Dense midrises are a better alternative than tall buildings, but not a better alternative to single family dwellings, at least according to the people who own the land such projects would be built on.
@@timogul _"according to the people who own the land"_ -- I'm not sure that's correct. I agree, for people who already own a structure on the land, of course they want housing shortages, to keep their real estate values propped up. But I would expect people who just own raw land, to likely prefer zoning that allows higher density, because a developer can make more money from high density construction than single-family detached housing, and so that would make the value of the land itself higher, since those developers are then going to be among the parties interested in buying it.
@@harvey66616 Hypothetical people who might eventually own some land do not get a vote. Only actual people who actually own land. People who are developing land want low density housing, because it's more profitable. If high density housing were more profitable, then there would be a lot more of it.
@@timogul I have no idea what hypothetical people you're talking about. I didn't mention any. As for your other two claims they are patently false. *Developing* land as low density is *not* more profitable. As for your claim that if higher density development was more profitable there would be more of it fails to account for the zoning issues, i.e. the whole point of this video and others like it. Cities lack the density they need because entrenched interests want to keep supply low and retail prices of real estate high, not because developers prefer low density development or make more money on low density development.
@@harvey66616 Of course developing land for low density is more profitable, because you can sell the properties for more money. This is property developers' entire jobs, to buy properties and then upgrade them and sell them for more. Do you think they haven't considered building higher density projects before? You might argue that on a _single_ plot of land higher density might bring more money, but it's diminishing returns, because the higher the density on a single plot of land, the lower the value all around it, so a typical development project will involve multiple properties at once. They want to increase the value of _all_ of them.
Also, I've seen complaints about the height of 2 story buildings at planning and zoning hearings - from neighbors who live in taller also-two-story single-family homes and just don't like any apartments at all.
Also the hypocrisy have don't have to go far to find a Shitsville Indiana type town of 5000 people with a ten storey building at its heart to prove the yokels are sophisti-macated like NYC 😊
Great overview of FAR! Also, the "towers in the park" concept (popularized by Le Corbusier) has always been a bit dubious, but even more so when the 'park' is almost entirely just a giant surface parking lot...
If it was an actual park, with good transportation, commerce, maybe some buildings as offices to encourage said commerce, it could be fantastic. But the moment it becomes a car park, it's just doomed. The worst is they could put the car park underground.
Towers in the park is really common in eastern Europe and usually it's an actual park with lots of playgrounds, greenery, schools, shops, and other amenities. They're quite nice.
@@gavinkemp7920 this is precisely what StuyTown, referenced in the video, is like. It’s actually quite livable despite the fact that the housing stock is kinda bland and ugly. My girlfriend lived there when we first started dating and it was always good to visit (albeit she did live on the edge of the development furthest from transit so it was never fun to visit her apartment specifically 😅)
@@gavinkemp7920 but it's impossible for every park in a "tower in the park" to be like that. Also, residents of the apartment tower may not want so many members of the public to get so close to their residences. I personally prefer the apartment blocks of Barcelona, which mostly all have a sizable internal courtyard which can house green space soley for the residents. Unfortunately many of those courtyard have been filled in with buildings, but if the original design was respected and enforced with laws then it could work very well
seems a few early comments are missing the point of the video. It's only a 7:30 long video, and the thesis is very concise. There are a lot, lot of other factors at play in other cities, but this video only addresses density of mid rise vs high rise in different city configurations. Not affordability, not liveability, not connectivity, etc. (at least, not as a focus.)
@@etiennelevesque6015 Right, I'm really just pointing out that nimbys might be more accepting of new development if we focused on creating picturesque architectural facades in addition to functionality.
I live in a Paris suburb. Even in my suburb the density is about 7500/sq km or 19000/sq mile. There are some individual houses, but packed together in small lots, and lots of midrise buildings with 4-7 stories downtown. We still have 2 train stations and buses every 10 min. About half the people in my city including me don't have cars. You can walk to the pharmacy, post office, bakery, hair salon, vet, doctor, and small supermarket... When I lived in FL, I had to drive everywhere... Making me walk places has really helped my health.
To be fair the need to drive everywhere in the US isn't just density. A big part of it is also that there's basically zero commercial zoning in subburds/near subburds. I grew up in a subburd that was technically a food desert. (Neerest supermarket was about 5km away. 1km away is enough to be qualified as a food desert). When a grocery chain tried to open up a grocery in an abandoned pool store (which would have been about 1km away from my house) the city refused. Instead that abandoned building stayed in zoning limbo and is still abandoned a decade later.
