never lived in Europe? Europe is mostly very many small, sub million, cities with jobs scattered throughout the city largely created before the automobile. The jobs are spread throughout the city in the buildings people live in you can choose to live in the neighborhood where you work. Or, the American model where all the jobs are in the city core in monsterous buildings (most not skyscrapers, but anyway ugly orgies of concentrated office space) while everyone lives far in a suburb.
  - zozbot234 5y ago
    > Or, the American model where all the jobs are in the city core in monsterous buildings (most not skyscrapers, but anyway ugly orgies of concentrated office space) This is a creation of modern urban planning; it's not a "natural" consequence of having skyscrapers. Europe has its megacities and hyperdense cores too (which do feature mixed business/residential use, unlike much of the U.S.), and America has its scattered historical towns.
    - tagoregrtst 5y ago
      I mostly agree, thats why I used mid sized European cities as an ideal, not London or Paris. And, it wasn't to pick on the US - Charleston SC or Savanah GA come to mind as an very livable cities (minus the tourists). Instead US cities suffered the advent of the car more since they were newer, less established. Finally, I agree that (mis century “progressive”) Urban planning is mostly to blame. Where I don't agree is that the skyscraper is a blameless misused tool of the urban planner. In the cities that built them, skyscrapers hurt the city. And European “megacities” are as unlivable (unless you’re 25-35) as any American megacity. Give me Bologna over Milan any day.
- Talanes 5y ago
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
adrianN 5y ago
If everybody wants to commute roughly to the same area in the city, it's much easier to build public transport that serves them. Dense cores work very well until the city becomes too big to support reasonable commute times from the periphery to the center by public transport. Of course you need to take care that things like supermarkets, restaurants, schools, libraries and such are well distributed so that people can walk or cycle to them.
- tagoregrtst 5y ago
  If you put everything in the same place ppl end up being on crowded shoulder to shoulder - very difficult to walk 100 m to do what you need. Its like putting too many cores in a CPU without addressing the memory bus. Better an architecture where a core largely has everything it needs locally and only occasionally needs to go elsewhere; hierarchically seeking larger, harder to reach, memories This is not the suburban model - in suburbia everything is far from everything. Even your next door neighbor. Instead, in my model, everything you typically immediately need (grocer, baker, pharmacist) is within walking distance (ideally, no public transit needed!).

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)

dhosek 5y ago

I've lived my whole life in two different metropolitan areas: Chicago and Los Angeles. The former has most of its businesses in or near the Loop, the downtown area.¹ The latter has them more scattered like you argue in favor of. I find with businesses concentrated, it's much easier to make decisions about housing. In Los Angeles, it was difficult to predict where my next job might be. It could be downtown, it could be Santa Monica, Marina Del Rey, the valley, Pasadena, Orange County, etc. I could face a 90 minute drive or a ten minute bike ride to get to work. Even if I didn't change jobs, a company might move from one side of L.A. to the other (and this did happen to both my wife and me while we lived in L.A. although her location change was less dramatic than mine). Dispersed job centers often meant passing up on jobs because the location was inconvenient. In contrast, in Chicago, the key thing is being able to get to downtown reasonably quickly by public transportation (or, when I was single, I had an apartment that allowed me to easily bike or walk to and from the Loop if I so chose and the weather wasn't awful). One thing I noticed was that in the 90s, many tech companies were located in those outer suburbs and living anywhere but near downtown made commuting challenging. In contrast, since I moved back to Chicago 11 years ago, almost all tech jobs are downtown, which seems a likely consequence of the fact that being close to competitors makes it easier to find employees. ⸻ 1. There are, of course, bits of exceptions to his with some scattered business areas in some of the suburbs, most notable Oak Brook, Evanston and Schaumburg being the primary examples in my experience.

