I don’t understand why the conclusion he gives is “make buildings short” rather than “make the first five floors of a building more livable”? When I visited Mexico City I was in love with how, instead of fully bringing down old houses, they would repurpose them to be the first few floors of towers, so at street level you are still seeing friendlier architecture while also allowing for higher density. It’s another reason why I always like buildings that have supermarkets and cafes and restaurants (so multi function) - they allow for those interactions
🥰Vertical mixed-use is really good IMO. You get more smaller shops, instead of needing to always go to a big-box store. (It's even better with Vancouver style buildings, where the high-rises are narrower on top of the lower commercial portions that are wide and right up to the side-walk, for foot-traffic.) I'd even take horizontal mixed-use, but my city's still almost totally separated. Newer areas have some limited amounts of this, but it'll be a few decades before this place is half-way walkable or bike-able.😅
That's not his conclusion though, this is what the video's author interpreted. The book is generally about what feels nice and why, without setting out to describe some strict rules for a humanistic utopia. So more of a guideline, where conditions permit it.
This is such a good point :) Because in the video they keep talking about people actually chatting and that's not the point. The point is that it feels sooo much friendlier and more welcoming to walk by buildings with fewer stories than by skyscrapers. But much of that can be compensated for by deliberately designing inviting first and second floors that you can interact with.
In one of the European cities where I used to live, there was a street in the city's centre that was dark, cold, gloomy, always windy and dominated by a tall concrete building block from the 1950s. What the city did then was to make the street less wide by removing space for cars. That allowed for the construction of narrow, three to five story high fronts that were put directly in front of the brutalist monstrosity. The end result was a really nice alleyway filled with small shops that connected the pedestrian zone on one side with a school, theater and public park on the other side.
What city was that? I'm really interested in seeing examples of this because I also think it's kinda an optimal solution. High rises that are set back a bit with lively streetfronts
totally different but in Vancouver Canada there are a LOT of "podium towers" with a 3 story "podium" that is street facing and the towers rise from the podium and are set back from the street giving residents a "private" park on top of the podium around the towers and the podium is ether retail space OR city homes / podium homes as they are referred to and are 2 - 3 story tall 3+ bedroom units
As someone who's lived on the first floor of a three story building in an exclusively residential development for the last 15 years, I can tell you that ain't no picnic either. I feel super disconnected from my neighborhood, because I always have to keep my blinds closed, or else everyone walking by is just looking at me doing whatever I'm doing. Heck, the windows on one side of my place are at the exact level of the parking spots there, so whenever anyone pulls in or out, their headlights blaze through my dining room. It sucks. I think it would be much better if we had good exterior design, like parklets, any retail/restaurants at all, or just somewhere to interact with neighbors who were doing anything other than going from their front doors to their cars. I'd be fine living on the 6th or 8th floor, if I could leave my building and be in a vibrant neighborhood of shops, parks, and people. I also agree with you about the weird idea of balconies, or what have you, keeping you connected to the neighborhood. We have much longer seasons of "good" weather here in the Washington DC region, and I almost never see anyone out on their balconies or patios. I walk through my development frequently, and if I've seen 10 people out on their porch/balcony in the last 15 years, I'd be shocked. There's a really nice new development I pass by all the time that has gorgeous, spacious balconies, and in the 4 years since it was completed, I think I've seen maybe two people sitting outside, and they weren't chatting with anyone on the ground.
I think balcony or the lack of is not the main cause. In my hometown in Turkey, there was a time people used their balconies to talk to neighbors. Now people figured out that they can put windows and use it as additional storage room. Maybe people are simply interacting less with neighbors (as both adults spend the entire day working 9-6 jobs) or neighborhoods are less uniform so you don’t want to interact with people. I think we should address other issues before we talk about 3-5 level limits or balconies.
I live on the third floor of a 3 story. There's a parking lot across the street and headlights come in my window still because everything is ultra bright high aimed headlight these days. And they can still see across my living and dining rooms through the sliding door for my balcony. I'm too close to a 4 lane road for my balcony to be very inviting because of road noise. But that's the style of almost all apartments in my smaller city as they're on the outside of suburban type blocks. About the only plus is there is usually a very close bus stop?
Hey I live on the first floor and was put off by this for a while. I solved the issue with a simple 2-way film that works so long as there's more light on the outside than in. It was cheap and a simple fix. Now I comfortably keep blinds open all day. I wouldn't want to keep them open due to the noise anyways so it's been a great solution for me!
I actually like balconies... they aren't essential, but when my dad lived in an apartment, I actually would spend a lot of time in the balcony. I especially liked having my morning coffee in the balcony.
Honestly, I think tall buildings are fine. I do prefer however any buildings from 1-10 stories. But having some high rise stuff to prioritize space in the downtown areas is perfectly fine.
I don't really like 1 storey buildings. Even single family homes can be 2 storeys tall. Higher than 1 storey can give more a sense of enclosed streets. Proper mixed use buildings must also be multi storey in my opinion.
@@dylanc9174 I don’t really love one story buildings either but sometimes with a historical area there are some strange buildings that also look cool so I accept it sometimes.
I once lived on the 2nd floor of a 26-story building in FiDi (downtown Manhattan). Had no direct sunlight and I interacted with the rats from my window. Then I moved to a higher floor (prefer hanging out with birds and airplanes rather than rats).
Sometimes some is not enough and having them as concentrated as cheap housing does not work well. So you have to distribute them with only a few exception because of landmark designation or safety restrictions.
I like the fact that you constantly emphasize that ensuring enough people have acesss to housing is more important than the design principles. Although, I do wish that modern developers made tall buildings nicer.
The housing argument only works in theory, though. Usually landlords in highrise buildings make you pay for the view and having to operate one or more elevators is costly as well. In general, highrise buildings are proportionally more expensive to build than the same amount of housing spread over several smaller buildings.
I agree with the premise, but taller buildings are not stick built; they are constructed of wildly expensive steel beams. This quickly leads to the building being a “luxury” building with higher rents to recoup that cost. It’s not just that they have elevators. It’s literally everything and every component. Once they cross the steel beam threshold the entire project becomes essentially a commercial grade project, meaning high rent. I’m not opposed to high rent high rises, it’s just what they are. Low rent means low building.
I think he forgot to mention that the 5 story rules is not about design per say. It's more about the most COST effectiveness of the construction due to the fact that they could use normal foundation they usually use on normal residential houses. 5 story building could also use residential grade lifts instead of the heavy commercial Lifts that costs more to buy and maintained. Also taller building would require more complex design and the maintenance costs for them would be significantly higher. It's a lower cost solution that could be fast cheap and maintain easily especially when the city got more lands.
The problem is, high rises aren't going to give you affordable housing due to the fact of physics, and the deeper you need to go to for the foundation. Then the logistics of sewage. This results in less floor space actually available in the building the higher up in it you go(due to the space the plumbing needs to take); it increases the cost to build due to the excavation for the foundation. And then the pluming is expensive as hell to maintain. It's why sky scrapers tend to be office space, or luxury condos because that's the only group who can afford to live in them, or use them as work space. They are useful in the sense that it may get the rich out of housing that lower earners can afford, but it isn't a solution for affordable housing.
I vastly prefer varied environments over uniform ones. A mix of building heights is ideal. I love visiting cities with high rises, and sleepy little villages. If any one specific level of density overtakes every other and every city/town/village looks samey, that is my idea of hell, no matter how nice the overall design is. This is part of why American suburbia is so abhorrent to me.
To me, the goal of having all buildings looking the same is unimportant to me, as is the goal of varied environments. I do not care what anything LOOKS like.
Jane Jacobs has a whole chapter on the importance of a diversity of building types/ages in a neighborhood in Death and Life of American Cities. The idea is that different types of building are better for different purposes (in terms of rent prices, aesthetics, etc.) so a healthy neighborhood has a mix of these. Otherwise the neighborhood can't fulfill all the needs of it's residents. Also it just looks better.
For me it's the opposite. I like to either have a pleasant European city or a full-on skyline like in Asia or America that inspire awe. some horror examples exist in Europe where they tried to mix both at the same time, such as Brussels (which gave the name to the idea of Brusselization). Some cities find a middle ground by keeping their center a pleasant density and skyscrapers in one area like La Defense in Paris. They managed to have their cake and eat it too, the smart bastards
Meanwhile some expatriates have found Singapore's suburbs claustrophobic e.g. the suburb of Tampines has 600+ apartment towers that're usually betweem 11-17 floors tall spread over 12km^2 that house ~300000 people. HK's towers are even taller but don't sprawl across as large an area I think probably as it's more constrained by mountains
I feel like a lot of other urbanist youtubers ignore this and choose to focus on aesthetic elements instead. It comes across as totally out of touch and oblivious to actual, material issues that could be helped through urbanism.
This tends to be outside urbanist communities, but I often hear people say that they'd rather be homeless than live in a brutalist apartment. Personally I think the idea of everyone having at least an ugly home is a better standard than most people living on the street in a sleeping bag with no toilet
@@yemmohater2796those are not the only two alternative though. Those are the two extremes. I hate high rise towers and would rather not live in one. You can solve housing problems by building more low rise apartments and better transit. Building towers scars the city for generations to come.
When I lived in Waikiki I lived on the 30th floor of a 44 storey building. I could keep my blinds open all the time, didn't have to listen to street noise, had fantastic ocean views, and had a great overview of everything in the neighbourhood. The downside was that I lived in an illegally partitioned apartment without a kitchen, and there was a HOA that all the tenants couldn't participate in (just for the landlord owners). Eventually there was a bedbug problem in the entire building that did not get addressed because everyone dealing with it was a tenant and the landlords were doing nothing (they would all have to work together at once to rid the building of it). The problem was not due to it being a tall building, it was due to how the building was owned and managed.
As an engineer my only issue with height has been how much space you need to sacrifice for stairwells and lift shafts the higher up you go. These are necessary to deal with resident traffic and emergency service access. They reduce floor space and add cost to the point where then can make high rise buildings less economically viable. It’s why optimum heights from a fire safety point of view tend to be 6-9 stories. Beyond that, you have to start adding more width to stairwells, bigger/more lifts etc. That said I wouldn’t sacrifice a potential housing solution due to a single assumed design principle. Sacrificing housing need because of an assumed community benefit is like throwing the baby out with the bath water.
Economic considerations should be left for developers to decide. If its not economical to build at height it won't be built. But considering that land acquisition is a huge cost for developers in most high-rent cities, it can definitely pencil out for developers to build high so as to get the most number of units out of the land, even if there are increasing per-unit costs as you build higher.
Exactly. I agree, though in some countries developers can be city/local authorities and therefore may have different motivations beyond profit. Plus there are building codes which will place design constraints on buildings. But of course a private developer will always choose to maximise profits.
that seems to assume smaller lot sizes. different economies of scale are possible with larger lots. maybe even an elevator solution that doesn't have the economics of single track commuter rail.
@@ThirdWigginthis is exactly why we have so many vacant apartments in NYC’s luxury towers. The astronomical cost of building high-rise residential towers forces developers to cater to wealthier tenants, pricing out middle and lower income people, and thereby defeating the purpose of building these towers to solve the housing shortage. It’s more economically feasible and sensible to build 6-10 story residential buildings; they are quicker to build, require less materials to construct, and consume far less energy to heat and cool. Adam Something has a great video about the many pitfalls of skyscraper construction vs smaller residential buildings.
@@Guavauava I think the reason so many US urbanists love towers is because they haven't seen what you can do with low / mid rise towers and actually good public transport.
I live in a 2-story townhouse. People don't talk to one-another from balconies or windows. Heck, they barely talk to one-another at all, and if they do it is usually at ground level on the walking paths. Honestly I think I'd prefer living in a high rise again, if only for the concrete and steel construction and ideally better noise dampening. Not being smoked out by my neighbours 24/7 would also be a plus. :)
As a Vancouverite, I really like design of the point tower, as it's the ultimate best of both worlds. With a podium of only 2-6 stories facing the street, they help to create a bright, vibrant local neighborhood with local shops, services, and townhomes. And with up to 60 stories stepped back far enough from the street that they look distant (towers are usually around 5-10 meters from the edge of the podium) they help to solve housing and densify transit hubs. This also creates more private spaces within a dense city for those who seek it - as separation and privacy is part of the allure of a high condo, just like it is for a single family home. The mile-high club will still be forced to interact with ground level, which creates a peaceful coexistence between lifestyles within a shared urban fabric. In the end, the point tower provides the perfect compromise between Jan Gehl type idealists and economic realists. It's the ultimate solution for building a downtown with plentiful housing, a vibrant streetscape, local small business, and plentiful underground parking garages to free up valuable street space for bike lanes and sidewalks.
Judging by this and other comments, the optimal compromise here does seem to be that the first five floors or so of the building are optimized for what Gehl discusses, and then a tower set back a bit further that optimizes for economics, yes, but also privacy, so as to get the best of both worlds.
The five-story maximum building height that you see throughout historic cities, particularly in Europe is due to the technological constraints as well as the limitation of building a multi-story building without elevators. The fact is that you need much thicker load-bearing walls to support a taller building without steel construction. Additionally, people find it harder to walk up more than five stories upstairs to access their apartments or offices.
A) Remembering visiting Sweden and it being dominated by historic 6 storey buildings. 😆 B) The inability to identify people easily when you’re 8+ floors up is good, actually? It gives privacy and anonymity. People like some privacy.
To B) The interesting thing is that people have a heightened need for privacy the higher the density gets. So that is kind of a circular argument. More privacy is good in tall towers because you need more privacy in cities with tall towers. Just ask any resident of a below-10k city if they feel like having enough privacy in their ground floor appartement - and I guarantee that the answer is fundamentally different than from somebody living ground floor in NYC (if that even exists in Manhatten).
@@QemeHIt’s not a circular argument at all? Big cities exist. One tower isn’t going to make the city all that much bigger. So might as well let people have their privacy, if they want it. (Which people definitely do.)
@@dickiewongtk No. Not at all. I'm just saying that you can have privacy in a two story building, if the city isn't as dense. You only need tall towers for privacy (there are other reasons, obviously, but I just adressed the privacy issue!) if the city consists of tall towers. In a town (or even neighborhood) with just townhouses you can have your privacy on ground or first floor just as well and easily. Again, there are other considerations for tall towers as stated in the video (mainly too many people wanting to live in a specific spot for external factors like transit or workplaces), but better privacy is not one of them.
@@fernbedek6302 Yeah, nah. ONE tower doesn't change anything in terms of privacy, livability or whatever else. What I was saying is that privacy is only a reason to build tall towers if there already are a bunch of tall towers (i.e. high density). If the density is lower you don't need tall towers for privacy. That's why it's a circular argument: You only need high buildings for privacy if the city already has tall buildings. That's like saying "we need more guns to protect us from all the guns", it's just not how that works.
My 11th floor apartment provides all day sun light and an expansive view to the horizon as well as a sense of place by keeping well known landmarks in view. There are lots of coming and goings from the 100 apartments enabling interactions. Its damn quiet up here as well, and all these factors well balance the daily grind of the urban worker packed into trains, exposed to traffic hell, laboring indoors.
Yeah, it's all about whats important to you. I feel I've generally got enough friends, family and other loved ones in my life, so while I don't dislike other people, I'm perfectly fine not meeting strangers. So what you describe, a lot of light and a lot of quiet with great views sounds incredible to me. Alone doesn't always equal lonely, since I'm not a fan of loneliness but I love alone-ness that you describe. And yeah, there's people in the stairwell and on your floor you could in theory interact with if you want to see some faces and hear some voices, but you don't have to. I think that's nice.
The resources we overconsume and waste cast a shadow of poverty death and extinction over the developing world's citizens and every living system on the planet as well. Your statement is as over broad as mine.
While you have a good view now, a shorter building behind yours probably lost part of its view when your tower went up. Units on higher floors typically cost more, so views of the sun, lake, city landmarks, become more exclusively available to those who can afford to pay for them. Those on the street level or older shorter buildings suddenly lose their sunlight, landmark views when a new tower goes up beside them. Views, sunlight, distance from noise all get commercialized.
A great example of the difference between good and bad ground-never design is those pre-fab Soviet blocks. The identical ones with poor communal spaces were purportedly depressing and unpopular. But the ones made after the 60s are still highly rated today versus brand new developments, because they made each building unique (despite being made of prefab parts) and had large plazas leading to the subway. Many such residents complained about new developments not considering equitable sunlight access or green spaces anymore.
Wat? Houses built before the 60s are very popular housing. Often - elite. It is very green and has all the necessary infrastructure. Houses from the 60s to 70s called 'Khrushchevki'. Yes, the areas are interesting in terms of landscaping, but the houses themselves are disgusting.
One of my friends grew up in a Moscow "commie block" and loved it, it was insanely convenient. So many people in one space means you have friends nearby, easy access to amenities and stores, transit, etc.
@@Verezart of course, this was an oversimplification. Stalin certainly led the building of grand, golden buildings that were awarded to high ranking people. But I am talking about the initial attempts at the pre-fab buildings, not the bespoke ones made under Stalin’s rule. I believe, upon refreshing my memory, I was calling Kruschev’s buildings soulless but Brezhnev’s as the “made of prefab panels but still unique” ones. So it seems I had also misremembered Severnoye Chertanovo as being representative of that later Brezhnev run of _mikrorayon,_ rather than as the pinnacle of them. And a lot of that comment was based on a few articles I read in the Guardian 10 years ago, and mostly on one called “Moscow’s suburbs may look monolithic, but the stories they tell are not”. It seemed I had forgotten that there was some uniqueness in the initial roll-out of _mikrorayon_ from the late-50s early-60s. But the bulk of them were indeed identical “dormitories” as I outlined.
Since I went back to the article I got these ideas from to respond to Verezart, I thought I should quote these few paragraphs (from interviews with residents) here as well: _What has changed, however, is two things: space, with communal areas now regarded as parcels of land ripe for development, and speculation, with a vibrant property market in the capital generating fortunes for a few and insecurity for most._ _Dominating Severnoye Chertanovo today is a 40-storey monolith called Avenue 77. According to Palmin, this giant apartment block limits light for many residents here for much more than “a few hours in summer”. It tries to break up its enormous grid of standardised flats via a Koolhaas-like “iconic” shape, but nobody could be seriously fooled; this is form following speculation, an image of public space and equality being crushed by speculation._ _In the 1990s, when looking at the apparently interchangeable districts produced by Communism, critics didn’t see, or ignored, the libraries, the childcare centres, the parks and the treatment of housing as a basic and free human right; and instead saw merely those huge, inescapable, interchangeable monoliths - the slabs upon slabs that always strike the casual viewer driving from Moscow’s Domodedovo airport to its centre._ _These critics argued that this monumental uniformity was the greatest possible indictment of the system: a rigid plan that assumed everyone wanted the same thing, while giving them a mass-produced product that few really desired. The assumption was that the free market would result in variety, liveliness and complexity. What actually happened was a property boom that took over Russia’s three or four biggest cities, and a grim decline everywhere else._
I think that 5-6 stories is a good rule of thumb for modestly sized cities. Being able to interact with the street is nice, but I think that the bigger factor is that buildings that are too tall start to discourage you from leaving your apartment or desk because going down to street level starts to become a trip in itself. The other point it has in its favor is that, since it's both politically and practically easier to build than a tower, faster deployment could make up for smaller size in terms of "housing more people". No artsy-fartsy architect mumbo jumbo justification required. With that being said, there is definitely a point when the need for density in a big city starts to outweigh other factors.