I think the best case for midrise housing is when it's cheaper per unit and floor area than a highrise. Increasing height helps to offset the land value, but at a certain height, the increasing complexity of construction and overhead from amenities makes it so the building becomes more expensive per livable area as you increase height
The goal the construction industry wants to achieve is to raise that first economic barrier to height. Make things less prone to become more complex as you get higher. It used to be like 3-4 stories, then it was 7-8 and now it's 12 stories before any major complications emerge.
Add to that the fact it becomes painfully windy and cold to have a balcony/open space anywhere above mid rise height, so it feels much more like a prison than a home for residential. In the only city I lived, there was a single residential complex above medium "single digit number of floors". They sold well at first, but nobody wants to live there anymore, there are tons of empty apartments on the higher levels, even the few "luxurious". Just because it is too high for comfort.
In Buenos Aires the land price is usually directly tied to the zoning code. So the price of a plot of land will depend on how many square maters you can develop on it (among other things like location).
Unless you plan to make the empire state housing complex, high rises, on average, are cheaper per unit than mid-rises but more expensive to maintain. That maintenance cost is often why high rises get abandoned, or turned into a slum in the long run.
As a Parisian, I will add a 3rd argument as to why I prefer mid-rises : It's much more human scaled. Everybody hates "La defence", the office high-rises neighbourhood right outside of Paris because of its sense of gigantism that goes along with it. Even though it's quite nice seeing it from afar, walking through it is not pleasant at all and besides white collars, nobody is happy to go work in these giant skyscrapers. At the end, I will trade the highest density high-rise for a reasonable density compacted mid-rise every day of the week.
I find here in Vancouver, excluding the city centre, the use of highrises mixed with midrise on major corridors and then mid-rise between (replacing the old (1940s and earlier primarily) single-occupancy houses built on them, none of which were built to last), creates a nice mix - you still get to leverage height, but it's not crowded, since it isn't walls and walls of towers (looing at YOU waterfront Toronto lol).
Human scale is a great way to put it. I honestly think a 5 over 1 design throughout as much of the city as possible is the way to go. The city is a better more lively place when street corners have a shop or cafe or restaurant. 2 story or 3 story is a waste of land but build too tall and the people inside live at the mercy of their elevator. My elevator went out over Xmas but even my mother in her '70s was able to climb the stairs to the 4th floor.
I think Singapore is a good example on how to use a highrise building to increase density. Most buildings is around 8 to 16 storeys high or sometimes higher. It's sparse enough to let a lot of greenery around it, but too wide to become 'a building in the middle pf parking sea/featureless grass'.
I think such a mix of mid-rises and less tall (under 30 storey) high-rise buildings is a very good idea for many high-demand inner city neighbourhoods.
I can't say that my experience living here in this Yishun neighborhood is typical of all of Singapore but I don't see a lot of greenery around. Most buildings are close together for walkability. Maybe in the newer estates there might be more greenery.
Depending on the climate of the area, building denser leaving no site space left may not be best. In Paris it may work, as huddling close together conserves heat, but Singapore being *very* tropical needs that porosity dense midrise rows simply do not have. I think more spaced highrises work better the hotter the climate gets, so as you get denser you get more air space.
Love the little chuckle I get every time you use one of those awful “no zoning changes” signs our Alx NIMBYs designed in MS Paint The guy who distributed them just ran for council this year, and got absolutely crushed ❤
It’s a red herring argument lol they never actually want Parisian density, they just want to stop any development that’s not low density. It’s like when people say people are all for cycling, but not without removing lanes, parking or any other inconvenience to cars.
This is the kind of video that is why I love your channel. Good, concise, cuts straight to the point without getting too bogged down in the wrong points. There are many benefits to mid-rises. But they should be used as an improvement over inefficient low-density development, not used to hold back high-density development in pursuit of some theoretical "perfect" state. Because if you're just suggesting cutting the height of a building in half without also pushing for building a second building to make up for it, you're just advocating for less housing and less density, rather than actually helping to achieve these goals in the optimal way.
Especially if they oppose high rises because they're more expensive to build and "we need affordable homes, not expensive market-rate towers", but then don't make it any easier to build midrise non-market housing (n.b. Jericho Lands). When those high rises even include below market housing, making them smaller directly reduces the amount of below market homes being created.
Midrise neighborhoods like in Paris has as drawback that you live pretty close to your neighbors. On the other hand, they reach the critical density to have basically any service you need in shops immediately below your appartment, which makes them very lively. Considering Paris suburbs, they actually offer super diverse urban landscapes. Inner suburbs are just as dense as Central Paris, and even most of remote suburbs are actually denser than the typical US suburbs.
