I suggest this is the wrong conversation to have. I'd put it this way: I love Paris, with its buildings of 5 or 6 stories, and I love New York City (where I liv

I suggest this is the wrong conversation to have. I'd put it this way: I love Paris, with its buildings of 5 or 6 stories, and I love New York City (where I live) with its taller buildings. But both cites suffer the same problem, which is that the roads are used for all purposes. If you are a pedestrian, and you want to go into a store to buy bread and cheese and wine and coffee, the bread and cheese and wine and coffee need to be brought in by a truck that will be using the same streets that people use to get around on/in their cars or Vespas or bicycles or taxis. Only a few cities in the world have ever been serious about building a second level of walkways, for pedestrians, and typically these pedestrian walkways only cover a few blocks in the downtown area. Nor are the walkways truly fundamental to the architecture of the city, and by that I mean one rarely sees retail stores on the 2nd level, but rather, pedestrians are expected to go back down to the ground floor once they need to actually do something, like buy something at the store. Cities of the future will have to commit to that 2nd level, as well as a 3rd and 4th level. And at some point, these walkways need to be built not just for pedestrians but for any 2 wheel vehicles, including bikes and Vespas and mopeds. This issue is more important than whether the buildings should max out at 5 floors or 50.