They channel wind and block light. They're also kinda imposing for people who grew up in the country. 4-6 story buildings don't usually have these problems.
@@shraka The cost is also important to take into consideration. Skyscrapers are very expensive to build and maintain. The way they look upclose isn't very appealing for most people as well. Tall rectangular boxes of steel and glass just look boring for most folk. Skyscrapers are just impressive because of their height and that's about it.
@@epic8923 Yep. Even most mid rises are more expensive than they're worth, plus they can drive up living expenses in the local area by overloading local infrastructure and gentrifying an area.
There is a practical reason to consider that most buildings should be below 6-7 storeys or so in height though, and it has nothing to do with connection to the street. Above this height (exact figure depends on a lot of local variables including mains water pressure, specific storey height, etc) the per square meter/ per square foot cost of building begins to climb again (having dropped with each extra floor added above the second). This is due to the need to include additional machinery to provide normal services and serviceability at these heights. Now it's not as though it's hard to do this, or even that it's expensive, but it does provide a sort of natural division between mid-rise designs which do not normally require such additional infrastructure and true high rise designs which normally will require it. In short whatever this boundary is for a given area it's not normally worth exceeding it unless you are going to do so by a number of storeys in order to help offset costs, so it creates a logical level to set your local planning laws and definitions around.
Maybe a distinction between high-service and low-service areas is useful here. Say you have a building with lots and lots of small units where occupants need to leave to do everything but sleep and bathe, or ones with people who need to be within a 4 minute walk of a metro station, etc. Those can be taller by a good margin because it may be more expensive total to service a wider area esp with something like quick metro access. Hard to get developers to care about municipal spending but zoning regs could find a way
Also, the crossover point somewhat depends on those (local) regulations. Alternate fire exits, sprinklers, elevators, prohibition of certain building techniques, and so on add costs, but _at which building height_ they start to be required determines where those costs start to appear. At the heart most of these regulations exist because the associated risk increases with height. There is usually no clean natural cutoff, so yes, there is _some_ room to weight the safety (or accessibility or whatever) from these regulations against the ease of engineering buildings. But you won't be able to stray too far from where other places put these cutoffs. And secondly, the cost of land also affects the crossover point massively. 6-7 storeys or what have you may be economically ideal in terms of the cost of construction. But in city centers the cost of land can have a much larger impact on the optimal building height than the cost of construction. And in the suburbs you have people congregate who will pay extra for the ability to have a yard, so that the cost of _enclosed_ living space becomes less of a factor (for those who can afford to pay extra for the "luxury" of having a yard).
@@planefan082 That distinction may be more influential than you may realize. Retail for example is on the ground floor (or at most 3 or 4 floors up) because it just gets prohibitively expensive to deliver the goods to sell up to higher levels. That and the increased strain on elevators (or then possibly escalators) from patrons who stay for only 30 minutes or so.
"the per square meter/ per square foot cost of building begins to climb again" In high-demand areas the extra housing or office space might still be worth the extra cost.
Height can also be beautiful! I love Calgary’s skyline! And some people might enjoy living on a higher floor. Thanks for a great nuanced look at height!
And you're not alone in that! It's extremely common for people to enjoy the look of an impressive skyline. Tourists look for exactly these kinds of views all the time. It's strange that this all gets forgotten when people talk about tall buildings being inherently bad.
Another big advantage to high rises is actually the excavations required, that underground space can be very useful, it allows things like parking and utility infrastructure to be hidden and also provides space for other services, there's even a residential high rise in Vancouver that managed to fit a full sized Costco store in the basement...
What's wrong with being at bird-level? Lateral views of geese and crows is pretty fun. I love my concrete box in the sky. It fits a lot of good points that you brought up, like proximity to transit. I also love how much of the landscape and sky I can see. And I'm a bit of a recluse so greeting people from my balcony is not a priority for me. But I also recognize that a concrete box in the sky is not the right choice for everyone.
Another argument for high-rises: If you want a lively street life you need to have more people, to inhabit the street and patronize businesses. High rises allow for a higher population density. Seems absurd to care more about where people are when they are at home (i.e. being antisocial) than where they are when they step out their front door.
Those high rises have common areas where residents can hang out together. Or sometimes there are enough families with kids, they even have a playground indoors. I also think it can be quite social.
When I was on the 14th floor, it was fun catching a flock of geese go by, UNDER my elevation. I moved to an even more dense area of my city, but chose a lower floor (5th) but now the office building (parking garage of it actually) looks straight into my place, I feel pretty visible from the street with my shades up whereas my old higher place didn't have that issue, I no longer have a view across the city and of the mountains, and the parking garages nearby have buzzers that go off constantly to warn pedestrians of cars coming out across the sidewalk that I can hear (along with all the other car/truck/bus noises). (Cars ruin cities.) I picked a lower floor so that I could more easily take the stairs (down at least) and spend less time on the elevator including stopping for other people :) since my old place had a lot of elevator problems (one of the main reasons I moved).
@@drivers99 Ayy, 14th is my floor! I used to live on the third floor and yeah, I always felt a bit visible. There was another apartment building across the back parking lot, and the pine trees didn't provide enough of a screen to make me feel comfortable. I can still hear traffic noise (Yes! Cars ruin cities!) unless my windows are closed *and* I'm wearing my noise cancelling headphones. And there's beepy trucks doing deliveries a few times per day that I can hear no matter what. It would probably be a lot worse if I was lower down.
I do think there's a tendency for taller mixed-use buildings to have larger/fewer businesses on the ground floor compared to older 3-4 story buildings. An example would be the newer 8-10 story buildings going up all along 4th Avenue in Brooklyn, which seem to have at most a single ground floor business in buildings that span half a block or more. Only certain kinds of businesses can afford to rent that much space in Brooklyn, so you mostly only see things like medical practices and real estate offices, making for a not very attractive streetscape. Compare this to 5th Avenue one block over, which is mostly older 3-4 story buildings, and has much narrower storefronts housing a wide variety of restaurants, coffee shops, bars, clothing and specialty stores, etc. I don't think this has to be inherently the case for tall buildings, just an observation.
I always support whatever is the max density that I think has a real chance of getting built due to political will. Since most of LA is currently SFH sprawl, Im A-ok with supporting several 5 story apartment/condo buildings. Unfortunately, these areas just simply won’t be able to get a 10+ story building across the finish line :-( But there are some places in LA which are already jam packed with 5 story buildings and have high capacity transit options within walking distance. In those situations I’m fully behind building taller buildings which can house more people. And I’m fully confident that the areas where we’re currently building 5 story buildings will be having 10 story buildings built in 20ish years if we continue on our current path.
Not to mention DTLA could triple the number of skyscrapers and only get better. I've never understood the angst against skyscrapers. I think skyscrapers in DTLA only makes the region better.
Having parts of the city that feel isolated but are in fact close is a very good thing. Being able to duck into an alley, wander into a park, or climb/ride up out of the hustle and bustle and be alone is a good thing. Driving 20 minutes to the suburbs to get peace and quiet isn't as good as riding an elevator 2 minutes up to achieve the same.
@@shraka 5 floor apartment buildings usually have elevators too though. People with disabilities exist and deserve the ability to access homes, and moving heavy objects up multiple floors of stairs is hell.
Elevators don't actually require much power, especially if they are done with a counterweight which is common in tall buildings. If I can get the feeling of peace and quiet and distance by riding an elevator (all electric, only lifting my weight plus overcoming friction), that will be far less energy consumption than even riding a bus out to the suburbs. I don't just want quiet places that are sometimes unoccupied like parks and other public spaces (those should exist of course), I want a place that is reliably quiet where I can disconnect. Especially with as many cars are on our streets, living within shouting distance of the surface in a dense area is not something I want. And increasing density above what can be done with 5 story buildings has other benefits too, it makes public services like transit and trash pickup more efficient, it makes utilities more efficient, and it enables more businesses to be viable within walking distance without having to accommodate parking. Those benefits far outweigh the energy consumption of any sensible elevator. We should have enough high rise residences to accommodate everyone who wants one, and I would like one. @@shraka
@@cordcorcese2448 What's that got to do with my comment? Though, obviously lower buildings will have a higher percentage of the residents taking the stairs.
@@TheReykjavik Umm, not from what I've seen. Older elevators use quite a bit more power than a car over the same distance in the real world. Trams and trains are far more efficient. But again why not just go to a quiet park or square? Did they not build them in your city? Maybe your city just sucks? And no above 5 stories doesn't necessarily increase transit efficiency. Go run some numbers on pax per hour and catchment areas. Even just 4 story buildings can completely overwhelm a very sophisticated transit system.
As an architect, I would say that it "always" comes down to design. Buildings of any size or height can enhance or be a detriment to a community, at both the small scale of the immediate community and the large scale of the urban fabric. Whether using the model that rings a tower with townhomes (I saw a lot of this when I visited Vancouver) or follows the old "main street" model of retail/restaurant underneath the residences, there's plenty of opportunity to entice people to the public realm. And really that is the thing: a 3 story building where the surroundings are car-infested roadways isn't going to have any community feel, no matter how many balconies or etc you put on it. A pedestrian-first design will get people out and about and create an environment that will have people meet and greet each other and create a strong connection to the place, even if the buildings themselves are 30 stories tall. Great video!
Toronto is the poster child for having tall buildings and a lively streetscape, you just have to force developments to include retail at ground level. The right amount of elevators is key though, something the city has yet to mandate.
I lived on the 15th floor for couple of years and totally loved it - beautiful views and it was actually very quiet. I socialized in coffee shops and restaurants nearby, not on the balcony.
I guess you had those views, because you were NOT surrounded by higher buildings? See - have a WHOLE district, where every house was +15 floors would in resullt exactly 0 views for you. BUT having a whole district of 3 floor houses and your house is the only one towering above them ... welll ... congratulations!
@@ravanpee1325 20 floor reduces other costs, by spreading land cost across more people. Which effect is bigger will depend on local land values and such, and should be up to the developer to decide, not zoning codes.
@@mindstalk The costs go up exponentially prettey soon. A 20 story building has way stricter regulations on litterally everything. If a single family home collapses during an earthquake nobody bats an eye, a 20 story building with hundreds of people in it? Yeah, that needs way stricter regulations. You know how even big semi trucks are at risk of tipping over in storms? Do you know what kind of loads a 20 story building has to endure with every storm? And of course the elefant in the room: Fire. The moment the fire department is unable to evacuate a building quickly and safely with the help of fire trucks, fire codes go ballistic, since the building needs to be able to contain the fire while keeping its inhabitants safe. I live in europe, here you could basically build almost whatever, wherever with much less restrictive building codes (building type wise) and still sky scrapers (or at least buildings anywhere near the local height limits) are far and few between. And those that exist are corperate buildings or luxury housing. If building high would be so affordable and profitable, why are buildings as low as they are here? Building high only makes sense in places like Hong Kong, where surronded by mountains and oceans there is no space to go anywhere but up. Not because ervery last bit of reasonable land is wasted by single family homes. The issue at the end of the day is that there is very little being done to keep a balance between the amount of work places and living spaces. The moment people have issues finding a decent place to live at a reasonable distance to their work, prices go up and quality of life down. Either you need to spend a monumental ammount on living where you need to be or you have to deal with a soul sucking commute and high mobility expenses. This is caused by for example sky scrapers not solved by them.
9 месяцев назад+2
@@ravanpee1325 Let the developers build, and let them try to find customers. We don't forbid certain kinds of shoes, because some bureaucrat thinks they would be more expensive for the average customer.
@@ravanpee1325 people also really really hate having to take the stairs to get to the 4th or 5th floor. do you want to move furniture in and out, up and down 5 flights of stairs?
if Asia follows the European 5 story and narrow streets model for our cities, we'd completely cover every single inch of flat plains suitable for city building, mind you, the same airable land critical for agriculture. the struggle for efficient housing, privacy in a hugely mobile and metropolitan environment, greenspace, weather resilience and sanitation are greatly important agendas aside from the topic of urban design, imo urbanism should also cover these topics
A fixed 5 story building is arbitrary but most of the densest cities are not in Asia but, indeed, in Europe - and this is without high rise buildings. Apart from the Philippines, which has the highest number of cities with very high density comes Europe with France, Belgium, Spain and Greece (those have multiple cities). India has 3 cities, Bangladesh 2, Indonesia 2and Nepal, Sri Lanka, South Korea and Japan have one, some are in the lower part of the list. The most famous one is Paris, that has a height limit of 12 stories (or 37m) with one tower that slipped in the short period when restrictions were lifted and the people hated it so much (and still do) that restrictions were reinstated, and before someone mentiones La Défense, where you can find quite a few high rises, is not part of the city of Paris. With this restriction they have a density of more than 21,000/km2.
Well you can look at Japan. Tokyo is the biggest urban area in the world. And it’s mostly low rise buildings. It’s no Hong Kong or Shanghai. Also Asia is such a broad region. Some countries have huge populations and some less populated.
@@AL5520 "cities" have very arbitrary sizes and borders and typically include lots of green space. The densest neighborhoods are all high rise blocks, except for the poorest countries that can't afford them.
Dude you have demographic crisis. The space you save by building towers you waste on utilities around it. Let's say Barcelona is better of than any Chinese city.
You make a good point, but we should analyze why Asian cities are so populated and dense? Is that something that was artificially done? Wouldn’t it better if there was global freedom of movement so people in those cities can move to Gehls ideal cities that are accessible everywhere? As well as having access to good contraceptions and abortions, which reduces overpopulation?
I live close to the 60th parallel and for a large portion of the year the sun is pretty low in the sky. I think this sets a natural height limit for buildings in northern cities to avoid streets feeling too dark. IMO this maxes out at around 8-10 stories, which is what you tend to see in central Stockholm and Helsinki for example.
Reykjavik famously has butt-ugly white-painted buildings across the city for the same reason. I'm sure there's a hard and fast aesthetic rule against plastering white paint on concrete buildings, but it quite literally saves lives and sickness by mitigating SAD for ~200.000 Icelanders.
My sister is in the process of worldbuilding a solarpunk fantasy setting, and was asking me what my opinion is on optimal building height, since I'm always going on about transit and urban design. I kinda waffled on it a little bit, but ultimately said basically what's in this video, although definitely not as clearly as I was speaking off the cuff at the time. Don't think I said anything as succinct as "they should be as tall as they need to be," but that was I think the ultimate takeaway. I actually visited her 15th floor Vancouver apartment recently, and I felt way more connected to the city while there than I do in my Bay Area house that I share with four other people.
9 месяцев назад
Singapore might be a good real life example to draw solarpunk inspiration from.
In my experience, high rises are perfectly fine. And for what it’s worth, people in those 5-story buildings with balconies will never experience bumping into people in the elevator or the club room or the rooftop pool, so it really is a bit of a trade-off either way.
Born and raised in 2-5 stories soviet stalin era hood. It was amazing experience, everything was very cozy and green and blocks were planned in a way I had access to everything I need in 5 minutes, kindergarden, school, hospital, gym, shops and services, transpiration. The hood was drowned in greenery and every block had it's own charm. First floor was dedicated mostly to shops or had a small garden to protect you from peopl eyes. On the downside every place I have ever lived since is a living nightmare of hour long commutes, too dark or lack of shade, wind, to huge empty spaces or lack of any space. Terrible block planning and terrible apartment planning's. That disconnection brought me to urbanism and understanding that stalin era hoods where way ahead of it's time. I wish someone would adjust take those plans modernize a bit and bring back to life.
I think part of the problem is that oftentimes highrises don't mesh well with the street-scape. Many modern highrises are ugly glass and steel boxes, which would honestly be fine, but when you're at the street level, there's nothing for a pedestrian to interact with. It's just glass and steel. There are no shops, or restaurants, and if it's residential-only, there's often a guard or a locked door, which I can understand for security purposes, but it still limits how the building can be experienced for someone walking on the street. Ultimately, this is only a problem if too many streets or blocks are like this, which many downtowns in the US are.
@@MatthewGraham027 Yes, very true. The glass and steel box design philosophy is just uninspired and honestly pretty depressing. When you consider that part of the design philosophy was that it "deconstructed" a building's facade, no wonder it looks soulless and boring.
@@jamalgibson8139The tower in the park site plan was great for its time, when folks needed tons of housing right away. Now, I get the sense people need almost a park in the tower plan, something like Taino Towers in New York. It has both needs settled; Tons of community functions in the first few floors that can be interacted with from the street, but floors on top of floors of good housing above in a high rise function.
jamal, as the video mentioned, that's a design issue not a height issue. You can have dead low-rise buildings, and you can have high-rises that incorporate street-facing retail, housing, or enclose public plazas.
@@mindstalk Yes, I know. I'm just stating that that could be the reason why many dislike these buildings, without considering the broader benefits. Personally, I think that we need to reform our zoning code to allow for more midrises before we throw skyscrapers down. Even new york city likely has more skyscrapers than they need because much of the outer boroughs are single family zoned. And new york likely has such a high population because it's just about the only city with decent transit in the country.
I lived in a building of 7 stories in a socialist-planned 15-minute city style neighborhood. These were such huge buildings with parks in between, and business at the bottom. Such a tall mixed-use building becomes an ecosystem or a "city" of its own, and it's still connected to the street enough because of its cascade design. It's really interesting.
I kind of agree that taller buildings disconnect you from the life below... and that is EXACTLY WHY ITS GOOD. Not everyone wants to be connected to the city at all times. In fact, many people absolutely require a home that allows some form of escape. I used to live in a city because my university was there, and after that my job. For two out of the 11 total years in the city I lived in an apartment on the 11th floor. It was absolute bliss. Being able to look out to the horizon... not having people walk in front of my window all day... the (relative) silence on my balcony... being able to sleep without being woken up by drunks and car horns and garbage trucks. Not to mention that city culture... dynamic but chaotic... abrasive... offering so much but taking so much as well. The city was nice to live in, and its one of the most livable cities in the world.... but I still needed escape. That apartment on the 11th floor was bliss, and having lived in a smaller town for some years now I can say with confidence I never want to live on the bottom 5 floors in a city ever again.