There's not a single place in America that comes close to the density of Paris except for Manhattan. ALL of America's cityscapes are not truly urban, but are actually suburban, because they're comprised of an overwhelming majority of single family homes.
As a Parisian, I'm pretty sure NIMBYs would NEVER DARE to allow their neighbourhoods to get as dense as Paris. They also don't realize our flats are SUPER SMALL compared to American standards of living. It's normal for a mid-class Parisian family to live in half of what their American counterparts would accept. I'm living with 2 people in a 38sqm flat, I'm the lucky one with the only bedroom, my friends sleep in a small 4sqm closet with a window (technically too small to be called "a bedroom") and the living room. I doubt Americans would accept that lol So yeah, if Americans are willing to go back to the density they used to have in cities with mid-rise buildings everywhere (in cities), sure you might not need high-rise or not as much, or at least concentrate those elsewhere like we did with La Défense. But that's not gonna happen.
American housing affordability issues are largely caused by legal occupancy limits and practical occupancy limits. Americans complain about house prices but we focus on "average house price", because we know our price per square ft is actually very low. While culturally Americans don't like small apartments and tenements, there are a lot of homeless people/ poor renters paying 60% of their income, who would love a smaller room. The floor for rent is $700-$1000/month right now, the difference is that gets you a room in a major city, or a 750sf/70m2 apartment in a rural town. Wouldn't it be nice if the rural town also had small rooms available so renters could really save money?
Yes, Central Paris appartments are super small. Yet appartments are larger in the midrise buildings that are being built all around in the Paris suburbs.
Americans actually do live in tiny appartments just like you describe, like for example in New York or Los Angeles. I am not saying that this is a good thing. I think we can all agree that at a certain point quality of life really starts to suffer when you decrease the size of your living space. I know for example how it is to share a 44 sqm appartment with another person, it's cramped but not awful. I also think that Americans are willing to accept less living space if they can gain something else in return. There is a reason people pay sky-high rents in some cities. And I think Americans are no exception.
The sqm price is more expensive in the US than in France and the quality of housing isn't even there. You compare apples and oranges. Real estate isn't more expensive in Paris than in NYC, LA, San Francisco or other big American cities. The French don't like living in houses too big for their needs. That's why there are many cheap big empty houses in France. In Paris more than the population lives alone, the rest mostly couples. They don't need big apartments and sharing an apartment or even a bedroom isn't a thing like in the cities listed above. Those who want to live in big houses simply buy or rent big houses.
Oh, and just as a reminder, in Paris, most of what is today an apartment complex with 6 stories of 2 or 3 apartments per level, used to be a single family home, with kitchen and dining room at street level, office and living room above, bedrooms for parents and children in upper floors, and maids bedroom under the rooftop.
on the flip side, paris’ building codes of “no more than 7 stories” is ironically causing its own housing crisis. every city needs to be more flexible to to meet its own demand.
This is incorrect. Limit is 37 meter, which can be 12 stories. The issue is almost all land is already developed. Existing buildings need to be taken down or made higher.There are *many* projects across Paris that transform 5-story buildings into taller ones. But this is a costly affair, and it's only adding handfuls of extra homes at a time.
After the dissolution of the Soviet Union.There is one area in Moscow called the business district. Because all the skyscrapers are built.Right after the liberalization of building height regulations .
Because NYC doesn't have an even worse housing crisis than Paris? Please 😂😂😂 They do not need to build higher, they need to invest in the suburbs where there are still countless opportunities for housing development and fully integrate them into an ensemble with the city economically and transportation wise. Newsflash, they're already doing that. It's called the Grand Paris, and it's going to be a game changer.
@@GrandPoivron sorry, 12 stories. but this arbitrary limit causes its own problems, like you mentioned. its not worth it to build up only a couple more stories.
@@OhTheUrbanity A city should accomodate however many it can while maintaining its spirit/identity and history. In the case of Paris I think it would suffer if they started building more Montparnasse towers in the otherwise uniform and coherent hausmann centre. its in parisians interest to avoid Brusselization, both for economic reasons and quality of life. To densify, maybe they could crack down on empty housing held as assets, or airbnbs ect. make better use of their existing housing stock. make sure the housing there exists for housing people, and not as speculation. There is also already plenty of space to densify the outskirts much of which has single family houses, even in areas that are well served by transit. there is no sense in that really. Perhaps also building dense/tall housing near La Défense, where there already is an established skyline of mostly offices. there is plenty of space in Paris, without even touching the centre that much.