dredmorbius 5y ago
Understanding and sympathising with this viewpoint, the issue is far more one of urban planning and transit than it is of structure height per se. San Francisco hasn't been known for its soaring towers (though recently the leaning sort are making headlines), but it is centralised and well-served by transit both within the city and from surrounding communities. To this extent, it resembles Chicago. At the same time, the Bay Area as a whole strongly resembles Los Angeles, with various tech hubs ranging from San Jose to San Francisco, and including Sunnyvale, Fremont, Mountain View, Palo Alto, Menlo Park Redwood City, and Oakland. If you find yourself job hopping between these spots, commutes get long fast, and there's no one best place to live. Chicago was built around rail with both the urban CTA and regional Metra rail service. Suburbs first emerged as points on spokes radiating out from downtown. Those have since filled in considerably, and inter-suburban commutes are both real and every much as horrible a mess as you'd imagine them to be. Los Angeles grew up as an automobile city with boulevards and freeways, and looks it. Absent the constraints of terrain, what defines Los Angeles is a grid-pattern of both streets and freeways. Whilst Chicago does have a street grid, that grid does not define the city in the same way Los Angeles does. If LA had instead opted to build distributed clusters of both high-rise (office/commercial) and low-rise (residential) towers, on a hub-and-spoke transit system, it might offer a far more reasonable set of commute and living options. There's no strict need for towers, so much as there is for connections between them. Arguably, another element that defines much of Chicago is its greystone and bungalow residential styles. These don't reach the density of 5--6 story apartment construction typical of Europe, but are far denser than the predominantly single-story fully-separated housing of the Los Angeles area. As with elsewhere, density makes transit service, whether bus or rail, far more viable.
- DoreenMichele 5y ago
  Los Angeles grew up as an automobile city with boulevards and freeways, and looks it. LA is the way it is due to the history of how it was developed. It's a desert city and they had to develop large tracts at one time to finance the water infrastructure to bring water in from elsewhere. LA was spread out like it is before it became the poster child for the cult of the car. It was like that when it was served by trolleys and foot traffic. I don't know what the solution is going forward, but planning around cars is not how that got started in the case of LA.

megablast 5y ago

What a ridiculous take. Spread businesses out more rather than in one place. Let me guess, you never go anywhere without your car??

tagoregrtst 5y ago
Let me guess you never lived in Europe? Europe is mostly very many small, sub million, cities with jobs scattered throughout the city largely created before the automobile. The jobs are spread throughout the city in the buildings people live in you can choose to live in the neighborhood where you work. Or, the American model where all the jobs are in the city core in monsterous buildings (most not skyscrapers, but anyway ugly orgies of concentrated office space) while everyone lives far in a suburb.
- zozbot234 5y ago
  > Or, the American model where all the jobs are in the city core in monsterous buildings (most not skyscrapers, but anyway ugly orgies of concentrated office space) This is a creation of modern urban planning; it's not a "natural" consequence of having skyscrapers. Europe has its megacities and hyperdense cores too (which do feature mixed business/residential use, unlike much of the U.S.), and America has its scattered historical towns.
  - tagoregrtst 5y ago
    I mostly agree, thats why I used mid sized European cities as an ideal, not London or Paris. And, it wasn't to pick on the US - Charleston SC or Savanah GA come to mind as an very livable cities (minus the tourists). Instead US cities suffered the advent of the car more since they were newer, less established. Finally, I agree that (mis century “progressive”) Urban planning is mostly to blame. Where I don't agree is that the skyscraper is a blameless misused tool of the urban planner. In the cities that built them, skyscrapers hurt the city. And European “megacities” are as unlivable (unless you’re 25-35) as any American megacity. Give me Bologna over Milan any day.
Talanes 5y ago

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

adrianN 5y ago

If everybody wants to commute roughly to the same area in the city, it's much easier to build public transport that serves them. Dense cores work very well until the city becomes too big to support reasonable commute times from the periphery to the center by public transport. Of course you need to take care that things like supermarkets, restaurants, schools, libraries and such are well distributed so that people can walk or cycle to them.

tagoregrtst 5y ago
If you put everything in the same place ppl end up being on crowded shoulder to shoulder - very difficult to walk 100 m to do what you need. Its like putting too many cores in a CPU without addressing the memory bus. Better an architecture where a core largely has everything it needs locally and only occasionally needs to go elsewhere; hierarchically seeking larger, harder to reach, memories This is not the suburban model - in suburbia everything is far from everything. Even your next door neighbor. Instead, in my model, everything you typically immediately need (grocer, baker, pharmacist) is within walking distance (ideally, no public transit needed!).