There's an argument with a similar endpoint, but a completely different (and more scientifically accurate) idea behind it: urban density actually doesn't increase that much beyond ~5-6 story buildings. The amount of extra infrastructure and non-built up area you need to accommodate taller buildings largely negates the extra stacked floor area you get. This means taller buildings really only work to densify cities when you also start stacking services and infrastructure, something that is extremely expensive. The best route towards affordable and achievable urbanism is moderate densification. The type that doesn't require massive upgrades to local infrastructure, doesn't require subway lines to serve the transit need and that doesn't require expensive engineering.
It depends a lot on the city. Stacking services and infrastructure makes sense for sufficiently large cities. This is important to keep in mind, since over half of the urban population in the world lives in cities with more than 500.000 inhabitants.
needs both history is littered with projects to "fix" a lack of housing that themselves created different issues often becoming financially ruined and ghettos destroying there neighbourhoods and there are GREAT points about livability / size and massing of structures to the streetscape one example is "podium / towers" build a 3-5 story building filled with shops and offices ETC and have tower blocks rise out of the centre of the "podium" streetscape gets the "life" of a "small" building while the housing numbers are supplied
Guys, I find Your channel as one of the most objective on youtube and urbanist's communities. Sometimes urbanists are so idealistic that refuse to see the other side perspective. But you can show all the benefits of dense urban environment without calling the other side "idiots". People like you win.
My parents moved my sister and me from Montreal to Thunder Bay in 1964. Getting off the train, we saw a woman, driving a pick-up truck, turning into a parking lot. I remember saying that we’d died, and gone to hell
Modern urban problem is that we mostly don't live next to workplaces anymore. We wouldn't need to overbuild around major transit hubs otherwise. Decades ago if you worked at the factory, you would live with your colleagues next to it. If you had a store, you would live on a floor above it. Having long commute every day really sucks. I had a job within a walking distance, it was wonderful.
“Where renters don't have to compete with each other for apartments.” Renters will ALWAYS be competing with each other in high-demand neighborhoods. Numerous neighborhoods that are full of highrises are still extremely expensive. Taller buildings don't necessarily have more units, either. Some of the luxury supertall condo towers that have been constructed recently in NYC actually have FEWER units than the much, much shorter buildings they replaced. A city is its buildings. People want to live in a given neighborhood in no small part because of how it looks and is organized. You can't take a neighborhood of quaint Victorian houses that have been carved up into apartments and replace it with modern condo towers, and act like its the same place. You may be housing more people, but those people aren't living in the same neighborhood. They're just living in the same geographic coordinates. If you're willing to sacrifice the unique sense of place that comes with human-scaled and historic architecture, then you're willing to destroy one of the principle joys of urban life. You're simply destroying that which you are trying to promote. The other issue with tall buildings is that there's significant diminishing returns to density by building up. Paris is actually denser than NYC, and about as dense as Manhattan in both residential and job density. As a building gets taller, more and more internal space must be devoted to elevators and emergency egress. Furthermore, there is a tendency to increase the space between buildings as they get taller, whether that means wider sidewalks, wider roads, entrance plazas, etc. It just doesn't work out that building up automatically results in significantly higher density. In fact, one of the key motivations of building up hasn't been to increase density overall, but to free up space on the ground for parks, wider roads and freeways. This was the thinking of Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe. Mies designed Detroit's Lafayette Park neighborhood to have several highrises amid ample green space, wide streets and parking lots. Thus, it's purposefully not very dense despite having tall buildings. Ironically, the most coveted section of the neighborhood is the area of townhouses designed by Mies himself. They're both architecturally distinctive and traditional in organization. They've become a significant anchor to the whole neighborhood, and couldn't be replaced without fundamentally diminishing the area's integrity and sense of place. Lastly, the attempted analogy between building height and transit systems is utterly nonsensical.
As a strongly introverted person, if I had to move to a city residing in the "realm of birds and views" instead of communion with the street might be the difference between serenity and frayed sanity. We all have similar needs but we often weight them quite differently.
I've got to say I tend to agree with the Danish gentleman. I have noticed that the space around high rises seem to suck up energy from the streets around them. I could see some limited applications for high rises, but normally I find low and mid-rise places are nicer to be around. I also concede there are places with high density and low land availability where high rises are necessary.
I have both. My office is on floor 41 of a 50+ story building. I enjoy getting my morning coffee and looking out over the city - I get a broad picture of humanity. I also get to laugh at all the cars bumper to bumper on the highways, because ... Two miles away I live on the second floor (top) of a duplex. I don't interact with people walking by (my screen porch is in the back), but I do see trees and flowers and bicycles going past. I see city life close up. Neither view is better. I don't feel disconnected in either place. I can see both the forest and the trees. Oh, I don't own a car or bicycle. I walk, including to my office whenever possible. Otherwise, I take the bus.
I've only heard an argument that a certain height is a cutoff point for energy efficiency, where you require air-conditioning even in colder climates, the fire-systems that need to be implemented take away floorspace and extra pumps are needed in the basement to get water pressure to the upper floors. Attractiveness of the street is an important consideration, most importantly don't overshadow everything or enable glass facade reflections that cause sunburn. I'm sure a good designer can build an attractive lower portion of the building for the cityscape.
@@BoburtoMy reply didn't make it because of the link, you need to search for "building height energy efficiency" to find articles discussing a study that simulated single home to 1000 floor buildings. The optimum is estimated to be somewhere between 6 and 12 floors.
Well presented argument. IMHO tall buildings have their place, but some of them are unnecessary and do damage to a city. Many times they're built because overly restrictive zoning laws have prevented high density low rise or mid rise housing elsewhere. If you fixed that first, there would be way less need for tall towers. Look at Paris as an example. I do think tall buildings make sense near transit and it can be nice to have an apartment with views, but they also create shadows and wind tunnels that make the streets below unpleasant and make you feel like an ant. So, I don't mind some tall buildings in certain places, but I think too often they are built as an easy solution without considering the down sides.
Paris is like the entire reason why you shouldn't take this ideology to the extreme, its nearly impossible to live with more than yourself in Paris without making a massive amount of money, and even then, you'll be in a very very small apartment. The suburbs of Paris actually end up having taller buildings because of this. Although form is important, cities are not purely an artistic exhibition, they are primarily somewhere to live, comfortably and spaciouslly, which can be accomplished if we build up. Chicago is a great example of a city thats very tall but feels also very real, it helps that chicago has alot of mixed density that includes everything from high rises to low rises, this also helps keep the rent super low. I agree with you on the restrictive zoning laws, if we were able to build some areas that look and feel more like Paris, then we would have a much better time interacting with the housing crisis. A counterpoint to my take on paris would be looking at New York City, I believe, though, that as you go further out from downtown things get cheaper, but, the housing crisis is a very complex issue, density is not the sole factor, but it is a very important one.
@@LiquidBassBrony "Paris is like the entire reason" I disagree. Paris is by no means not a dense city. The height of its buildings are typically 8-12 stories and feature expansive courtyard infill. Paris's density at 20k inhab/km2 is vastly larger than Hong Kong's 7k inhab/km2. It is supremely dense. Paris' issues lie in a more general French normative problem - one of centuries of centralization, of culture, economy politics etc, which cause Paris to be basically the only "relevant" city for people to want to move to. But that is a primarily policy problem not an urban materialist one. Germany shows that similarly dense cities (or even far less dense cities than Paris - Berlin has a density of 5k inhab/km2) that are however densely connected to each other in medium distances, which keeps land values dispersed. The suburbs around Paris are still far less dense than the city center itself (e.g. the Arrondisement Saint-Denis has half Paris' denisty at 9.5k inhab/km2, Créteil, famous for it'S high rise housing projects is even less dense, at 8k inhab/km2) Your examples of Chicago is in bad faith. You consider Paris separate from its supposed "denser" suburbs, but in Chicago it seems you only consider downtown. "mixed density that includes everything from high rises to low rises" The vast majority of Chicago is single family homes (79% to be exact). Even considering just the downtown, the Chicago Loop is far less dense than the center of Paris (only 10k inhab/km2). And the reason why is partly exactly because of the nature of high-rises. The taller buildings are, the more space they require dedicated to circulation, technical services, emergency exits and structural support. They become far less economical to build as well the higher they go. The value/cost proposition of building such structures tips after about 12 stories, where the necessity of elevator banks, safety and access start coring out larger sections of the building. These modern high-rises require far more space around them as well, setbacks for instance emergency services or daylight penetration. So if you tore down Paris as it is now to build higher, you'd most likely end up with lower density overall. "that as you go further out from downtown things get cheaper," That is the general primary difference between Anglo-American historical urbanism and Continental European/Asian urbanism, whereas the early adoption of railroads and cars allowed wealthy suburbs to develop away from cities, Continental cities industrialized later, with walking to work remaining the most common mode of transit well into the late 19th century. As a result the city centers on the Continent remained the most desirable areas to inhabit, with a heavy emphasis of public transit meant to accommodate travel from less developed peripheries into their centers
@@LiquidBassBrony I used Paris as an example simply because it's a rare case of extremely high density of people per sq km, with almost no high rises. If Paris has cost of living issues, it's not going to be down to a lack of density vs other cities. Although Manhattan has a higher density than Paris, Paris has a much higher density than NYC as a whole. My point being that you can have massive density without high rises if everything is at 5-8 stories. In practice, most cities aren't going to be like Paris without large scale demolition, so more realistic examples might be London or Chicago (as you mentioned), where you get general low/mid rise density, with some taller towers added into the mix.
I love the functional, value-neutral (or at least value-lite) approach this duo has to urban design, so I really appreciate the suggested reading that may likely helped inform this thoughtful approach.
I think his view make sense in the context of being from Denmark where the population is moderately sized (nearly 6 million) but live in somewhat dense cities or villages that are fairly compact and walkable. Alongside that Denmark has above average sized housing, where the average house is 1475 sq ft. I think its an admirable goal to have housing be reasonably hunan scaled and make sense to be comfortable and not feel intimidating. But i know plenty of people who love tall buildings and feel like it gives them a sense of privacy and comfort.
10:24 "[It wasn't] a scientific process or objective conclusion. [...] It was a stylistic preference" This statement is SO important! There is so much in architecture and urban planning which are just assertions based on nothing but ideology, philosophizing, and speculation. CIAM being one of the greatest offenders. And we see what happens when ideas not objectively tested against reality are implemented: Brasilia, Bijlmer, etc.
I kinda think Gehl was calling to the fact that below 5 stories allows for a personal connection to the activity outside at street level, making living feel more lively without being overwhelming. This would mean not just talking, but seeing what goes on at street level, allowing inhabitants to feel more connected. Regardless, there are other reasons I disagree. For Instance: 1. They incentivize corporate landlords instead of local ones due to their extreme prices to build and operate, causing higher rent. 2. By making people feel more locally connected to the ground level, it statistically makes people want streets to be cleaner and for there to be less crime. 3. They make the environment uninviting for the people at ground level on the streets, and make the lives of those within the skyscraper less lively. 4. They make it way too inefficient to practically build beautiful architecture, causing every skyscraper churned out to be boring glass cubes. 5. (ONE THAT MOST PEOPLE DON'T TALK ABOUT) They're insanely energy inefficient.
I appreciate how you guys take economics of urbanism into consideration in most of your videos. Sometimes other channels go a little too far into the ideal world and obsess over perfection which lets be real isnt feasible. We need to build off what we have today and there is so much room for improvement.
Is there a tangible difference between shade given by trees vs shade given by buildings? There’s a picture somewhere of protesters opposing tall buildings for “light access,” but they’re all clustered on the shaded side of the street. Even the most extreme building shadows do not plunge the city into darkness.
Even if that's an issue, you can offset it with setbacks a la "podium towers". Base of the building faces the sidewalk, but some upper stories are stepped in, allowing more light to the street.
Jan clearly hasn’t been in Valencia. The literal central square there has 12-story buildings, which integrate so well that I was genuinely surprised when I counted up to 12. I agree that above a certain level it becomes difficult to actually move around the building, and that is quite important, but that definitely happens way above 5 stories.
This drove me nuts when I read his book recently, and this is infuriating when there are numerous cities where five stories clearly won't cut it, or even get clsoe to doing so.
There's a paradox. The shorter buildings get, the easier it is to talk to someone passing by; but the shorter they get, the less dense housing becomes, and people dont walk much in low density space.
I think you have missed a major part of the issue (though you mention it, the topic deserves more attention). What you're missing is that in the absence of TRANSIT then 3-5 stories is ideal. We already have places for tall buildings and they will go perfectly well in the transit-served places which already exist. The pressing problem of our time is how to create the smaller scale walkable cities that would otherwise lose out to SPRAWL. And that missing part the equation is the 3-5 story building. Nobody is saying NYC can't handle more towers. They have transit. We're talking about creating walkable cores that don't require the installation of subterranean subway systems, but could be served by walkable neighborhoods and surface-level transit options. When you try to stick tall buildings in these areas you have a massive issue in that THESE TALL BUILDINGS REQUIRE EITHER TRANSIT (ABSENT IN AMERICA) OR A HIGHWAY/STROAD to service them. So without a subway present, the tall buildings ruin the neighborhood from a walkable standpoint. I really wish you would show some examples of how tall buildings have created terrible places (Houston/Dallas/anywhere else in America). Nice channel otherwise.
Bro, as a Russian, does not agree with the main message of the video. We have gone exactly this way: from areas of cozy five-story buildings to high-rise residential complexes. The population density in five-story buildings is sufficient to provide various services and transport. Areas with nine-story buildings also look good. There is a lot of green space (trees, bushes), public infrastructure, shops, etc. And, I think, one of the best (maybe the best) metro in the world, BTW. But modern high-rise residential buildings (15+ floors, united in a mirodistrict) in Russia are often called something like anthills for people. And this is not a compliment. Because the developers in them are guided by the same idea as the author of the video: more people per square meter of land! Minimum landscaping (tress, etc), minimum public areas. Parking lots and concrete. P.S. Sorry for my broken English.
YOU GUYS ROCK! I had been persuaded about 5 stories because Chris Alexander and Paris fall into the Gehl camp as well. Plus, how could I disagree with Gehl? You have turned me around. I do think that the new type wooden construction should be preferred and possibly mandated for a greener result. Keep up the good work. Listening to two voices helps me with my ADD as well.
This is absolutely true and too many right wing market fundamentalists deny this because they don't care about housing the population as a social utility. However, it's also absolutely true that the progressive activist left makes this impossible to do when you don't enforce crime and you allow tens of millions of immigrants in the country who will also need shelter...
I love this video because my city halifax has very unique design at least in certain areas that fulfill both these points. There are really tall skyscrapers here that still have the facades of really really old buildings preserving the pedestrian experience while fulfilling demand which is amazing
Thank you for intelligently shining light on this topic. His contribution to the DISCOURSE about building height & scale in context should not be undervalued. However when we overvalue something as gospel (such as parallel parking beside sidewalk eating areas as good for the pedestrian experience in any case), we do a disservice to the discussion about these issues.
I think this conversation should be held in Germany. The country has basically banned highrise buildings, except in a few buisness districs, where they mostly provide office space. Meanwhile Germanys largest cities have massive housing problems and often way to much commuting traffick. Seems to me, that one part of the solution could be to build higher for housing in places like berlin, Munich, Hamburg and other cities.
It seems like the creators of this video were triggered by NIMBY's in some sort of housing or political forum. I have never heard of the guy yet I fully understand and ultimately agree in what he seems to be saying and feel like you guys missed the point and went off on a tangent. He's not an actual dictator tearing up districts insisting that this MUST be the only way to build but that rather it is pretty much the most IDEAL way. From ancient cities to the most visited ones today, this is still relevant; Ancient Rome, Modern Day Tokyo, and the tropical Miami Beach are from completely different eras from one another and yet have this tried and true model which makes them all fabulously livable. NOT bc they are trendy places like the West Village but bc we're human and ultimately its about human scale places. He analyzed it very well.. A dense blanket of 3-5 story buidings will almost always be superior to the Suburb to Skyscrpaer model found in most of North American cities which have both extremes,;too low and too high densities. I'm sorry you guys may have missed the point somehow bc your point is valid too. We do need lots of affordable housing but critiquing the criteria he mentioned is way off mark and practically not relevant. Take an architectural massing study for a building as a reference. The amount of floor space can be spread out differently in a variety of ways and still reach the quota. I think THAT's the meat of the subject at hand for both arguments. As a NYer I get both the appeal and argument about how un-affordable the Village is but bulldozing it to build higher isnt the long term point or solution. Its building that same loveable density and character in undesirable places ,say for example pockets of NJ, where they can then live car-free and not even have to or want to drive into the city to get that experience.. catch the drift? It solves the housing crisis by redistributing the amount of housing needed and uplift that area but also not overwhelming the traditional ones. Then more public transit can be made relevant there etc etc. Thats the real solution. Not some 1,000 story building in the "best" part of town.
Agreeing with you, I thought the same after watching this video. It appears the authors of this channel are not purely urbanism enthusiasts but also have a substantial political agenda intertwined throughout their content. It is seriously unfortunate that they do, because this area needs more unbiased experts, especially in North America, to build a desire in people for a better taste for living standards.
You're missing the bigger picture. His idea of people being obscure over 5 stories of height is important not because you'll always have a conversation with passerbys. Rather such a skyscraper design would make you dehumanise people more, as you see them more as ants running around gathering rice instead of as flesh and blood people like you. You see, hear, and take part in their day to day life to some degree, compared to the total alienation seen in skyscrapers. You can't just pack people like Sardines and forget about them because it's 'economic'. 🙄 If you don't live amongst the plebs, you won't even know what they are.
It's pretty much a fake dilemma people need to choose between affordable, housing bundled to skyscrapers, or homelessness and short buildings. We have skyscrapers and next to them homeless people. If there would be a real wish on the politicians side to stop the homelessness, they could tax the second homes and finance from that money social housing. Also I don't understand why the access to sunlight is heavily ignored in that video. It must be an important topic. Finally the more distributed town planning could lift the necessity of the metro lines as the stations by themselves create the requirement in the increased density around them.
Wholeheartedly agree until the end (book recommendation). I am modernist (Nothing over ruled 'form follow function'). I don't believe in organic/un-planned being better. If not planning is better, that is because the plan sucks, not the idea of planning. Nothing (nearly) we used and appreciate came from un-planned result, even agriculture.