@@OhTheUrbanityTall buildings are terrible to live in. For instance, most of the highrises in New York cap out on the tenth floor: nobody wants to live higher than that, because transportation becomes inefficient. Waiting on elevators gets old.
@@OhTheUrbanity It should be up to the state to encourage economic development in a way that evenly distributes it amongst more cities, much how mid rise housing are better than towers, mid size cities are better than megacities. 10 1 million inhabitants cities is better than 1 10 mil inhabitants one.
Exactly. There's the obvious livability factor (people want to live there but if even more people got there it would be Kowloon, and not that many people want to live like that). Beyond that, there's the resource and energy efficiency argument (for economical and environmental reasons). Dense habitats are more efficient than sparse ones, UP to a certain point, after which adding more floors because wasteful. And that point happens to be the height/density of Paris. I'm not saying it's a perfect city, far from that, but it just happens to exist near the golden mean that should serve as example for others
There are a few things that help to make mid-rise neighborhoods more popular. 1. Ornament. Bigger buildings are more imposing and ornament softens the presence of a building, especially organic ornament that reminds us of trees and flowers. The street becomes an art gallery and individual houses within the block get personality. 2. Shops, cafés on the ground floor. The anonymity of big buildings is compensated with social connection on the street level. 3. Keep the courtyards inside the blocks spacious and green. While the streets can be busy, the courtyards can have gardens or be like a small park. Children can play safely.
That's even more true in France. It's such a challenge to build high rise housing in France because they are associated to poor public housing neighbourhood. Everyone wants to build midrise instead because that's where the traditional Parisian bourgeoisie lives. And that's actually what is getting built in all Paris suburbs.
This is racial/cultural in nature, and has no acceptable solution yet. It is not simply black culture that causes flight, but sometimes just xenophobia against foreign cultures that causes diversity to die and housing in general to become stacked with one ethnicity or culture.
@@ecurewitz Property value loss used to be dealt with back in the day by using "Jewish lightning." Landlords would intentionally have accidents or neglect maintenance until the inevitable happened, then collect on the insurance.
The density achievable by mid rise cities is very important for weaker economies that still want the benefits of urbanism but do not have the land value to sustain skyscrapers. Since mid rises are viable everywhere from downtowns to rural towns. but skyscrapers help to maximize the value of a city if you want the best transit, best land use, best agglomeration and more urban green space.
The way I see it, skyscrapers are the end goal, the "ideal" of urbanism, but mid-rises are the much more achievable "sweet spot" on the way to get there that have most of the same benefits for a fraction of the cost. That being said, chiding a place for not focusing on mid-rises when they've went all the way to skyscrapers - as it so often happens in North America - is just outright stupid. The "Paris vs Hong Kong" argument that is so often brought up is also idiotic. Hong Kong is not some hellhole compared to Paris. From what I've heard from my Hong Kong friends, the people in Hong Kong tend to love their built environment. It's other issues such as cost of living, over-financialization or that-one-party that are bringing down their quality of life.
@@jenm1 You're obviously starting this argument in bad faith so I'm not gonna bother but basically, a skyscraper allows you to go everywhere you need to go on a daily basis without even leaving the building and get run over by some F-150 truck. That and to me, looking at the cityscape from the 40th floor is cool. If your ideal life is staring at nature or a yard all day, all the power to you. But having nothing around but trees is pretty boring to me.
@@Meta7 Why would you assume I'm starting in bad faith lol? I'm far left dude. I support density. What a straw man you created out of nothing. I live in NYC. I'm asking why people want more of this? There's no space for human beings yet it's somehow crammed. And fyi, I don't support suburbia or yards but thanks for starting *your* argument in bad faith.
@@jenm1 Also, for what it's worth, skyscrapers are really out of the way. If you hate skyscrapers, they don't take up much space for everyone else who prefers other lifestyles. A single skyscraper can house as many skyscraper-lovers as an entire suburban neighborhood or rural village, if not more.
To discuss housing density without discussing public transport is a serious omission. Much of central Paris and New York are dense as people don't need to park at night, therefore less space for cars. Suburbia uses more cars and needs lower density to accommodate them.
thats BS.....Suburbia uses cares because it was specifically designed to be car dependent. One or 2 parking spaces dont take THAT much amount of square footage. And most regular suburban streets are too wide for the amount of traffic=even more waste of space.
Largely, my attitude is that I wouldn't live in a high-rise block of flats myself, but I think they can work well in some contexts, especially for student accommodation. My city is seeing a lot of this kind of development of late. It has much more potential for profit than plebeian housing, and Brits still haven't been fully convinced to give up their private gardens. It's a pity because the main reason for this explosion in student accommodation is not for the purpose of consolidating existing students away from other housing stock, but because a new university campus is under construction. My overriding impression is that the private sector is not willing to fix our burgeoning housing crisis while there is easier money to be made elsewhere.
Another thing is that Paris *has* tall buildings. The suburbs have plenty, but you can also find some in the inner city (Italie XIII and Front de seine)
if nimbys started using paris' midrises as an argument against tall buildings, and started advocating to build midrises to 'avoid' building high rises id support them i think the second point you used as an example for what they say isnt actually a bad thing, building many mid rises does provide the same housing as few high rises, and does so cheaper and without standing out in the location as badly the reason tall apartments get made in suburbs(which nimbys oppose) is because theres only a few bits of land zoned for it, so builders bid up the price, which means they need to build higher to recoup cost
Coruscant or bust Edit: jokes aside, at this point I feel like North American cities need to hire people from Korea, Japan, China, and France to come to our cities and help us unf*ck this situation
Coruscant is not that dense, as counter intuitive as it sounds, with only about 1000B people on a planet wide 5000+ floors. It was calculated it sure wasn't close to be as dense as Hong Kong's Kowloon.
@@mariannerichard1321 I guess most of the planet is completely empty, because what we see in the films is extremely dense. Whoever said Coruscant has 1 trillion people didn't know enough mathematics too realise that it's not enough.
@@موسى_7 I would guess, there are some floors where they have giant warehouses where they do vertical farming, someone needs to feed these 1T mouths.And probably quite some industrial space as well. Maybe even huge indoor gardens, some no go space in ruins, public aquariums, etc.
@موسى_7 isaac Arthur did the calcs. Every km square geodesic could have a single 100 storey building on the vertex and all the land in between empty. Would result in several trillion people in those buildings
Unfortunately Japanese have not been able to undo their own similar mess in parts of Okinawa Prefecture. The UA-camr "Where I'm From" has a good video about it called, "Japan's Worst Traffic is NOT in Tokyo" and I recommend it quite highly. It seems that Americans have actually had more success correcting this mess than Koreans, Japanese, French, Chinese or even Canadians. But we really did make a mess of things in the meantime and so everywhere you look there are all sorts of random obstructions.
1:51 wow a FAR of 1.5 is wildly funny to me. That’s suburban here in Germany. Source: I’m a member of a mid sized suburban city’s planning commission. Paris had the great fortune of being completely redeveloped within a short time span, with the backing of an absolute monarch (Napoleon III) on the plans of a competent architect (Haussmann). That makes it nice to look at, but a completely unreasonable role model.
I am not sure if the point of this video: sure, you showed that you are good in algebra. But what makes Paris great is not the density per se, but the highly mixed use of that relatively dense occupation (living, shopping, leisure, 3rd places, etc.). And areas are very well connected by the Metro. So as a resident I can live in a relatively small part of the town without ever having to leave (by car). The argument for density is not that we don't have the space, but that low density reduces connectivity. At some point, density can become too much, just go to Mumbai for example.
Many people point to the high density of Paris as an argument against allowing tall buildings in their city (e.g., Vancouver, Toronto, etc.). They say "we don't need to allow tall buildings, look at how dense Paris is". This video was a response to that.
@@MarkHolmes1 The conclusion of the video was this: "Simply allowing Paris-style mid-rises everywhere wouldn’t be the perfect housing policy but it would be a massive win. It’s unfortunate that there’s a lot more energy around shrinking tall buildings down than there is to opening up more neighbourhoods to the mid-rises that people say they love."
Montreal is seeing a lot of mid-rise development outside of downtown, although perhaps it’s mostly on former industry-zoned lands, like Griffintown, along the Lachine Canal, Little Italy, and Hochelaga.
Another banger. You touched on this in the "allow density everywhere" part but one more thing I would note is the *turnover rate* in a given area. During the Ottawa upzoning debate this important fact was shared: "Does that mean your current R1 street in Alta Vista will turn into Brooklyn overnight? No, the city says. The city estimates that the the typical turnover of houses is about 0.5 per cent a year, meaning in a one-hectare city block, just three properties would turn over for infill in the course of 25 years. (For reference, the lawn of Parliament Hill is just under two hectares.)"
So many opponents frame upzoning as "forced-density" and treat allowed heights as the new minimum, but if we actually needed as few new homes as they claim then most neighbourhoods would see minimal change from broad upzoning and many smaller buildings would still be constructed.