As someone who has lived in a high-rise before, I'm not too keen to see them become the norm. While I liked and still like the place I used to live, it always led to strong winds in the area. Maintenance and heating of high-rises are costly. Not to mention, if you have a disability, you're screwed if the elevators don't work. Emergency services can't reach you as easily as with a low or midrise building. Plus, the designs give the place a cold appeal. I think that 10 - 12 floors is more than enough for housing, and it is better to move expand city limits well into the suburbs to allow for more space.
The point you are making with your comparison of the Copenhagen and NYC metros is a correct one, but its undercut a little bit because Copenhagen's metro is effectively much larger if you include the S-TOG lines, which I'd argue provide a metro-like service for the city. Still wouldn't be sufficient for a city like NYC but Copenhagen has a lot more than was shown on the map.
Yes. As someone who's worked closely with urban designers (including many I like very much), they can be more or less oblivious to things like, you know, the housing crisis in so many cities, or the climate change implications of limiting density near transit (not to mention the economics of the housing market, etc.).
the thing is, outside of urbanist circles when you talk about high dencity, people only imagine highrise buildings. So it is important to talk about the missing middle. more often than not midrise buildings are the optimal solution between different different demands.
Frequently five stories is all the city and the NIMBYs will allow. The ideal height is pretty much always "as high as legally possible" in any sort of in demand area. If the area is not in high demand, the additional costs per unit above a certain height will kick in-usually above five stories in what may or may not be a coincidence. But in most high demand locations, land costs are greater than extra costs for building high until you get quite high indeed.
I've never lived in more sterile and lonelier places than the 2-3 stories apartment buildings I've recently been living in.. On the contrary, the 6 to 8 floor ones were an amazing way to keep them a little more spaced with little parks in between, keeping also the distance between buildings enough for a good amount of privacy but also having swarms of kids playing out and a lot of neighbours sitting and talking in the front. The thing that makes a place livable is not the 3-5 floors height.
Urban design is very tricky. Yes you have to meet the housing demands but also you need to provide a nice place for people to exist and not hate their life. Some cities went to the extreme on both of those ends. Some urban centers have a problem that too many people want to live there. So you either have to make it unaffordable or turn the city into a concrete jungle to meet the housing demand.
The point of this video is well taken. I would add however that in Nyc for instance, if the suburban areas modernized and built up to a 5 story urban density, more would be gained than building taller buildings in the city center. More work spaces, walkable spaces and affordable housing for sure - not to mention less traffic congestion and pollution. Long Island City, Downtown Brooklyn and even the South Bronx all have built many residential sky scrapers over the past few years, none of which are affordable or encourage human interaction. On the other hand, there are dozens of nearby Long Island, Westchester and New Jersey towns that could accommodate countless people if they built just 5 stories up as opposed to more single family sprawl. I'd imagine those are the areas in question - and if they took a page from places like Carmel Indiana, we'd all be better for it.
I think both types of densification should be allowed and they should happen according to demand. If people want to live in mid-rises in the suburbs, great. If people want to live in high-rises in Manhattan or Brooklyn, that's fine too.
Who honestly lives in a basement suite and has a normal social life? In my city you can't register as residing in a basement, to the chagrin of the moles among us.
You hit the nail on the head there. It's a matter of priorities, isn't it? It's not an arrangement of space for the arrangement's sake; it's to achieve quite simple ends, often. "To be close to stuff", for instance. Nice and close to direct needs. As for the perfection of the medium rise, one counter I could offer (as far as appearances go) is that high rise meets another "natural human need" (maybe) - namely "better appearances from the inside". Appearances from the outside aren't the only thing that matter. But how better? Well it seems to be a very popular human impulse to find a way to the top of something (like a hill, for instance), and to look out from there. I suspect most people like the view from the hilltop better than they like the one from the valley, so it's possible that this is the most comforting one. I also suspect that many of the empty balconies (in the pictures they outvote the balconies in use by quite a long way) are empty because the person behind the curtains prefers privacy when at home, and is not an extrovert wanting to shout friendly extrovert things at passers by. People don't just withdraw from the rest of the world out of hate or whatever. And because I have a little obsession about this, I now imagine taking the low rise building on the opposite side of the street and stacking it upon the other one (just accounting for space usage by "counting on my fingers", you understand? It's not the vandalism it might seem, just a thought experiment). Pick that up and move it there. OK what to do with the ground that opens up? How about having a little Kleingärtenverein running it? Have little gardens there for anyone who wants a little bit of green space to waste time on, within walking distance. Same neighbourhood; more facilities. Hey! That whole road could go. Maybe keep a pedestrian and cycle path near the residences, and make it broader, but push traffic to the road in front of the row you picked up on your sky hook and lifted across to make this place "low-high-rise". The reason I'd not go for making it public space is I've seen such public space, and it tends to become something of a nomansland. Too much "under observation" for use as a park. The park is nice, but it would appear it's not so if "there are people staring at you". Allotments are pretty public spaces, full of little "micro-views" (and full of people you might pause to have a chat to, too, if it's a friendly kind of place), but they're also private enough to ensure fine grained privacy - big hedges for shy people, and low flower beds in front of the nude tanning area for the extroverts. Hey, come into my garden, and take off your clothes! We're barbecuing today! Next door to, "You could come in here, but please knock first. Maybe send a written note like they do in Switzerland". Anyway, just by a small more vertical rearrangement the road is now further away, and everyone who wants one has a garden. If you use vertical growth to save ground space, you can expand the possibilities of a neighbourhood. Make that space you don't waste on paving or buildings well, and you'd have a sociable space where there's plenty of room to hang out with other extroverts in. Hmm ... you know? The resulting building is only 6 storeys, now. That's not very high. Hardly high enough for any of the units to have a View, even. Maybe go fetch the next back to back pair of residences on the other side of the road, too? Stack them up, and now you have a long 12 storey "entry level high rise", and enough space for everyone to have an nice cricket pitch in the green space. Take the road again, and put an anti-noise wall between it and you. More green space, and less rumble. What's to hate about that?
I gotta say, one of the things I miss about living in Montreal is "balconville". I agree with you, tall isn't necessarily bad, but walking or riding through the steel and glass canyons of some of Toronto's newer condo developments feels very dehumanizing. If you're going to do tall, it needs to be done right (as you quite rightly said).
Toronto’s problem is not how tall buildings are but the details at street level. If we had good retail spaces and great details on these buildings and a lot of trees we would vastly improve the experience of people
One point that was not discussed enough is that if you have a walkable city with 5 stories tall houses with all the necessities within a 15 minute walking distance. Then there is no reason to have tall houses around transit hubs because there is a smaller reason for people needing to go somewhere for shopping or free time activities. So instead of having small up- zoned centers you could spread it out over an area and make the entire area desirable.
I just want to take a moment to think about the people in Grindavik Iceland who are losing their homes due to todays volcanic eruption. We argue about what the best housing is, but after today, many of them wont have permanent housing at all. I know thoughts and prayers are quite cliche these days, but sometimes it's the only thing you can do.
Stopping at 4:23 to remark that the RUclips algorithm served me an ad for a oversized pickup and Hobby Lobby. This video doesn't seem like the optimal place to put such ads.
I would argue that one objective metric as to how tall a building should be is how many floors a person is willing to climb. At a certain number of floors, elevators become necessary. If the elevators fail (e.g. power failure), you're stuck climbing down 30 flights of stairs to get out of the building. Nobody will want to climb 30 flights of stairs to get in and out every day. That requires an elevator.
Isn't this something we can leave up to people's own decision making though? If some people want to stay on lower floors out of fear of a power outage, that's fine. But other people might not care (after all, power outages are relatively rare in most big cities) and choose to live up higher.
High rise buildings require emergency power generation by fire code. Fire pump, elevator, emergency lighting, and usually domestic water pumps are all provided with backup power via an on-campus diesel generator. Doesn't mean it's impossible to fail, but there is redundancy in emergency power for that reason. Emergency egress via stairs thankfully is much more accessible than climbing up. I've done a 75 stair climb in about 25 minutes and it was very difficult, I would not want to be walking up more than 5 flights each trip.
@@OhTheUrbanity That means that every high rise must have a freight elevator to facilitate moving heavy furniture and appliances to the 30th floor. It means that they need to design the building to be virtually fire proof. It means they need to ensure that a failure of the elevators is an infinitely small probability. In other words, the building had better be infallible. In a fire or other emergency, 30 flights of stairs would tire anyone out before they get out of the building safely. It still doesn't address the fact that the higher up you live, the longer it takes to ride an elevator. Just going down to check the mail will take much longer (or the mail carrier has to travel up the elevator daily, making mail delivery much slower) with a 30 floor building. An elevator can only go as fast as people can tolerate before they get motion sick. Cities also don't need to be so dense either. There is a huge imbalance between urban and rural density. My opinion is that places like Manhattan are too dense. Meanwhile, small towns are of the opposite extreme. The two really should be brought to a more balanced middle density. There is plenty of land to use, but we use it so poorly. Either too dense or completely under utilized. I think 10 to 15 floors is the ideal maximum if we stop allowing such uneven density. It's not too much to walk in an emergency, nor too much dependence on an elevator. Mixed use zoning is needed badly as well.
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The problem is that tall buildings are costly and usually in high price areas. At least in developing countries, they don't do anything for bettering housing issued, they actually make the situation worse by inflating prices and gentrification. Just look at São Paulo's tall buildings rich neighborhoods, dominated by a very small elite and set apart from the city. It's quite the opposite of a democratic urbanisation.
I mean... Jan Gehl _fundamentally_ is right. Tall buildings are worse for human interaction and a lively quarter and the pedestrian experience. It's just that we don't live in towns of a few thousand people anymore (at least a lot of people don't), so we have to put them somewhere - and Gehl would agree that Urban Sprawl (tm) is not the answer either. As with everything else there isn't an ideal building height, period. But there IS an ideal building height for specific purposes. And all Gehl said is that _for the human interaction_ in the neighborhood, a max of 5 stories is optimal. And I agree with that. For anybody wanting to live in a place where too many other people also want to live - well, you have to be okay with downgrading your experience with single members of that mass in order to FIT that mass. That's just how it goes...
Really well worded and worthwhile video, I feel like people today have pretty much abandoned the concept of nuance in all walks of life, and this is a good example of bringing it back and making it digestable.
This was a good breakdown of pro and con. IF we all lived in a magical place - sure - 5 stories would be optimal. But I live in NYCand these days building 5 stories almost anywhere in the city would be a waste and not serving the public well. And we live in a six story building, the tallest buidling I have ever lived in believe it or not. And this is so much more people-friendly and community oriented that any of the other 7 places I have lived in NYC!!
Honestly though, there is so much wasted space in the outer boroughs that could be developed first. Like why are there strip malls and golf courses in nyc 💀
Maybe I missed it but another argument for shortish buildings is the energy usage of the building per person is at it's optimum ~5 or so stories high. 80 story buildings are much more energy inefficient.
I agree that the idea of an arbitrary limit of 5 stories based on a specific, non scientific, criteria cannot be accepted as a fact but the basic idea is definitely true. High rises have their usefulness and id designed well they can connect to the city and provided a vibrant area, but it won't be a great human scale neighborhood and it will certainly won't be an affordable place for "normal" people. High rises are expensive to build and maintain this requiring a certain level of wealth to live in them. The more affordable high risers tend to deteriorate as the residents do not have the means to maintain them. As for density, many of the densest cities, especially in Europe, have very few (if any) high rises and mostly 8-12 stories buildings with plenty of transport means for all. The problem with your claims is that they are centers on the current North American way of thinking with very few far away stops and the belief that changes are bad and one seat stop is the goal. You also still think of one big CBD one part of the city instead of offices that can spread all over the city and have multiple centers, including in the "suburbs". I live in Barcelona in the central Eixample district that has a density of more than 36,000/km2 and my neighborhood is denser (with about 48,0000/km2) there are plenty of metro stations and buses around but I walk to work, like many others do. Barcelona's density is close to 17,000/km2 and the adjacent suburb of L'Hospitalet de Llobregat is even denser with close to 21,000/km2 and the high rises it has are mostly for offices. More distance suburbs have regional rail lines and regular/express buses, like Sabadell and Terrassa - Both with more than 200,000 residents each and a connection of both the regional/suburban Rodalies trains with more than one station and the FGC suburban train, that was extended as a local underground metro into the city and if someone is a bit far from one of those stations he takes a bus to that station. TOD is nice but it cannot be the only source of travelers to that station, but part of an internal transit system in that area.
Maybe the definition of being able to talk from a balcony is taken to literally as sole argument. What is defining for happiness is that an environment is helpful for people to engage in human interaction. If your apartment or house is designed that it should be natural to greet each other when you meet, then you have a condition established that is important. What made me feel unsafe in living surroundings was when you are totally anonymous . That is not alone a matter of heights but also of widths. I wouldn't want to live in buildings where you have to count to find your place standing before your building.
I think this is an imposition of personal preference onto other people. I really don't care about that and want my home to feel private. If I want to socialize with people in the street, then I will go to the street.
I think the 3-7 storey range is ideal for suburban residential, while higher buildings should be generally reserved for urban centers. However, i think how we classify urban centers is also broken, especially here in Ontario. Toronto has treated Bay Street as the only urban center in the city for far too long, and as a result our entire transit system funnels through Union Station, even for trips that wouldn't need to go through the downtown core. We need to recognize North Etobicoke, Kipling, Humber Bay, Midtown, Scarborough Center, etc, as urban centers in their own right, with all the density and transit infrastructure that should go with that. We're starting to move towards that goal, but as always we're about 30 years behind where we should be, and we have the worst traffic in North America now as a result
I’ve lived in high rises. They’re terrible - disconnect from the neighborhood, constantly broken elevators, and always owned by a faceless corporation.
I've been having this argument for a decade and respectfully disagree. The point about low rise density being fueled by historic preservation which leads to higher prices has always struck me as a misplacement of blame and not the solution to making cities the main way of living again. It's the suburbs that need to increase their density to medium, not the medium density urban areas that need to turn themselves into the extremely high density ones. The world has plenty of high-rise neighborhoods and we have the institutional momentum to build many more, but the same can't be said about medium density urban neighborhoods, which is realistically legislated out of existence from being built new again. Those are what we should be building more of, and dare I say, preserving, because even you admit in this video that they're more pleasant to live in, all other factors equal. This isn't to say high rises can't exist in some places, particularly near transit, but to give a blanket approval of turning liveable 5 story and below neighborhoods into high rise areas is something that isn't helpful. The focus needs to be on densifying existing suburbs, connecting them to transit, and making sure new suburbs are built in a fashion that can be designed easily at a later date. Stop putting the entire onus of housing demand on the best performing neighborhoods and taking away what makes the great! Build new amazing neighborhoods instead. Also, your statement "That's not how geometry works" in response to the suggestion that we have primarily 5 story neighborhoods near transit is a cheap blanket dismissal and simply not tru. There are countless examples of medium density areas supporting quality transit. Rant over lol.
One aspect of your argument really jumps out at me. Now that you have helped me "accept" tall buildings, I am starting to recognize their advantages much better. They are the most potent way we have for creating smart density, which I passionately believe in. They can also enable people to have convenient proximity to things with out being so car dependent, provided they are accompanied by plentiful mixed use and transport options. The fact that living high provides privacy and quiet is not to be discounted either along with dramatic views. I would point out that tall buildings have a huge responsibility to avoid the pitfalls of drabness and sterility which so much modern building activity is afflicted with. How about affordable high rises so that they don't end up as low use places for the wealthy also? 🙂🙂🙂🙂
God I love that this channel isn't afraid to puncture the egos of elitists and remembers that cities are for people and that letting people live in them is the bedrock of urbanism.
I think it's good to critique and examine his work but i wouldn't call Gehl Elitist. If you go to a lecture of his you will see that (while his english isnt great) he has a great sense of humor and doesn't take himself too seriously. His entire life work builds upon him and his wife going against the popular ideas of the architectural elite in the 60's-70's modernist times and doing their own thing
My favorite thing about this channel is that it does not take the approach of Thing A always bad and Thing B always good. I had to stop watching a lot of urbanism channels for this reason because the level of abstraction to make their premise work is too much. Population size, land area, geology, climate, politics, and homogeneity matter.
![Six Hundred Strike [EPIC: The Musical] Full Animatic](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/zov6NXIAuow/mqdefault.jpg)
I don’t understand why the conclusion he gives is “make buildings short” rather than “make the first five floors of a building more livable”? When I visited Mexico City I was in love with how, instead of fully bringing down old houses, they would repurpose them to be the first few floors of towers, so at street level you are still seeing friendlier architecture while also allowing for higher density. It’s another reason why I always like buildings that have supermarkets and cafes and restaurants (so multi function) - they allow for those interactions
🥰Vertical mixed-use is really good IMO. You get more smaller shops, instead of needing to always go to a big-box store. (It's even better with Vancouver style buildings, where the high-rises are narrower on top of the lower commercial portions that are wide and right up to the side-walk, for foot-traffic.) I'd even take horizontal mixed-use, but my city's still almost totally separated. Newer areas have some limited amounts of this, but it'll be a few decades before this place is half-way walkable or bike-able.😅
That's not his conclusion though, this is what the video's author interpreted. The book is generally about what feels nice and why, without setting out to describe some strict rules for a humanistic utopia. So more of a guideline, where conditions permit it.
This is such a good point :) Because in the video they keep talking about people actually chatting and that's not the point. The point is that it feels sooo much friendlier and more welcoming to walk by buildings with fewer stories than by skyscrapers. But much of that can be compensated for by deliberately designing inviting first and second floors that you can interact with.
@@PTS1337Also a good point :)
Urban designers like to think they're also expert psychologists and biologists. But humans aren't building materials.
In one of the European cities where I used to live, there was a street in the city's centre that was dark, cold, gloomy, always windy and dominated by a tall concrete building block from the 1950s.
What the city did then was to make the street less wide by removing space for cars. That allowed for the construction of narrow, three to five story high fronts that were put directly in front of the brutalist monstrosity.
The end result was a really nice alleyway filled with small shops that connected the pedestrian zone on one side with a school, theater and public park on the other side.
What city was that? I'm really interested in seeing examples of this because I also think it's kinda an optimal solution. High rises that are set back a bit with lively streetfronts
@@Nicolas-zw2hv Bergstraße in Oldenburg - the new front buildings are actually smaller than I remembered, just two stories tall.
totally different but in Vancouver Canada there are a LOT of "podium towers" with a 3 story "podium" that is street facing and the towers rise from the podium and are set back from the street giving residents a "private" park on top of the podium around the towers and the podium is ether retail space OR city homes / podium homes as they are referred to and are 2 - 3 story tall 3+ bedroom units
Yeah. Keep them short. Tall is horrid
@@Wondwindare you helping the homeless where you live?