For my master's final project thesis I took a look at suburban and inner city density along subway lines. This was back when in Toronto there was a lot of debate about whether to extend the Sheppard subway eastward, or continue it as an LRT. One of the key arguments against extending it was that there was a lack of density to support grade separated transit along the corridor because it was in the suburbs. But Toronto's inner suburbs seemed denser than most suburbs with a fair bit of high rises (mostly in the Tower in the Park model mind you) and frequent bus service along arterials. And when you look at the Bloor-Danforth line to the south, it runs through mid rises and compact detached housing. What I found was that while the suburban census blocks with high rise towers in the suburbs were the most dense, it was not enough to make up for the low density suburban housing surrounding them. Meanwhile in inner Toronto while the midrises along Bloor were not as dense as the high rises along Sheppard, the compact housing in the neighbourhoods in behind allowed the area to achieve a significantly higher net density overall.
@@nellwarnes7273this is the third time I have replied, so hopefully it will show up. Google COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF DENSITY AND RAPID TRANSIT NEEDS ALONG SHEPPARD AVENUE EAST and it should come up.
Give me Paris! It makes New York feel like a small town. Skyscrapers are simply inefficient, and are a lazy solution for cities that are not urban to attempt urbanism without building dense.
Paris is Paris because of Haussmann and his very special way of urban planning. People like Paris because there is beautiful architecture, urban life, street cafés, nice shops, monuments, small parks and everything that makes this place a worthwhile place. All this has grown over centuries and is a cultural heritage. You can get inspired by it and get the right architects who build accordingly for the very people that will live in those new mid-rise buildings. Unfortunately, what most architects build these days is certainly not what people appreciate.
First of all, Paris has a high rise district called La Defense. It's technically outside of Paris, which brings me to another fun fact - Paris as an administrative area only covers the very downtown of the city, it's like NYC was only covering Manhattan. No wonder it's formally so dense. However 80% of Paris urban population actually lives outside of Paris. Second, mid rise is denser because it fits all urban purposes. Therefore the entire city can be made of mid rises, with a relatively modest suburban area, which on average will be much denser than typical US model of small high rise downtown and huge low rise sprawling suburbs. It's also way more viable for efficient public transit. (low rise can sustain pretty much only a basic bus service on its own). Adding that Europe default zoning is mixed use (and there are huge areas that are built up without zoning at all)
You’re totally right! Just to clarify for other people that La Defense is almost only office and hotel spaces so no permanent population stays there. There’s also the 13th and 15th arrondissements within Paris where some high rises can be found at 20+ stories
Great Video! I think the "tower in the park" is supposed to be suburban neighbourhood that replaces a block of single-family homes, as they are not hard to find in Paris surroundings. It's really not suppose to be compared with wall-to-wall mid/high rises. The "tower in the park" gets a lot of hate in Us-Canada because most of then are in the state of decay right now, but many of them are fairly well designed neighbourhood, with built-in shops and grocery stores, some with daycare facility, clinic and community centers, and interconnected with foot path.
modern suburbs in asia are all tower in the park. It combines the best elements of urbanism/ density (still higher density than most mid rise downtowns in the US) while still giving residents a good view and plenty of recreational space.
Tower in the park looks like Brezhnevka/campus brutalism to Americans. There is also a deep rooted suspicion in the US of "the home makes the man", i.e. put people in housing that resembles a prison, they will become criminals.
Tower in the park developments in the US were not typically used to replace single family homes. They were built primarily as public housing projects and destroyed historically black neighborhoods in the name of 'slum clearance'. They get an especially bad reputation due to the horrible upkeep of public housing projects in the United States, and the tendency to replace the 'park' with parking spaces. While the development pattern is not inherently flawed and has seen great success in Eastern nations it has a troubled history in the United States
In my life I've lived in everything from a dense apartment neighborhood (15 floors +) to a townhouse complex to a typical single-dwelling suburb to a small farm outside a major city. I've basically experienced it all. For me a medium density ( 2 - 5 floors) mixed use suburb is the Goldilocks zone. This sweet spot avoids the alienation of super-dense living and the morgue-like silence of suburbs. Dense enough so that everything is close by but open enough to have some elbow room.
The good answer is that you can have green space and density with high rises or density without green space to get the same density with mid rises. I'd like the green space.
Every one of the Paris examples had a nice private courtyard in the center. That is much better access to the green space than many of the high rise examples.