As someone who's lived on the first floor of a three story building in an exclusively residential development for the last 15 years, I can tell you that ain't no picnic either. I feel super disconnected from my neighborhood, because I always have to keep my blinds closed, or else everyone walking by is just looking at me doing whatever I'm doing. Heck, the windows on one side of my place are at the exact level of the parking spots there, so whenever anyone pulls in or out, their headlights blaze through my dining room. It sucks. I think it would be much better if we had good exterior design, like parklets, any retail/restaurants at all, or just somewhere to interact with neighbors who were doing anything other than going from their front doors to their cars. I'd be fine living on the 6th or 8th floor, if I could leave my building and be in a vibrant neighborhood of shops, parks, and people.
I also agree with you about the weird idea of balconies, or what have you, keeping you connected to the neighborhood. We have much longer seasons of "good" weather here in the Washington DC region, and I almost never see anyone out on their balconies or patios. I walk through my development frequently, and if I've seen 10 people out on their porch/balcony in the last 15 years, I'd be shocked. There's a really nice new development I pass by all the time that has gorgeous, spacious balconies, and in the 4 years since it was completed, I think I've seen maybe two people sitting outside, and they weren't chatting with anyone on the ground.
I think balcony or the lack of is not the main cause. In my hometown in Turkey, there was a time people used their balconies to talk to neighbors. Now people figured out that they can put windows and use it as additional storage room. Maybe people are simply interacting less with neighbors (as both adults spend the entire day working 9-6 jobs) or neighborhoods are less uniform so you don’t want to interact with people. I think we should address other issues before we talk about 3-5 level limits or balconies.
I live on the third floor of a 3 story. There's a parking lot across the street and headlights come in my window still because everything is ultra bright high aimed headlight these days. And they can still see across my living and dining rooms through the sliding door for my balcony.
I'm too close to a 4 lane road for my balcony to be very inviting because of road noise. But that's the style of almost all apartments in my smaller city as they're on the outside of suburban type blocks. About the only plus is there is usually a very close bus stop?
Hey I live on the first floor and was put off by this for a while. I solved the issue with a simple 2-way film that works so long as there's more light on the outside than in. It was cheap and a simple fix. Now I comfortably keep blinds open all day. I wouldn't want to keep them open due to the noise anyways so it's been a great solution for me!
@@conniesometimes That's a genius idea!
I actually like balconies... they aren't essential, but when my dad lived in an apartment, I actually would spend a lot of time in the balcony. I especially liked having my morning coffee in the balcony.
Honestly, I think tall buildings are fine. I do prefer however any buildings from 1-10 stories. But having some high rise stuff to prioritize space in the downtown areas is perfectly fine.
Nothing wrong with personal preferences! Like we mentioned, we appreciate many aspects of living closer to the ground too.
I don't really like 1 storey buildings. Even single family homes can be 2 storeys tall.
Higher than 1 storey can give more a sense of enclosed streets. Proper mixed use buildings must also be multi storey in my opinion.
@@dylanc9174 I don’t really love one story buildings either but sometimes with a historical area there are some strange buildings that also look cool so I accept it sometimes.
I once lived on the 2nd floor of a 26-story building in FiDi (downtown Manhattan). Had no direct sunlight and I interacted with the rats from my window. Then I moved to a higher floor (prefer hanging out with birds and airplanes rather than rats).
Sometimes some is not enough and having them as concentrated as cheap housing does not work well. So you have to distribute them with only a few exception because of landmark designation or safety restrictions.
I like the fact that you constantly emphasize that ensuring enough people have acesss to housing is more important than the design principles. Although, I do wish that modern developers made tall buildings nicer.
The housing argument only works in theory, though. Usually landlords in highrise buildings make you pay for the view and having to operate one or more elevators is costly as well. In general, highrise buildings are proportionally more expensive to build than the same amount of housing spread over several smaller buildings.
I agree with the premise, but taller buildings are not stick built; they are constructed of wildly expensive steel beams. This quickly leads to the building being a “luxury” building with higher rents to recoup that cost. It’s not just that they have elevators. It’s literally everything and every component. Once they cross the steel beam threshold the entire project becomes essentially a commercial grade project, meaning high rent.
I’m not opposed to high rent high rises, it’s just what they are.
Low rent means low building.
Sounds like the topic for a different video.
I think he forgot to mention that the 5 story rules is not about design per say. It's more about the most COST effectiveness of the construction due to the fact that they could use normal foundation they usually use on normal residential houses.
5 story building could also use residential grade lifts instead of the heavy commercial Lifts that costs more to buy and maintained.
Also taller building would require more complex design and the maintenance costs for them would be significantly higher.
It's a lower cost solution that could be fast cheap and maintain easily especially when the city got more lands.
The problem is, high rises aren't going to give you affordable housing due to the fact of physics, and the deeper you need to go to for the foundation. Then the logistics of sewage.
This results in less floor space actually available in the building the higher up in it you go(due to the space the plumbing needs to take); it increases the cost to build due to the excavation for the foundation. And then the pluming is expensive as hell to maintain.
It's why sky scrapers tend to be office space, or luxury condos because that's the only group who can afford to live in them, or use them as work space. They are useful in the sense that it may get the rich out of housing that lower earners can afford, but it isn't a solution for affordable housing.
I vastly prefer varied environments over uniform ones. A mix of building heights is ideal. I love visiting cities with high rises, and sleepy little villages. If any one specific level of density overtakes every other and every city/town/village looks samey, that is my idea of hell, no matter how nice the overall design is. This is part of why American suburbia is so abhorrent to me.
To me, the goal of having all buildings looking the same is unimportant to me, as is the goal of varied environments. I do not care what anything LOOKS like.
Jane Jacobs has a whole chapter on the importance of a diversity of building types/ages in a neighborhood in Death and Life of American Cities. The idea is that different types of building are better for different purposes (in terms of rent prices, aesthetics, etc.) so a healthy neighborhood has a mix of these. Otherwise the neighborhood can't fulfill all the needs of it's residents. Also it just looks better.
For me it's the opposite. I like to either have a pleasant European city or a full-on skyline like in Asia or America that inspire awe. some horror examples exist in Europe where they tried to mix both at the same time, such as Brussels (which gave the name to the idea of Brusselization).
Some cities find a middle ground by keeping their center a pleasant density and skyscrapers in one area like La Defense in Paris. They managed to have their cake and eat it too, the smart bastards
Meanwhile some expatriates have found Singapore's suburbs claustrophobic e.g. the suburb of Tampines has 600+ apartment towers that're usually betweem 11-17 floors tall spread over 12km^2 that house ~300000 people. HK's towers are even taller but don't sprawl across as large an area I think probably as it's more constrained by mountains
Glad this channel doesn't just forget that housing everyone is the first and primary goal of any urban planner.
That isn't true. Perhaps it SHOULD be but it isn't a priority here in North America despite official rhetoric.
I feel like a lot of other urbanist youtubers ignore this and choose to focus on aesthetic elements instead. It comes across as totally out of touch and oblivious to actual, material issues that could be helped through urbanism.
This tends to be outside urbanist communities, but I often hear people say that they'd rather be homeless than live in a brutalist apartment.
Personally I think the idea of everyone having at least an ugly home is a better standard than most people living on the street in a sleeping bag with no toilet
Is it though? If people designed cities like that every city would look like Hong Kong or Shanghai.
@@yemmohater2796those are not the only two alternative though. Those are the two extremes. I hate high rise towers and would rather not live in one. You can solve housing problems by building more low rise apartments and better transit. Building towers scars the city for generations to come.
When I lived in Waikiki I lived on the 30th floor of a 44 storey building. I could keep my blinds open all the time, didn't have to listen to street noise, had fantastic ocean views, and had a great overview of everything in the neighbourhood. The downside was that I lived in an illegally partitioned apartment without a kitchen, and there was a HOA that all the tenants couldn't participate in (just for the landlord owners). Eventually there was a bedbug problem in the entire building that did not get addressed because everyone dealing with it was a tenant and the landlords were doing nothing (they would all have to work together at once to rid the building of it). The problem was not due to it being a tall building, it was due to how the building was owned and managed.
that sounds like a dream (the first part), i love high rises and ocean views. How much was rent?
Oh skyscrapers are great for the people who live in them, they are however not great for the people living around themm
As an engineer my only issue with height has been how much space you need to sacrifice for stairwells and lift shafts the higher up you go. These are necessary to deal with resident traffic and emergency service access. They reduce floor space and add cost to the point where then can make high rise buildings less economically viable. It’s why optimum heights from a fire safety point of view tend to be 6-9 stories. Beyond that, you have to start adding more width to stairwells, bigger/more lifts etc.
That said I wouldn’t sacrifice a potential housing solution due to a single assumed design principle. Sacrificing housing need because of an assumed community benefit is like throwing the baby out with the bath water.
Economic considerations should be left for developers to decide. If its not economical to build at height it won't be built. But considering that land acquisition is a huge cost for developers in most high-rent cities, it can definitely pencil out for developers to build high so as to get the most number of units out of the land, even if there are increasing per-unit costs as you build higher.
Exactly. I agree, though in some countries developers can be city/local authorities and therefore may have different motivations beyond profit. Plus there are building codes which will place design constraints on buildings. But of course a private developer will always choose to maximise profits.
that seems to assume smaller lot sizes. different economies of scale are possible with larger lots. maybe even an elevator solution that doesn't have the economics of single track commuter rail.
@@ThirdWigginthis is exactly why we have so many vacant apartments in NYC’s luxury towers. The astronomical cost of building high-rise residential towers forces developers to cater to wealthier tenants, pricing out middle and lower income people, and thereby defeating the purpose of building these towers to solve the housing shortage.
It’s more economically feasible and sensible to build 6-10 story residential buildings; they are quicker to build, require less materials to construct, and consume far less energy to heat and cool. Adam Something has a great video about the many pitfalls of skyscraper construction vs smaller residential buildings.
@@Guavauava I think the reason so many US urbanists love towers is because they haven't seen what you can do with low / mid rise towers and actually good public transport.
I live in a 2-story townhouse. People don't talk to one-another from balconies or windows. Heck, they barely talk to one-another at all, and if they do it is usually at ground level on the walking paths. Honestly I think I'd prefer living in a high rise again, if only for the concrete and steel construction and ideally better noise dampening. Not being smoked out by my neighbours 24/7 would also be a plus. :)
Exactly. Urbanised people nowadays communicate through gadgets regardless of the tallness of the building they live in
Depends on the construction though. I lived in a concrete building once and I was being smoked out AND noised out by my neighbours.
As a Vancouverite, I really like design of the point tower, as it's the ultimate best of both worlds. With a podium of only 2-6 stories facing the street, they help to create a bright, vibrant local neighborhood with local shops, services, and townhomes. And with up to 60 stories stepped back far enough from the street that they look distant (towers are usually around 5-10 meters from the edge of the podium) they help to solve housing and densify transit hubs. This also creates more private spaces within a dense city for those who seek it - as separation and privacy is part of the allure of a high condo, just like it is for a single family home. The mile-high club will still be forced to interact with ground level, which creates a peaceful coexistence between lifestyles within a shared urban fabric. In the end, the point tower provides the perfect compromise between Jan Gehl type idealists and economic realists. It's the ultimate solution for building a downtown with plentiful housing, a vibrant streetscape, local small business, and plentiful underground parking garages to free up valuable street space for bike lanes and sidewalks.
Judging by this and other comments, the optimal compromise here does seem to be that the first five floors or so of the building are optimized for what Gehl discusses, and then a tower set back a bit further that optimizes for economics, yes, but also privacy, so as to get the best of both worlds.
The five-story maximum building height that you see throughout historic cities, particularly in Europe is due to the technological constraints as well as the limitation of building a multi-story building without elevators. The fact is that you need much thicker load-bearing walls to support a taller building without steel construction. Additionally, people find it harder to walk up more than five stories upstairs to access their apartments or offices.
A) Remembering visiting Sweden and it being dominated by historic 6 storey buildings. 😆
B) The inability to identify people easily when you’re 8+ floors up is good, actually? It gives privacy and anonymity. People like some privacy.
To B) The interesting thing is that people have a heightened need for privacy the higher the density gets. So that is kind of a circular argument. More privacy is good in tall towers because you need more privacy in cities with tall towers. Just ask any resident of a below-10k city if they feel like having enough privacy in their ground floor appartement - and I guarantee that the answer is fundamentally different than from somebody living ground floor in NYC (if that even exists in Manhatten).
@@QemeHIt’s not a circular argument at all? Big cities exist. One tower isn’t going to make the city all that much bigger. So might as well let people have their privacy, if they want it. (Which people definitely do.)
@@QemeH So needing privacy is...bad?
@@dickiewongtk No. Not at all. I'm just saying that you can have privacy in a two story building, if the city isn't as dense.
You only need tall towers for privacy (there are other reasons, obviously, but I just adressed the privacy issue!) if the city consists of tall towers. In a town (or even neighborhood) with just townhouses you can have your privacy on ground or first floor just as well and easily.
Again, there are other considerations for tall towers as stated in the video (mainly too many people wanting to live in a specific spot for external factors like transit or workplaces), but better privacy is not one of them.
@@fernbedek6302 Yeah, nah. ONE tower doesn't change anything in terms of privacy, livability or whatever else. What I was saying is that privacy is only a reason to build tall towers if there already are a bunch of tall towers (i.e. high density).
If the density is lower you don't need tall towers for privacy. That's why it's a circular argument: You only need high buildings for privacy if the city already has tall buildings. That's like saying "we need more guns to protect us from all the guns", it's just not how that works.
My 11th floor apartment provides all day sun light and an expansive view to the horizon as well as a sense of place by keeping well known landmarks in view. There are lots of coming and goings from the 100 apartments enabling interactions. Its damn quiet up here as well, and all these factors well balance the daily grind of the urban worker packed into trains, exposed to traffic hell, laboring indoors.
Yeah, it's all about whats important to you. I feel I've generally got enough friends, family and other loved ones in my life, so while I don't dislike other people, I'm perfectly fine not meeting strangers. So what you describe, a lot of light and a lot of quiet with great views sounds incredible to me. Alone doesn't always equal lonely, since I'm not a fan of loneliness but I love alone-ness that you describe. And yeah, there's people in the stairwell and on your floor you could in theory interact with if you want to see some faces and hear some voices, but you don't have to. I think that's nice.
All the sunlight you enjoy casts a shadow on other buildings and people.
The resources we overconsume and waste cast a shadow of poverty death and extinction over the developing world's citizens and every living system on the planet as well. Your statement is as over broad as mine.
@@trainluvr Sir, this is a Wendy's
While you have a good view now, a shorter building behind yours probably lost part of its view when your tower went up.
Units on higher floors typically cost more, so views of the sun, lake, city landmarks, become more exclusively available to those who can afford to pay for them.
Those on the street level or older shorter buildings suddenly lose their sunlight, landmark views when a new tower goes up beside them.
Views, sunlight, distance from noise all get commercialized.
A great example of the difference between good and bad ground-never design is those pre-fab Soviet blocks.
The identical ones with poor communal spaces were purportedly depressing and unpopular. But the ones made after the 60s are still highly rated today versus brand new developments, because they made each building unique (despite being made of prefab parts) and had large plazas leading to the subway. Many such residents complained about new developments not considering equitable sunlight access or green spaces anymore.
Wat? Houses built before the 60s are very popular housing. Often - elite. It is very green and has all the necessary infrastructure.
Houses from the 60s to 70s called 'Khrushchevki'. Yes, the areas are interesting in terms of landscaping, but the houses themselves are disgusting.
One of my friends grew up in a Moscow "commie block" and loved it, it was insanely convenient. So many people in one space means you have friends nearby, easy access to amenities and stores, transit, etc.
@@Verezart of course, this was an oversimplification. Stalin certainly led the building of grand, golden buildings that were awarded to high ranking people. But I am talking about the initial attempts at the pre-fab buildings, not the bespoke ones made under Stalin’s rule.
I believe, upon refreshing my memory, I was calling Kruschev’s buildings soulless but Brezhnev’s as the “made of prefab panels but still unique” ones. So it seems I had also misremembered Severnoye Chertanovo as being representative of that later Brezhnev run of _mikrorayon,_ rather than as the pinnacle of them.
And a lot of that comment was based on a few articles I read in the Guardian 10 years ago, and mostly on one called “Moscow’s suburbs may look monolithic, but the stories they tell are not”. It seemed I had forgotten that there was some uniqueness in the initial roll-out of _mikrorayon_ from the late-50s early-60s. But the bulk of them were indeed identical “dormitories” as I outlined.
Since I went back to the article I got these ideas from to respond to Verezart, I thought I should quote these few paragraphs (from interviews with residents) here as well:
_What has changed, however, is two things: space, with communal areas now regarded as parcels of land ripe for development, and speculation, with a vibrant property market in the capital generating fortunes for a few and insecurity for most._
_Dominating Severnoye Chertanovo today is a 40-storey monolith called Avenue 77. According to Palmin, this giant apartment block limits light for many residents here for much more than “a few hours in summer”. It tries to break up its enormous grid of standardised flats via a Koolhaas-like “iconic” shape, but nobody could be seriously fooled; this is form following speculation, an image of public space and equality being crushed by speculation._
_In the 1990s, when looking at the apparently interchangeable districts produced by Communism, critics didn’t see, or ignored, the libraries, the childcare centres, the parks and the treatment of housing as a basic and free human right; and instead saw merely those huge, inescapable, interchangeable monoliths - the slabs upon slabs that always strike the casual viewer driving from Moscow’s Domodedovo airport to its centre._
_These critics argued that this monumental uniformity was the greatest possible indictment of the system: a rigid plan that assumed everyone wanted the same thing, while giving them a mass-produced product that few really desired. The assumption was that the free market would result in variety, liveliness and complexity. What actually happened was a property boom that took over Russia’s three or four biggest cities, and a grim decline everywhere else._
I think that 5-6 stories is a good rule of thumb for modestly sized cities. Being able to interact with the street is nice, but I think that the bigger factor is that buildings that are too tall start to discourage you from leaving your apartment or desk because going down to street level starts to become a trip in itself. The other point it has in its favor is that, since it's both politically and practically easier to build than a tower, faster deployment could make up for smaller size in terms of "housing more people". No artsy-fartsy architect mumbo jumbo justification required.
With that being said, there is definitely a point when the need for density in a big city starts to outweigh other factors.
I personally prefer tall buildings, but I grew up in NYC. I never understood the opposition to it
They channel wind and block light. They're also kinda imposing for people who grew up in the country. 4-6 story buildings don't usually have these problems.