@@sambennett5441 The courtyard is often tiny and not somewhere to hang out because your are going to distrub each neighbor if you make any noise. I have lived in both classic midrises in Paris and highrises in its 13th district, and the quality of life is much better in the highrises.
@@sambennett5441 not really, Paris is overall not very green and very few Haussman apartment blocks have any green space in the internal courtyard. Not all of them even have a courtyard. Barcelona is a better example of housing blocks with an internal courtyard, though many of those courtyards have been filled in with other buildings instead of green (enforcing the rules to eliminate those buildings in the courtyard is difficult).
@@poshbo Yeah. I'd say you can get to densities of 30.000/km² relatively easily with mid-rises while still having adequate open and green spaces. 40k/km² is more challenging and beyond that it's impossible. If you mix mid- and lower high-rises densities of 70k/km² along with some decent open space should be easy.
@@bojstojsa7574 I guess if I designed a city from scratch it would look like Barcelona but with some high rises dotted around (both residential and commercial) and the internal courtyards of the midrise housing blocks being kept as green space). That kinda accords with that you're saying
As someone who lived in Paris, I am painfully aware of one aspect that everyone should consider when talking about densities achieved the same way: heat. While mid-rises are a good thing, and most often enough, packing them so close like that is a great way to get heat islands during summer. Nights can easily be as hot as during daytime, with no way to efficiently cool inside, apart from built-in air conditioning. And as summers tend to get hotter in average in Paris, this won't get better...
There's a lot of obsession with air flow in building planning, but most people don't live somewhere with perfect weather. Insulation is more important to retain heat or keep units cool, and closely spaced buildings are least affected by wrong temperature wind. As the climate gets worse, A/C has to be presumed. To omit A/C as many northern cities are doing is just hubris.
@@FullLengthInterstates I agree about insulation (and shutters!), but without air conditioning, it has its limits. During severe heat waves, even the best insulated places will get hotter to some degree in daytime, as there is no cooling. And during the night, as it's still hot outside, often above or near 30°C thanks to the heat island effect, there is still no effective cooling, so this will get worse from one day to another. Vegetation and water (ponds, canals, etc) are one good way to alleviate this, but the possibilities are limited in already dense areas.
The heat island effect seems to start at a relatively low impervious coverage. I travel almost every day from a rural area to a former streetcar suburb that is no more than 30% improved. The temperature increase from majority-wooded rural to city single-family is 5-6 F (straight suburban is actually a little more). High-rises with larger parks should help some, but probably not more than that single-family area.
@@josephfisher426 Indeed. Do you spend the nights there? This is at this period that the heat island effect is at its peak, when most buildings are made of concrete releasing heat collected during the day.
@@Kyragos Those are vehicle-based observations: generally afternoon and evening before midnight. Since it is a lower-density area, there isn't a great deal of mass for heat storage, and I believe that the difference dwindles to 2-3 F by the middle of the night. One city observation location (in a large park) even has one of the typical low minimum temperatures for the general area. When I lived in the city proper, I would guess it was another 2 F warmer there during the day and it was continuous.
An issue I’ve seen in the urbanist community since joining is that some people seem to have nostalgia for old European cities and want to just go back to that. And yes, old European cities have great urbanism and are proven to work, but it’s not the only way to do things. This isn’t too common within the urbanist community, but I’ve definitely run into this.
i'm glad you mentioned that the banlieuex of Paris are "another matter". more detail would have been good. it's also worth mentioning that the centre of Paris we so admire, is the result of a massive tearing down of what was there in the mid 1860s-70s. i don't think the same admiration would be expressed for what the Haussman scheme replaced.
Paris suburbs have incredibly diverse urban landscapes. Most inner suburbs of Paris are actually as densely built as Paris itself. Also with the Grand Paris Express metro lines that are being built a massive regeneration is going on.