@@shrakaDon't speak for this North Floridian.
@@shanekeenaNYC I didn't. I spoke for this Australian and a lot of the people I know.
@@shraka The cost is also important to take into consideration. Skyscrapers are very expensive to build and maintain. The way they look upclose isn't very appealing for most people as well. Tall rectangular boxes of steel and glass just look boring for most folk. Skyscrapers are just impressive because of their height and that's about it.
@@epic8923 Yep. Even most mid rises are more expensive than they're worth, plus they can drive up living expenses in the local area by overloading local infrastructure and gentrifying an area.
There is a practical reason to consider that most buildings should be below 6-7 storeys or so in height though, and it has nothing to do with connection to the street. Above this height (exact figure depends on a lot of local variables including mains water pressure, specific storey height, etc) the per square meter/ per square foot cost of building begins to climb again (having dropped with each extra floor added above the second). This is due to the need to include additional machinery to provide normal services and serviceability at these heights. Now it's not as though it's hard to do this, or even that it's expensive, but it does provide a sort of natural division between mid-rise designs which do not normally require such additional infrastructure and true high rise designs which normally will require it. In short whatever this boundary is for a given area it's not normally worth exceeding it unless you are going to do so by a number of storeys in order to help offset costs, so it creates a logical level to set your local planning laws and definitions around.
Maybe a distinction between high-service and low-service areas is useful here. Say you have a building with lots and lots of small units where occupants need to leave to do everything but sleep and bathe, or ones with people who need to be within a 4 minute walk of a metro station, etc. Those can be taller by a good margin because it may be more expensive total to service a wider area esp with something like quick metro access. Hard to get developers to care about municipal spending but zoning regs could find a way
Also, the crossover point somewhat depends on those (local) regulations. Alternate fire exits, sprinklers, elevators, prohibition of certain building techniques, and so on add costs, but _at which building height_ they start to be required determines where those costs start to appear.
At the heart most of these regulations exist because the associated risk increases with height. There is usually no clean natural cutoff, so yes, there is _some_ room to weight the safety (or accessibility or whatever) from these regulations against the ease of engineering buildings. But you won't be able to stray too far from where other places put these cutoffs.
And secondly, the cost of land also affects the crossover point massively. 6-7 storeys or what have you may be economically ideal in terms of the cost of construction. But in city centers the cost of land can have a much larger impact on the optimal building height than the cost of construction. And in the suburbs you have people congregate who will pay extra for the ability to have a yard, so that the cost of _enclosed_ living space becomes less of a factor (for those who can afford to pay extra for the "luxury" of having a yard).
@@planefan082 That distinction may be more influential than you may realize. Retail for example is on the ground floor (or at most 3 or 4 floors up) because it just gets prohibitively expensive to deliver the goods to sell up to higher levels. That and the increased strain on elevators (or then possibly escalators) from patrons who stay for only 30 minutes or so.
That depends on the cost of the land. The more expensive the land, the more you gain by dividing it by a higher number of storeys.
"the per square meter/ per square foot cost of building begins to climb again"
In high-demand areas the extra housing or office space might still be worth the extra cost.
Height can also be beautiful! I love Calgary’s skyline! And some people might enjoy living on a higher floor. Thanks for a great nuanced look at height!
And you're not alone in that! It's extremely common for people to enjoy the look of an impressive skyline. Tourists look for exactly these kinds of views all the time. It's strange that this all gets forgotten when people talk about tall buildings being inherently bad.
Another big advantage to high rises is actually the excavations required, that underground space can be very useful, it allows things like parking and utility infrastructure to be hidden and also provides space for other services, there's even a residential high rise in Vancouver that managed to fit a full sized Costco store in the basement...
What's wrong with being at bird-level? Lateral views of geese and crows is pretty fun.
I love my concrete box in the sky. It fits a lot of good points that you brought up, like proximity to transit. I also love how much of the landscape and sky I can see. And I'm a bit of a recluse so greeting people from my balcony is not a priority for me. But I also recognize that a concrete box in the sky is not the right choice for everyone.
Another argument for high-rises: If you want a lively street life you need to have more people, to inhabit the street and patronize businesses. High rises allow for a higher population density. Seems absurd to care more about where people are when they are at home (i.e. being antisocial) than where they are when they step out their front door.
Those high rises have common areas where residents can hang out together. Or sometimes there are enough families with kids, they even have a playground indoors. I also think it can be quite social.
I’d to like experience this at least once 😭
When I was on the 14th floor, it was fun catching a flock of geese go by, UNDER my elevation. I moved to an even more dense area of my city, but chose a lower floor (5th) but now the office building (parking garage of it actually) looks straight into my place, I feel pretty visible from the street with my shades up whereas my old higher place didn't have that issue, I no longer have a view across the city and of the mountains, and the parking garages nearby have buzzers that go off constantly to warn pedestrians of cars coming out across the sidewalk that I can hear (along with all the other car/truck/bus noises). (Cars ruin cities.) I picked a lower floor so that I could more easily take the stairs (down at least) and spend less time on the elevator including stopping for other people :) since my old place had a lot of elevator problems (one of the main reasons I moved).
@@drivers99 Ayy, 14th is my floor! I used to live on the third floor and yeah, I always felt a bit visible. There was another apartment building across the back parking lot, and the pine trees didn't provide enough of a screen to make me feel comfortable.
I can still hear traffic noise (Yes! Cars ruin cities!) unless my windows are closed *and* I'm wearing my noise cancelling headphones. And there's beepy trucks doing deliveries a few times per day that I can hear no matter what. It would probably be a lot worse if I was lower down.
I think the difference between Greenwich Village and Midtown is that one feels like a neighborhood and one feels like a business/tourist district.
But the Upper East Side and the Upper West Side have lots of tall buildings and certainly feel like residential neighborhoods.
I do think there's a tendency for taller mixed-use buildings to have larger/fewer businesses on the ground floor compared to older 3-4 story buildings. An example would be the newer 8-10 story buildings going up all along 4th Avenue in Brooklyn, which seem to have at most a single ground floor business in buildings that span half a block or more. Only certain kinds of businesses can afford to rent that much space in Brooklyn, so you mostly only see things like medical practices and real estate offices, making for a not very attractive streetscape. Compare this to 5th Avenue one block over, which is mostly older 3-4 story buildings, and has much narrower storefronts housing a wide variety of restaurants, coffee shops, bars, clothing and specialty stores, etc.
I don't think this has to be inherently the case for tall buildings, just an observation.
@@ThreeRunHomer you’re right, they definitely do feel like neighborhoods as well.
After living in NYC for 15 years, I appreciate pragmatism in urban design over theory/principles that don’t do well when they meet reality.
after living in russia for 15 years you will hate pragmatism
I always support whatever is the max density that I think has a real chance of getting built due to political will.
Since most of LA is currently SFH sprawl, Im A-ok with supporting several 5 story apartment/condo buildings. Unfortunately, these areas just simply won’t be able to get a 10+ story building across the finish line :-(
But there are some places in LA which are already jam packed with 5 story buildings and have high capacity transit options within walking distance. In those situations I’m fully behind building taller buildings which can house more people.
And I’m fully confident that the areas where we’re currently building 5 story buildings will be having 10 story buildings built in 20ish years if we continue on our current path.
Not to mention DTLA could triple the number of skyscrapers and only get better. I've never understood the angst against skyscrapers. I think skyscrapers in DTLA only makes the region better.
Having parts of the city that feel isolated but are in fact close is a very good thing. Being able to duck into an alley, wander into a park, or climb/ride up out of the hustle and bustle and be alone is a good thing. Driving 20 minutes to the suburbs to get peace and quiet isn't as good as riding an elevator 2 minutes up to achieve the same.
Why couldn't you just walk around a corner to a quiet square or park? Why do you need an energy intensive elevator?
@@shraka 5 floor apartment buildings usually have elevators too though. People with disabilities exist and deserve the ability to access homes, and moving heavy objects up multiple floors of stairs is hell.
Elevators don't actually require much power, especially if they are done with a counterweight which is common in tall buildings. If I can get the feeling of peace and quiet and distance by riding an elevator (all electric, only lifting my weight plus overcoming friction), that will be far less energy consumption than even riding a bus out to the suburbs.
I don't just want quiet places that are sometimes unoccupied like parks and other public spaces (those should exist of course), I want a place that is reliably quiet where I can disconnect. Especially with as many cars are on our streets, living within shouting distance of the surface in a dense area is not something I want.
And increasing density above what can be done with 5 story buildings has other benefits too, it makes public services like transit and trash pickup more efficient, it makes utilities more efficient, and it enables more businesses to be viable within walking distance without having to accommodate parking.
Those benefits far outweigh the energy consumption of any sensible elevator. We should have enough high rise residences to accommodate everyone who wants one, and I would like one. @@shraka
@@cordcorcese2448 What's that got to do with my comment? Though, obviously lower buildings will have a higher percentage of the residents taking the stairs.
@@TheReykjavik Umm, not from what I've seen. Older elevators use quite a bit more power than a car over the same distance in the real world. Trams and trains are far more efficient.
But again why not just go to a quiet park or square? Did they not build them in your city? Maybe your city just sucks?
And no above 5 stories doesn't necessarily increase transit efficiency. Go run some numbers on pax per hour and catchment areas. Even just 4 story buildings can completely overwhelm a very sophisticated transit system.
As an architect, I would say that it "always" comes down to design. Buildings of any size or height can enhance or be a detriment to a community, at both the small scale of the immediate community and the large scale of the urban fabric. Whether using the model that rings a tower with townhomes (I saw a lot of this when I visited Vancouver) or follows the old "main street" model of retail/restaurant underneath the residences, there's plenty of opportunity to entice people to the public realm. And really that is the thing: a 3 story building where the surroundings are car-infested roadways isn't going to have any community feel, no matter how many balconies or etc you put on it. A pedestrian-first design will get people out and about and create an environment that will have people meet and greet each other and create a strong connection to the place, even if the buildings themselves are 30 stories tall. Great video!
Toronto is the poster child for having tall buildings and a lively streetscape, you just have to force developments to include retail at ground level. The right amount of elevators is key though, something the city has yet to mandate.
I lived on the 15th floor for couple of years and totally loved it - beautiful views and it was actually very quiet. I socialized in coffee shops and restaurants nearby, not on the balcony.
I guess you had those views, because you were NOT surrounded by higher buildings? See - have a WHOLE district, where every house was +15 floors would in resullt exactly 0 views for you. BUT having a whole district of 3 floor houses and your house is the only one towering above them ... welll ... congratulations!
Also a 20 storey building still has the first 5 floors. You can still have those interactions lol. Great video
20 floors need to have an elevator and will make the cost higher for average people
@@ravanpee1325 20 floor reduces other costs, by spreading land cost across more people. Which effect is bigger will depend on local land values and such, and should be up to the developer to decide, not zoning codes.
@@mindstalk The costs go up exponentially prettey soon. A 20 story building has way stricter regulations on litterally everything. If a single family home collapses during an earthquake nobody bats an eye, a 20 story building with hundreds of people in it? Yeah, that needs way stricter regulations. You know how even big semi trucks are at risk of tipping over in storms? Do you know what kind of loads a 20 story building has to endure with every storm? And of course the elefant in the room: Fire. The moment the fire department is unable to evacuate a building quickly and safely with the help of fire trucks, fire codes go ballistic, since the building needs to be able to contain the fire while keeping its inhabitants safe.
I live in europe, here you could basically build almost whatever, wherever with much less restrictive building codes (building type wise) and still sky scrapers (or at least buildings anywhere near the local height limits) are far and few between. And those that exist are corperate buildings or luxury housing. If building high would be so affordable and profitable, why are buildings as low as they are here? Building high only makes sense in places like Hong Kong, where surronded by mountains and oceans there is no space to go anywhere but up. Not because ervery last bit of reasonable land is wasted by single family homes.
The issue at the end of the day is that there is very little being done to keep a balance between the amount of work places and living spaces. The moment people have issues finding a decent place to live at a reasonable distance to their work, prices go up and quality of life down. Either you need to spend a monumental ammount on living where you need to be or you have to deal with a soul sucking commute and high mobility expenses. This is caused by for example sky scrapers not solved by them.
@@ravanpee1325 Let the developers build, and let them try to find customers.
We don't forbid certain kinds of shoes, because some bureaucrat thinks they would be more expensive for the average customer.
@@ravanpee1325 people also really really hate having to take the stairs to get to the 4th or 5th floor. do you want to move furniture in and out, up and down 5 flights of stairs?
if Asia follows the European 5 story and narrow streets model for our cities, we'd completely cover every single inch of flat plains suitable for city building, mind you, the same airable land critical for agriculture. the struggle for efficient housing, privacy in a hugely mobile and metropolitan environment, greenspace, weather resilience and sanitation are greatly important agendas aside from the topic of urban design, imo urbanism should also cover these topics
A fixed 5 story building is arbitrary but most of the densest cities are not in Asia but, indeed, in Europe - and this is without high rise buildings. Apart from the Philippines, which has the highest number of cities with very high density comes Europe with France, Belgium, Spain and Greece (those have multiple cities). India has 3 cities, Bangladesh 2, Indonesia 2and Nepal, Sri Lanka, South Korea and Japan have one, some are in the lower part of the list.
The most famous one is Paris, that has a height limit of 12 stories (or 37m) with one tower that slipped in the short period when restrictions were lifted and the people hated it so much (and still do) that restrictions were reinstated, and before someone mentiones La Défense, where you can find quite a few high rises, is not part of the city of Paris.
With this restriction they have a density of more than 21,000/km2.
Well you can look at Japan. Tokyo is the biggest urban area in the world. And it’s mostly low rise buildings. It’s no Hong Kong or Shanghai. Also Asia is such a broad region. Some countries have huge populations and some less populated.
@@AL5520 "cities" have very arbitrary sizes and borders and typically include lots of green space. The densest neighborhoods are all high rise blocks, except for the poorest countries that can't afford them.
Dude you have demographic crisis. The space you save by building towers you waste on utilities around it. Let's say Barcelona is better of than any Chinese city.
You make a good point, but we should analyze why Asian cities are so populated and dense? Is that something that was artificially done? Wouldn’t it better if there was global freedom of movement so people in those cities can move to Gehls ideal cities that are accessible everywhere? As well as having access to good contraceptions and abortions, which reduces overpopulation?
I live close to the 60th parallel and for a large portion of the year the sun is pretty low in the sky. I think this sets a natural height limit for buildings in northern cities to avoid streets feeling too dark. IMO this maxes out at around 8-10 stories, which is what you tend to see in central Stockholm and Helsinki for example.
Finally someone who thinks about natural light
Reykjavik famously has butt-ugly white-painted buildings across the city for the same reason. I'm sure there's a hard and fast aesthetic rule against plastering white paint on concrete buildings, but it quite literally saves lives and sickness by mitigating SAD for ~200.000 Icelanders.
My sister is in the process of worldbuilding a solarpunk fantasy setting, and was asking me what my opinion is on optimal building height, since I'm always going on about transit and urban design. I kinda waffled on it a little bit, but ultimately said basically what's in this video, although definitely not as clearly as I was speaking off the cuff at the time. Don't think I said anything as succinct as "they should be as tall as they need to be," but that was I think the ultimate takeaway.
I actually visited her 15th floor Vancouver apartment recently, and I felt way more connected to the city while there than I do in my Bay Area house that I share with four other people.
Singapore might be a good real life example to draw solarpunk inspiration from.
In my experience, high rises are perfectly fine. And for what it’s worth, people in those 5-story buildings with balconies will never experience bumping into people in the elevator or the club room or the rooftop pool, so it really is a bit of a trade-off either way.
But they are able to pay the rent, because elevator will increase the side cost
@@ravanpee1325 Or they won't be able to pay the rent, because the short building leaves them paying a lot for land value.
@@mindstalk You have single homes with crape standard everywhere..
Born and raised in 2-5 stories soviet stalin era hood.
It was amazing experience, everything was very cozy and green and blocks were planned in a way I had access to everything I need in 5 minutes, kindergarden, school, hospital, gym, shops and services, transpiration. The hood was drowned in greenery and every block had it's own charm. First floor was dedicated mostly to shops or had a small garden to protect you from peopl eyes.
On the downside every place I have ever lived since is a living nightmare of hour long commutes, too dark or lack of shade, wind, to huge empty spaces or lack of any space. Terrible block planning and terrible apartment planning's. That disconnection brought me to urbanism and understanding that stalin era hoods where way ahead of it's time.
I wish someone would adjust take those plans modernize a bit and bring back to life.
I think part of the problem is that oftentimes highrises don't mesh well with the street-scape. Many modern highrises are ugly glass and steel boxes, which would honestly be fine, but when you're at the street level, there's nothing for a pedestrian to interact with. It's just glass and steel. There are no shops, or restaurants, and if it's residential-only, there's often a guard or a locked door, which I can understand for security purposes, but it still limits how the building can be experienced for someone walking on the street. Ultimately, this is only a problem if too many streets or blocks are like this, which many downtowns in the US are.
Midrises are generally not beautiful either nowadays. This is more of a complaint about postwar architecture being of low quality.
@@MatthewGraham027 Yes, very true. The glass and steel box design philosophy is just uninspired and honestly pretty depressing. When you consider that part of the design philosophy was that it "deconstructed" a building's facade, no wonder it looks soulless and boring.
@@jamalgibson8139The tower in the park site plan was great for its time, when folks needed tons of housing right away. Now, I get the sense people need almost a park in the tower plan, something like Taino Towers in New York. It has both needs settled; Tons of community functions in the first few floors that can be interacted with from the street, but floors on top of floors of good housing above in a high rise function.
jamal, as the video mentioned, that's a design issue not a height issue. You can have dead low-rise buildings, and you can have high-rises that incorporate street-facing retail, housing, or enclose public plazas.
@@mindstalk Yes, I know. I'm just stating that that could be the reason why many dislike these buildings, without considering the broader benefits.
Personally, I think that we need to reform our zoning code to allow for more midrises before we throw skyscrapers down. Even new york city likely has more skyscrapers than they need because much of the outer boroughs are single family zoned. And new york likely has such a high population because it's just about the only city with decent transit in the country.
I lived in a building of 7 stories in a socialist-planned 15-minute city style neighborhood. These were such huge buildings with parks in between, and business at the bottom. Such a tall mixed-use building becomes an ecosystem or a "city" of its own, and it's still connected to the street enough because of its cascade design. It's really interesting.
I kind of agree that taller buildings disconnect you from the life below... and that is EXACTLY WHY ITS GOOD. Not everyone wants to be connected to the city at all times. In fact, many people absolutely require a home that allows some form of escape. I used to live in a city because my university was there, and after that my job. For two out of the 11 total years in the city I lived in an apartment on the 11th floor. It was absolute bliss. Being able to look out to the horizon... not having people walk in front of my window all day... the (relative) silence on my balcony... being able to sleep without being woken up by drunks and car horns and garbage trucks. Not to mention that city culture... dynamic but chaotic... abrasive... offering so much but taking so much as well.
The city was nice to live in, and its one of the most livable cities in the world.... but I still needed escape. That apartment on the 11th floor was bliss, and having lived in a smaller town for some years now I can say with confidence I never want to live on the bottom 5 floors in a city ever again.
There's an argument with a similar endpoint, but a completely different (and more scientifically accurate) idea behind it: urban density actually doesn't increase that much beyond ~5-6 story buildings. The amount of extra infrastructure and non-built up area you need to accommodate taller buildings largely negates the extra stacked floor area you get. This means taller buildings really only work to densify cities when you also start stacking services and infrastructure, something that is extremely expensive.
The best route towards affordable and achievable urbanism is moderate densification. The type that doesn't require massive upgrades to local infrastructure, doesn't require subway lines to serve the transit need and that doesn't require expensive engineering.
"urban density actually doesn't increase that much beyond ~5-6 story buildings"
Do you have a reference for this?
It depends a lot on the city. Stacking services and infrastructure makes sense for sufficiently large cities. This is important to keep in mind, since over half of the urban population in the world lives in cities with more than 500.000 inhabitants.
Thank you so much for recognizing that a city needs to meet the needs of its residents more than it needs to meet the “artistic vision” of one person.
needs both history is littered with projects to "fix" a lack of housing that themselves created different issues often becoming financially ruined and ghettos destroying there neighbourhoods
and there are GREAT points about livability / size and massing of structures to the streetscape
one example is "podium / towers" build a 3-5 story building filled with shops and offices ETC and have tower blocks rise out of the centre of the "podium"
streetscape gets the "life" of a "small" building while the housing numbers are supplied
to be fair, tall buildings, especially sky scrapers are mostly artistic visions of one person ( or a tiny group, with money as the main intrest )
It's not the vision of just one person. Sheesh.
Jan Gehl's principles are born from empathy to what humans need. It's not an "artistic vision".
@@c0rnichonI prefer Andres Duanys vision of New Urbanism.
Guys, I find Your channel as one of the most objective on youtube and urbanist's communities. Sometimes urbanists are so idealistic that refuse to see the other side perspective. But you can show all the benefits of dense urban environment without calling the other side "idiots". People like you win.
My parents moved my sister and me from Montreal to Thunder Bay in 1964. Getting off the train, we saw a woman, driving a pick-up truck, turning into a parking lot. I remember saying that we’d died, and gone to hell
Modern urban problem is that we mostly don't live next to workplaces anymore. We wouldn't need to overbuild around major transit hubs otherwise.
Decades ago if you worked at the factory, you would live with your colleagues next to it. If you had a store, you would live on a floor above it.
Having long commute every day really sucks. I had a job within a walking distance, it was wonderful.
“Where renters don't have to compete with each other for apartments.”
Renters will ALWAYS be competing with each other in high-demand neighborhoods. Numerous neighborhoods that are full of highrises are still extremely expensive.
Taller buildings don't necessarily have more units, either. Some of the luxury supertall condo towers that have been constructed recently in NYC actually have FEWER units than the much, much shorter buildings they replaced.
A city is its buildings. People want to live in a given neighborhood in no small part because of how it looks and is organized. You can't take a neighborhood of quaint Victorian houses that have been carved up into apartments and replace it with modern condo towers, and act like its the same place. You may be housing more people, but those people aren't living in the same neighborhood. They're just living in the same geographic coordinates. If you're willing to sacrifice the unique sense of place that comes with human-scaled and historic architecture, then you're willing to destroy one of the principle joys of urban life. You're simply destroying that which you are trying to promote.
The other issue with tall buildings is that there's significant diminishing returns to density by building up. Paris is actually denser than NYC, and about as dense as Manhattan in both residential and job density. As a building gets taller, more and more internal space must be devoted to elevators and emergency egress. Furthermore, there is a tendency to increase the space between buildings as they get taller, whether that means wider sidewalks, wider roads, entrance plazas, etc. It just doesn't work out that building up automatically results in significantly higher density.
In fact, one of the key motivations of building up hasn't been to increase density overall, but to free up space on the ground for parks, wider roads and freeways. This was the thinking of Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe. Mies designed Detroit's Lafayette Park neighborhood to have several highrises amid ample green space, wide streets and parking lots. Thus, it's purposefully not very dense despite having tall buildings. Ironically, the most coveted section of the neighborhood is the area of townhouses designed by Mies himself. They're both architecturally distinctive and traditional in organization. They've become a significant anchor to the whole neighborhood, and couldn't be replaced without fundamentally diminishing the area's integrity and sense of place.
Lastly, the attempted analogy between building height and transit systems is utterly nonsensical.
This comment makes sense to me. Thank you for the explanaton.
As a strongly introverted person, if I had to move to a city residing in the "realm of birds and views" instead of communion with the street might be the difference between serenity and frayed sanity. We all have similar needs but we often weight them quite differently.
I've got to say I tend to agree with the Danish gentleman. I have noticed that the space around high rises seem to suck up energy from the streets around them. I could see some limited applications for high rises, but normally I find low and mid-rise places are nicer to be around. I also concede there are places with high density and low land availability where high rises are necessary.
The biggest myth of urban planning is that centralized planning has positive results.
It is also hard to be rescued during a fire if you’re on a high floor, too.
I have both.
My office is on floor 41 of a 50+ story building. I enjoy getting my morning coffee and looking out over the city - I get a broad picture of humanity. I also get to laugh at all the cars bumper to bumper on the highways, because ...
Two miles away I live on the second floor (top) of a duplex. I don't interact with people walking by (my screen porch is in the back), but I do see trees and flowers and bicycles going past. I see city life close up.
Neither view is better. I don't feel disconnected in either place. I can see both the forest and the trees.
Oh, I don't own a car or bicycle. I walk, including to my office whenever possible. Otherwise, I take the bus.
I've only heard an argument that a certain height is a cutoff point for energy efficiency, where you require air-conditioning even in colder climates, the fire-systems that need to be implemented take away floorspace and extra pumps are needed in the basement to get water pressure to the upper floors. Attractiveness of the street is an important consideration, most importantly don't overshadow everything or enable glass facade reflections that cause sunburn. I'm sure a good designer can build an attractive lower portion of the building for the cityscape.
Interesting. Any link? What height was the cut off?
@@BoburtoMy reply didn't make it because of the link, you need to search for "building height energy efficiency" to find articles discussing a study that simulated single home to 1000 floor buildings. The optimum is estimated to be somewhere between 6 and 12 floors.
Well presented argument. IMHO tall buildings have their place, but some of them are unnecessary and do damage to a city. Many times they're built because overly restrictive zoning laws have prevented high density low rise or mid rise housing elsewhere. If you fixed that first, there would be way less need for tall towers. Look at Paris as an example. I do think tall buildings make sense near transit and it can be nice to have an apartment with views, but they also create shadows and wind tunnels that make the streets below unpleasant and make you feel like an ant. So, I don't mind some tall buildings in certain places, but I think too often they are built as an easy solution without considering the down sides.
Paris is like the entire reason why you shouldn't take this ideology to the extreme, its nearly impossible to live with more than yourself in Paris without making a massive amount of money, and even then, you'll be in a very very small apartment. The suburbs of Paris actually end up having taller buildings because of this. Although form is important, cities are not purely an artistic exhibition, they are primarily somewhere to live, comfortably and spaciouslly, which can be accomplished if we build up. Chicago is a great example of a city thats very tall but feels also very real, it helps that chicago has alot of mixed density that includes everything from high rises to low rises, this also helps keep the rent super low. I agree with you on the restrictive zoning laws, if we were able to build some areas that look and feel more like Paris, then we would have a much better time interacting with the housing crisis.
A counterpoint to my take on paris would be looking at New York City, I believe, though, that as you go further out from downtown things get cheaper, but, the housing crisis is a very complex issue, density is not the sole factor, but it is a very important one.
@@LiquidBassBrony "Paris is like the entire reason" I disagree. Paris is by no means not a dense city. The height of its buildings are typically 8-12 stories and feature expansive courtyard infill. Paris's density at 20k inhab/km2 is vastly larger than Hong Kong's 7k inhab/km2. It is supremely dense. Paris' issues lie in a more general French normative problem - one of centuries of centralization, of culture, economy politics etc, which cause Paris to be basically the only "relevant" city for people to want to move to. But that is a primarily policy problem not an urban materialist one. Germany shows that similarly dense cities (or even far less dense cities than Paris - Berlin has a density of 5k inhab/km2) that are however densely connected to each other in medium distances, which keeps land values dispersed. The suburbs around Paris are still far less dense than the city center itself (e.g. the Arrondisement Saint-Denis has half Paris' denisty at 9.5k inhab/km2, Créteil, famous for it'S high rise housing projects is even less dense, at 8k inhab/km2)
Your examples of Chicago is in bad faith. You consider Paris separate from its supposed "denser" suburbs, but in Chicago it seems you only consider downtown. "mixed density that includes everything from high rises to low rises" The vast majority of Chicago is single family homes (79% to be exact). Even considering just the downtown, the Chicago Loop is far less dense than the center of Paris (only 10k inhab/km2). And the reason why is partly exactly because of the nature of high-rises. The taller buildings are, the more space they require dedicated to circulation, technical services, emergency exits and structural support. They become far less economical to build as well the higher they go. The value/cost proposition of building such structures tips after about 12 stories, where the necessity of elevator banks, safety and access start coring out larger sections of the building. These modern high-rises require far more space around them as well, setbacks for instance emergency services or daylight penetration. So if you tore down Paris as it is now to build higher, you'd most likely end up with lower density overall.
"that as you go further out from downtown things get cheaper," That is the general primary difference between Anglo-American historical urbanism and Continental European/Asian urbanism, whereas the early adoption of railroads and cars allowed wealthy suburbs to develop away from cities, Continental cities industrialized later, with walking to work remaining the most common mode of transit well into the late 19th century. As a result the city centers on the Continent remained the most desirable areas to inhabit, with a heavy emphasis of public transit meant to accommodate travel from less developed peripheries into their centers
@@LiquidBassBrony I used Paris as an example simply because it's a rare case of extremely high density of people per sq km, with almost no high rises. If Paris has cost of living issues, it's not going to be down to a lack of density vs other cities. Although Manhattan has a higher density than Paris, Paris has a much higher density than NYC as a whole. My point being that you can have massive density without high rises if everything is at 5-8 stories. In practice, most cities aren't going to be like Paris without large scale demolition, so more realistic examples might be London or Chicago (as you mentioned), where you get general low/mid rise density, with some taller towers added into the mix.
I love the functional, value-neutral (or at least value-lite) approach this duo has to urban design, so I really appreciate the suggested reading that may likely helped inform this thoughtful approach.
I think his view make sense in the context of being from Denmark where the population is moderately sized (nearly 6 million) but live in somewhat dense cities or villages that are fairly compact and walkable. Alongside that Denmark has above average sized housing, where the average house is 1475 sq ft. I think its an admirable goal to have housing be reasonably hunan scaled and make sense to be comfortable and not feel intimidating. But i know plenty of people who love tall buildings and feel like it gives them a sense of privacy and comfort.
10:24 "[It wasn't] a scientific process or objective conclusion. [...] It was a stylistic preference"
This statement is SO important!
There is so much in architecture and urban planning which are just assertions based on nothing but ideology, philosophizing, and speculation.
CIAM being one of the greatest offenders. And we see what happens when ideas not objectively tested against reality are implemented: Brasilia, Bijlmer, etc.
I kinda think Gehl was calling to the fact that below 5 stories allows for a personal connection to the activity outside at street level, making living feel more lively without being overwhelming. This would mean not just talking, but seeing what goes on at street level, allowing inhabitants to feel more connected. Regardless, there are other reasons I disagree. For Instance:
1. They incentivize corporate landlords instead of local ones due to their extreme prices to build and operate, causing higher rent.
2. By making people feel more locally connected to the ground level, it statistically makes people want streets to be cleaner and for there to be less crime.
3. They make the environment uninviting for the people at ground level on the streets, and make the lives of those within the skyscraper less lively.
4. They make it way too inefficient to practically build beautiful architecture, causing every skyscraper churned out to be boring glass cubes.
5. (ONE THAT MOST PEOPLE DON'T TALK ABOUT) They're insanely energy inefficient.
You two always knock it out of the park. I love your nuanced approach to urbanism.
I appreciate how you guys take economics of urbanism into consideration in most of your videos. Sometimes other channels go a little too far into the ideal world and obsess over perfection which lets be real isnt feasible. We need to build off what we have today and there is so much room for improvement.
I believe there was another reason for height restrictions… light access
Is there a tangible difference between shade given by trees vs shade given by buildings? There’s a picture somewhere of protesters opposing tall buildings for “light access,” but they’re all clustered on the shaded side of the street. Even the most extreme building shadows do not plunge the city into darkness.
Even if that's an issue, you can offset it with setbacks a la "podium towers". Base of the building faces the sidewalk, but some upper stories are stepped in, allowing more light to the street.
from what i heard, it montreal, they dont want buildings higher than mount royal
Jan clearly hasn’t been in Valencia. The literal central square there has 12-story buildings, which integrate so well that I was genuinely surprised when I counted up to 12. I agree that above a certain level it becomes difficult to actually move around the building, and that is quite important, but that definitely happens way above 5 stories.
This drove me nuts when I read his book recently, and this is infuriating when there are numerous cities where five stories clearly won't cut it, or even get clsoe to doing so.
There's a paradox. The shorter buildings get, the easier it is to talk to someone passing by; but the shorter they get, the less dense housing becomes, and people dont walk much in low density space.
I think you have missed a major part of the issue (though you mention it, the topic deserves more attention).
What you're missing is that in the absence of TRANSIT then 3-5 stories is ideal.
We already have places for tall buildings and they will go perfectly well in the transit-served places which already exist.
The pressing problem of our time is how to create the smaller scale walkable cities that would otherwise lose out to SPRAWL.
And that missing part the equation is the 3-5 story building.
Nobody is saying NYC can't handle more towers. They have transit.
We're talking about creating walkable cores that don't require the installation of subterranean subway systems, but could be served by walkable neighborhoods and surface-level transit options.
When you try to stick tall buildings in these areas you have a massive issue in that THESE TALL BUILDINGS REQUIRE EITHER TRANSIT (ABSENT IN AMERICA) OR A HIGHWAY/STROAD to service them.
So without a subway present, the tall buildings ruin the neighborhood from a walkable standpoint. I really wish you would show some examples of how tall buildings have created terrible places (Houston/Dallas/anywhere else in America).
Nice channel otherwise.
Bro, as a Russian, does not agree with the main message of the video. We have gone exactly this way: from areas of cozy five-story buildings to high-rise residential complexes. The population density in five-story buildings is sufficient to provide various services and transport. Areas with nine-story buildings also look good. There is a lot of green space (trees, bushes), public infrastructure, shops, etc. And, I think, one of the best (maybe the best) metro in the world, BTW.
But modern high-rise residential buildings (15+ floors, united in a mirodistrict) in Russia are often called something like anthills for people. And this is not a compliment. Because the developers in them are guided by the same idea as the author of the video: more people per square meter of land! Minimum landscaping (tress, etc), minimum public areas. Parking lots and concrete.
P.S. Sorry for my broken English.
YOU GUYS ROCK! I had been persuaded about 5 stories because Chris Alexander and Paris fall into the Gehl camp as well. Plus, how could I disagree with Gehl? You have turned me around. I do think that the new type wooden construction should be preferred and possibly mandated for a greener result. Keep up the good work. Listening to two voices helps me with my ADD as well.
Paris is nice but it's also really expensive. Plus I think it's mostly 6-8 stories...
Affordable high density housing is needed to stop the climbing growth of homelessness and housing prices. We need to build more of it.
This is absolutely true and too many right wing market fundamentalists deny this because they don't care about housing the population as a social utility. However, it's also absolutely true that the progressive activist left makes this impossible to do when you don't enforce crime and you allow tens of millions of immigrants in the country who will also need shelter...
If you want to live with lazy unemployed people and junkies that's your choice, just don't think l everyone wants to live like that
As a planner, this dichotomy of thought very accurately describes my interactions with engineers and architects and work 😂
I love this video because my city halifax has very unique design at least in certain areas that fulfill both these points. There are really tall skyscrapers here that still have the facades of really really old buildings preserving the pedestrian experience while fulfilling demand which is amazing
Thank you for intelligently shining light on this topic.
His contribution to the DISCOURSE about building height & scale in context should not be undervalued. However when we overvalue something as gospel (such as parallel parking beside sidewalk eating areas as good for the pedestrian experience in any case), we do a disservice to the discussion about these issues.
I think this conversation should be held in Germany. The country has basically banned highrise buildings, except in a few buisness districs, where they mostly provide office space. Meanwhile Germanys largest cities have massive housing problems and often way to much commuting traffick. Seems to me, that one part of the solution could be to build higher for housing in places like berlin, Munich, Hamburg and other cities.
It seems like the creators of this video were triggered by NIMBY's in some sort of housing or political forum. I have never heard of the guy yet I fully understand and ultimately agree in what he seems to be saying and feel like you guys missed the point and went off on a tangent.
He's not an actual dictator tearing up districts insisting that this MUST be the only way to build but that rather it is pretty much the most IDEAL way. From ancient cities to the most visited ones today, this is still relevant; Ancient Rome, Modern Day Tokyo, and the tropical Miami Beach are from completely different eras from one another and yet have this tried and true model which makes them all fabulously livable. NOT bc they are trendy places like the West Village but bc we're human and ultimately its about human scale places. He analyzed it very well.. A dense blanket of 3-5 story buidings will almost always be superior to the Suburb to Skyscrpaer model found in most of North American cities which have both extremes,;too low and too high densities.
I'm sorry you guys may have missed the point somehow bc your point is valid too. We do need lots of affordable housing but critiquing the criteria he mentioned is way off mark and practically not relevant. Take an architectural massing study for a building as a reference. The amount of floor space can be spread out differently in a variety of ways and still reach the quota. I think THAT's the meat of the subject at hand for both arguments.
As a NYer I get both the appeal and argument about how un-affordable the Village is but bulldozing it to build higher isnt the long term point or solution. Its building that same loveable density and character in undesirable places ,say for example pockets of NJ, where they can then live car-free and not even have to or want to drive into the city to get that experience.. catch the drift? It solves the housing crisis by redistributing the amount of housing needed and uplift that area but also not overwhelming the traditional ones. Then more public transit can be made relevant there etc etc. Thats the real solution. Not some 1,000 story building in the "best" part of town.
Agreeing with you, I thought the same after watching this video. It appears the authors of this channel are not purely urbanism enthusiasts but also have a substantial political agenda intertwined throughout their content. It is seriously unfortunate that they do, because this area needs more unbiased experts, especially in North America, to build a desire in people for a better taste for living standards.
You're missing the bigger picture. His idea of people being obscure over 5 stories of height is important not because you'll always have a conversation with passerbys.
Rather such a skyscraper design would make you dehumanise people more, as you see them more as ants running around gathering rice instead of as flesh and blood people like you. You see, hear, and take part in their day to day life to some degree, compared to the total alienation seen in skyscrapers.
You can't just pack people like Sardines and forget about them because it's 'economic'. 🙄 If you don't live amongst the plebs, you won't even know what they are.
It's pretty much a fake dilemma people need to choose between affordable, housing bundled to skyscrapers, or homelessness and short buildings. We have skyscrapers and next to them homeless people. If there would be a real wish on the politicians side to stop the homelessness, they could tax the second homes and finance from that money social housing.
Also I don't understand why the access to sunlight is heavily ignored in that video. It must be an important topic.
Finally the more distributed town planning could lift the necessity of the metro lines as the stations by themselves create the requirement in the increased density around them.
I think Paris is full of nice six-storey apartment buildings...
Wholeheartedly agree until the end (book recommendation). I am modernist (Nothing over ruled 'form follow function'). I don't believe in organic/un-planned being better. If not planning is better, that is because the plan sucks, not the idea of planning. Nothing (nearly) we used and appreciate came from un-planned result, even agriculture.
As someone who has lived in a high-rise before, I'm not too keen to see them become the norm. While I liked and still like the place I used to live, it always led to strong winds in the area. Maintenance and heating of high-rises are costly. Not to mention, if you have a disability, you're screwed if the elevators don't work. Emergency services can't reach you as easily as with a low or midrise building. Plus, the designs give the place a cold appeal. I think that 10 - 12 floors is more than enough for housing, and it is better to move expand city limits well into the suburbs to allow for more space.
The point you are making with your comparison of the Copenhagen and NYC metros is a correct one, but its undercut a little bit because Copenhagen's metro is effectively much larger if you include the S-TOG lines, which I'd argue provide a metro-like service for the city. Still wouldn't be sufficient for a city like NYC but Copenhagen has a lot more than was shown on the map.
Yes. As someone who's worked closely with urban designers (including many I like very much), they can be more or less oblivious to things like, you know, the housing crisis in so many cities, or the climate change implications of limiting density near transit (not to mention the economics of the housing market, etc.).
the thing is, outside of urbanist circles when you talk about high dencity, people only imagine highrise buildings. So it is important to talk about the missing middle. more often than not midrise buildings are the optimal solution between different different demands.
Frequently five stories is all the city and the NIMBYs will allow. The ideal height is pretty much always "as high as legally possible" in any sort of in demand area. If the area is not in high demand, the additional costs per unit above a certain height will kick in-usually above five stories in what may or may not be a coincidence. But in most high demand locations, land costs are greater than extra costs for building high until you get quite high indeed.
@@Geotpf High density is also slums and packed homes !
YES!
I've never lived in more sterile and lonelier places than the 2-3 stories apartment buildings I've recently been living in..
On the contrary, the 6 to 8 floor ones were an amazing way to keep them a little more spaced with little parks in between, keeping also the distance between buildings enough for a good amount of privacy but also having swarms of kids playing out and a lot of neighbours sitting and talking in the front.
The thing that makes a place livable is not the 3-5 floors height.
Urban design is very tricky. Yes you have to meet the housing demands but also you need to provide a nice place for people to exist and not hate their life. Some cities went to the extreme on both of those ends.
Some urban centers have a problem that too many people want to live there. So you either have to make it unaffordable or turn the city into a concrete jungle to meet the housing demand.
Why not just copy it?
The point of this video is well taken. I would add however that in Nyc for instance, if the suburban areas modernized and built up to a 5 story urban density, more would be gained than building taller buildings in the city center. More work spaces, walkable spaces and affordable housing for sure - not to mention less traffic congestion and pollution. Long Island City, Downtown Brooklyn and even the South Bronx all have built many residential sky scrapers over the past few years, none of which are affordable or encourage human interaction. On the other hand, there are dozens of nearby Long Island, Westchester and New Jersey towns that could accommodate countless people if they built just 5 stories up as opposed to more single family sprawl. I'd imagine those are the areas in question - and if they took a page from places like Carmel Indiana, we'd all be better for it.
I think both types of densification should be allowed and they should happen according to demand. If people want to live in mid-rises in the suburbs, great. If people want to live in high-rises in Manhattan or Brooklyn, that's fine too.
By Gehr's logic, we shouldn't have basement suites, because you can't talk to someone in the ground.
Who honestly lives in a basement suite and has a normal social life? In my city you can't register as residing in a basement, to the chagrin of the moles among us.
You hit the nail on the head there. It's a matter of priorities, isn't it? It's not an arrangement of space for the arrangement's sake; it's to achieve quite simple ends, often. "To be close to stuff", for instance. Nice and close to direct needs.
As for the perfection of the medium rise, one counter I could offer (as far as appearances go) is that high rise meets another "natural human need" (maybe) - namely "better appearances from the inside". Appearances from the outside aren't the only thing that matter. But how better? Well it seems to be a very popular human impulse to find a way to the top of something (like a hill, for instance), and to look out from there. I suspect most people like the view from the hilltop better than they like the one from the valley, so it's possible that this is the most comforting one.
I also suspect that many of the empty balconies (in the pictures they outvote the balconies in use by quite a long way) are empty because the person behind the curtains prefers privacy when at home, and is not an extrovert wanting to shout friendly extrovert things at passers by. People don't just withdraw from the rest of the world out of hate or whatever.
And because I have a little obsession about this, I now imagine taking the low rise building on the opposite side of the street and stacking it upon the other one (just accounting for space usage by "counting on my fingers", you understand? It's not the vandalism it might seem, just a thought experiment). Pick that up and move it there. OK what to do with the ground that opens up? How about having a little Kleingärtenverein running it? Have little gardens there for anyone who wants a little bit of green space to waste time on, within walking distance. Same neighbourhood; more facilities.
Hey! That whole road could go. Maybe keep a pedestrian and cycle path near the residences, and make it broader, but push traffic to the road in front of the row you picked up on your sky hook and lifted across to make this place "low-high-rise".
The reason I'd not go for making it public space is I've seen such public space, and it tends to become something of a nomansland. Too much "under observation" for use as a park. The park is nice, but it would appear it's not so if "there are people staring at you". Allotments are pretty public spaces, full of little "micro-views" (and full of people you might pause to have a chat to, too, if it's a friendly kind of place), but they're also private enough to ensure fine grained privacy - big hedges for shy people, and low flower beds in front of the nude tanning area for the extroverts. Hey, come into my garden, and take off your clothes! We're barbecuing today! Next door to, "You could come in here, but please knock first. Maybe send a written note like they do in Switzerland".
Anyway, just by a small more vertical rearrangement the road is now further away, and everyone who wants one has a garden. If you use vertical growth to save ground space, you can expand the possibilities of a neighbourhood. Make that space you don't waste on paving or buildings well, and you'd have a sociable space where there's plenty of room to hang out with other extroverts in.
Hmm ... you know? The resulting building is only 6 storeys, now. That's not very high. Hardly high enough for any of the units to have a View, even. Maybe go fetch the next back to back pair of residences on the other side of the road, too? Stack them up, and now you have a long 12 storey "entry level high rise", and enough space for everyone to have an nice cricket pitch in the green space. Take the road again, and put an anti-noise wall between it and you. More green space, and less rumble. What's to hate about that?
I gotta say, one of the things I miss about living in Montreal is "balconville". I agree with you, tall isn't necessarily bad, but walking or riding through the steel and glass canyons of some of Toronto's newer condo developments feels very dehumanizing. If you're going to do tall, it needs to be done right (as you quite rightly said).
Toronto’s problem is not how tall buildings are but the details at street level. If we had good retail spaces and great details on these buildings and a lot of trees we would vastly improve the experience of people
@@waderinga7662 exactly!
One point that was not discussed enough is that if you have a walkable city with 5 stories tall houses with all the necessities within a 15 minute walking distance. Then there is no reason to have tall houses around transit hubs because there is a smaller reason for people needing to go somewhere for shopping or free time activities.
So instead of having small up- zoned centers you could spread it out over an area and make the entire area desirable.
I just want to take a moment to think about the people in Grindavik Iceland who are losing their homes due to todays volcanic eruption. We argue about what the best housing is, but after today, many of them wont have permanent housing at all. I know thoughts and prayers are quite cliche these days, but sometimes it's the only thing you can do.
Stopping at 4:23 to remark that the RUclips algorithm served me an ad for a oversized pickup and Hobby Lobby. This video doesn't seem like the optimal place to put such ads.
I would argue that one objective metric as to how tall a building should be is how many floors a person is willing to climb. At a certain number of floors, elevators become necessary. If the elevators fail (e.g. power failure), you're stuck climbing down 30 flights of stairs to get out of the building. Nobody will want to climb 30 flights of stairs to get in and out every day. That requires an elevator.
Isn't this something we can leave up to people's own decision making though? If some people want to stay on lower floors out of fear of a power outage, that's fine. But other people might not care (after all, power outages are relatively rare in most big cities) and choose to live up higher.
High rise buildings require emergency power generation by fire code. Fire pump, elevator, emergency lighting, and usually domestic water pumps are all provided with backup power via an on-campus diesel generator. Doesn't mean it's impossible to fail, but there is redundancy in emergency power for that reason. Emergency egress via stairs thankfully is much more accessible than climbing up. I've done a 75 stair climb in about 25 minutes and it was very difficult, I would not want to be walking up more than 5 flights each trip.
@@OhTheUrbanity That means that every high rise must have a freight elevator to facilitate moving heavy furniture and appliances to the 30th floor. It means that they need to design the building to be virtually fire proof. It means they need to ensure that a failure of the elevators is an infinitely small probability. In other words, the building had better be infallible. In a fire or other emergency, 30 flights of stairs would tire anyone out before they get out of the building safely.
It still doesn't address the fact that the higher up you live, the longer it takes to ride an elevator. Just going down to check the mail will take much longer (or the mail carrier has to travel up the elevator daily, making mail delivery much slower) with a 30 floor building. An elevator can only go as fast as people can tolerate before they get motion sick.
Cities also don't need to be so dense either. There is a huge imbalance between urban and rural density. My opinion is that places like Manhattan are too dense. Meanwhile, small towns are of the opposite extreme. The two really should be brought to a more balanced middle density. There is plenty of land to use, but we use it so poorly. Either too dense or completely under utilized. I think 10 to 15 floors is the ideal maximum if we stop allowing such uneven density. It's not too much to walk in an emergency, nor too much dependence on an elevator. Mixed use zoning is needed badly as well.
The problem is that tall buildings are costly and usually in high price areas. At least in developing countries, they don't do anything for bettering housing issued, they actually make the situation worse by inflating prices and gentrification. Just look at São Paulo's tall buildings rich neighborhoods, dominated by a very small elite and set apart from the city. It's quite the opposite of a democratic urbanisation.
You have reversed the cause and effect here.
I mean... Jan Gehl _fundamentally_ is right. Tall buildings are worse for human interaction and a lively quarter and the pedestrian experience.
It's just that we don't live in towns of a few thousand people anymore (at least a lot of people don't), so we have to put them somewhere - and Gehl would agree that Urban Sprawl (tm) is not the answer either. As with everything else there isn't an ideal building height, period. But there IS an ideal building height for specific purposes. And all Gehl said is that _for the human interaction_ in the neighborhood, a max of 5 stories is optimal. And I agree with that. For anybody wanting to live in a place where too many other people also want to live - well, you have to be okay with downgrading your experience with single members of that mass in order to FIT that mass. That's just how it goes...
Really well worded and worthwhile video, I feel like people today have pretty much abandoned the concept of nuance in all walks of life, and this is a good example of bringing it back and making it digestable.
This was a good breakdown of pro and con. IF we all lived in a magical place - sure - 5 stories would be optimal. But I live in NYCand these days building 5 stories almost anywhere in the city would be a waste and not serving the public well. And we live in a six story building, the tallest buidling I have ever lived in believe it or not. And this is so much more people-friendly and community oriented that any of the other 7 places I have lived in NYC!!
Honestly though, there is so much wasted space in the outer boroughs that could be developed first. Like why are there strip malls and golf courses in nyc 💀
Maybe I missed it but another argument for shortish buildings is the energy usage of the building per person is at it's optimum ~5 or so stories high. 80 story buildings are much more energy inefficient.
I agree that the idea of an arbitrary limit of 5 stories based on a specific, non scientific, criteria cannot be accepted as a fact but the basic idea is definitely true.
High rises have their usefulness and id designed well they can connect to the city and provided a vibrant area, but it won't be a great human scale neighborhood and it will certainly won't be an affordable place for "normal" people. High rises are expensive to build and maintain this requiring a certain level of wealth to live in them. The more affordable high risers tend to deteriorate as the residents do not have the means to maintain them.
As for density, many of the densest cities, especially in Europe, have very few (if any) high rises and mostly 8-12 stories buildings with plenty of transport means for all.
The problem with your claims is that they are centers on the current North American way of thinking with very few far away stops and the belief that changes are bad and one seat stop is the goal. You also still think of one big CBD one part of the city instead of offices that can spread all over the city and have multiple centers, including in the "suburbs".
I live in Barcelona in the central Eixample district that has a density of more than 36,000/km2 and my neighborhood is denser (with about 48,0000/km2) there are plenty of metro stations and buses around but I walk to work, like many others do. Barcelona's density is close to 17,000/km2 and the adjacent suburb of L'Hospitalet de Llobregat is even denser with close to 21,000/km2 and the high rises it has are mostly for offices. More distance suburbs have regional rail lines and regular/express buses, like Sabadell and Terrassa - Both with more than 200,000 residents each and a connection of both the regional/suburban Rodalies trains with more than one station and the FGC suburban train, that was extended as a local underground metro into the city and if someone is a bit far from one of those stations he takes a bus to that station. TOD is nice but it cannot be the only source of travelers to that station, but part of an internal transit system in that area.
If land values are high, then shorter buildings mean that only people of sufficient wealth will be able to live in them.
Maybe the definition of being able to talk from a balcony is taken to literally as sole argument. What is defining for happiness is that an environment is helpful for people to engage in human interaction. If your apartment or house is designed that it should be natural to greet each other when you meet, then you have a condition established that is important. What made me feel unsafe in living surroundings was when you are totally anonymous . That is not alone a matter of heights but also of widths. I wouldn't want to live in buildings where you have to count to find your place standing before your building.
I think this is an imposition of personal preference onto other people. I really don't care about that and want my home to feel private. If I want to socialize with people in the street, then I will go to the street.
I think the 3-7 storey range is ideal for suburban residential, while higher buildings should be generally reserved for urban centers. However, i think how we classify urban centers is also broken, especially here in Ontario. Toronto has treated Bay Street as the only urban center in the city for far too long, and as a result our entire transit system funnels through Union Station, even for trips that wouldn't need to go through the downtown core. We need to recognize North Etobicoke, Kipling, Humber Bay, Midtown, Scarborough Center, etc, as urban centers in their own right, with all the density and transit infrastructure that should go with that. We're starting to move towards that goal, but as always we're about 30 years behind where we should be, and we have the worst traffic in North America now as a result
I’ve lived in high rises. They’re terrible - disconnect from the neighborhood, constantly broken elevators, and always owned by a faceless corporation.
Feel free to avoid living in high-rises, but don't use your personal preference to stop other people from living in them.
I've been having this argument for a decade and respectfully disagree. The point about low rise density being fueled by historic preservation which leads to higher prices has always struck me as a misplacement of blame and not the solution to making cities the main way of living again. It's the suburbs that need to increase their density to medium, not the medium density urban areas that need to turn themselves into the extremely high density ones. The world has plenty of high-rise neighborhoods and we have the institutional momentum to build many more, but the same can't be said about medium density urban neighborhoods, which is realistically legislated out of existence from being built new again. Those are what we should be building more of, and dare I say, preserving, because even you admit in this video that they're more pleasant to live in, all other factors equal. This isn't to say high rises can't exist in some places, particularly near transit, but to give a blanket approval of turning liveable 5 story and below neighborhoods into high rise areas is something that isn't helpful. The focus needs to be on densifying existing suburbs, connecting them to transit, and making sure new suburbs are built in a fashion that can be designed easily at a later date. Stop putting the entire onus of housing demand on the best performing neighborhoods and taking away what makes the great! Build new amazing neighborhoods instead. Also, your statement "That's not how geometry works" in response to the suggestion that we have primarily 5 story neighborhoods near transit is a cheap blanket dismissal and simply not tru. There are countless examples of medium density areas supporting quality transit. Rant over lol.
One aspect of your argument really jumps out at me. Now that you have helped me "accept" tall buildings, I am starting to recognize their advantages much better. They are the most potent way we have for creating smart density, which I passionately believe in. They can also enable people to have convenient proximity to things with out being so car dependent, provided they are accompanied by plentiful mixed use and transport options. The fact that living high provides privacy and quiet is not to be discounted either along with dramatic views. I would point out that tall buildings have a huge responsibility to avoid the pitfalls of drabness and sterility which so much modern building activity is afflicted with. How about affordable high rises so that they don't end up as low use places for the wealthy also? 🙂🙂🙂🙂
Why do we even need that much density in the first place ?
God I love that this channel isn't afraid to puncture the egos of elitists and remembers that cities are for people and that letting people live in them is the bedrock of urbanism.
Hmm In think you need to read up on what Jan Gehls ideas actually are…….😊
I think it's good to critique and examine his work but i wouldn't call Gehl Elitist. If you go to a lecture of his you will see that (while his english isnt great) he has a great sense of humor and doesn't take himself too seriously. His entire life work builds upon him and his wife going against the popular ideas of the architectural elite in the 60's-70's modernist times and doing their own thing
My favorite thing about this channel is that it does not take the approach of Thing A always bad and Thing B always good.
I had to stop watching a lot of urbanism channels for this reason because the level of abstraction to make their premise work is too much. Population size, land area, geology, climate, politics, and homogeneity matter.