As a planner in North America, I would LOVE if we could legalize the mid rise densities of Paris in most neighborhoods. I'd even settle for four stories. 😅
As a french that only slept 2 nights in Paris my entire life, I think What the U.S. lacks is mixing different stuff together. The example of N.Y. in the video shows 3 kinds of zones, but if you look a smaller cities in France, you may have mid rise downtown, But you really have a variety of buildings anywhere else. I may think of this small village around a train station, you have 2/3 stories between the station and the central plaza a few hundred meters down the road, plaza surrounded by 3/4 levels building with shops at street levels. On the other side of the rail is a cider factory, with a few single family homes in the woods further south. As for the norther part, you have 2/3 stories buildings along the "second main street" and single family homes on the alleys connecting this T shaped main road network. You also find 3 farms, one of which have been rehabilitated as low rent housing (a big farm building is cut into 5 or 6 homes ) and the other two have cows, masticating grass in their field between 2 or 3 stories apartments buildings... As you continue further north, the streets turns to a road, with small packs of 1 to 5 single family homes spread here and their, with or without a farm in the center, accessed by a small road you need to put your wheels in the grass if you encounter an other car going the other way... This totals less than a thousand people, most of the area is low density, but since there is this spot of lowish mid rise, it is still interesting to offer a train stop at the station, and to further connect other small villages of the same kind with a bus line. So the train will take you in the city center (half million people city) fast if you have some business in the "capital", or you can take the bus to the suburbs for work, or to see your friend in the next village, all of this with the peaceful picture of cows from the window of your bedroom The interesting feature of such a place is that it brings together a dense enough mix of affordable flats or raw homes, with a mix of medium income to a few kind of rich people (one of the single family home I speak of above hires 5 people just to clean the home, trim the grass, care for the horses, water the flower gardens, clean the dead wood in the forest etc... Their swimming pool have more surface than my entire lot^^) instead of segregating the top tier in gated "heaven". And for the North American planer, I hope that you will get to spread the message that this kind of development revolve around a car restricted (like, truck must go around, and small cars will struggle going 20mph without scratching their paint on the corners of planter or even just the narrow street) but the total area annoying for drivers is not even as large as a wall mart. So if you can do with no car within a wall mart, you can do with only a few slow cars in such a neighborhood ! And having a few shops and community livelihood will be a quality of life boost for all the single family homes around, while making transit an interesting option. After writing all that, I feel like "if you can park outside Wall Mart, you can park outside my mid-rise walls" is a first step before a native speaker finds a more perfect catchphrase for a 15min ci-tee-shirt
I think the point many people are trying to make is that you don't NEED skyscrapers to have high density. But what they fail to acknowledge is that you need to build a LOT of mid rises and build them close together, and for some reason they don't seem to want that either. So, yes, I agree with the conclusion of the video. 😂
Give me Paris! It makes New York feel like a small town. Skyscrapers are simply inefficient, and are a lazy solution for cities that are not urban to attempt urbanism without building dense.
Basically, Paris' densest Arrondissement is the 11th which is 40,000 people/sq km. Hong Kong's 4 districts in Kowloon are all denser, with Kwun Tong district having 60,000 people/sq km. Mid-rises are only "denser" if you restrict high-rises environments to having a lot of space in between the buildings.
I don't know Hong Kong, but I am ready to bet that the city have a very large and frequent train/metro/tram/bus public transit network that have more problems with overcrowded vehicles rather than U.S. problems of not closing down a bus line that carries 2 people at peek hour.
The reason people love Paris isn't the density but rather the beauty of the architecture and urban design, which didn't factor at all in this video. Modern architecture is ugly, especially in North America, no matter the height or density. Make density beautiful like Paris, and the NIMBYs will learn to shut up.
Los Angeles over here continues to shove all the mid-rise apartment density into small areas of the city and busy corridors while leaving the vats majority of the city for SFHs, it's a huge shame. I like the idea of uniform mid-rise density around the city with cluster nodes of high rises around transit and other high interest spots, but apparently even in the 2nd most populous city in the US Paris-tier density is a far cry away still. It's a shame there's basically no option for modest density city wide, it's really only pockets of neighborhoods in certain cities, leaving that to be out of price range for most people.
The problem with opposing tall buildings, it ignores the fact those buildings are being built in lower density cities. People in toronto want missing middle but then want SFH everywhere but select areas whereas MTL mostly have duplexes.
There is another problem with tall buildings in existing cities. Everywhere where I have seen it - they were built: 1. car-centric, they made traffic congestion worse. 2. add load to existing public transit and other infrastructure (which is usually already overloaded). 3. in worst case - they are built with not enough parking space.
When a country has more space allocated to car parking spaces than space allocated to the construction of residential buildings, I consider that it has a real problem.
Theres several things that are missing: 1. the width of streets. Taller buildings generally need much, much wider streets, which eats away a lot of that added density. Just compare New Yorks 6 lane streets with the tight alleys in the Quartier Latin. 2. Cost of skyscrapers. Skyscrapers are extremely expensive, to the point that it's just wayyy cheaper to build a Paris style city than a new New York. Even in New York, it would be much cheaper to rezone Staten Island and Queens to allow row houses and midrises, than to built even taller skyscrapers. Theres a reason why Europe, despite for centuries being the most densely populated continent, had no skyscrapers until very recently. They don't make economic sense. The only reason they appeared in the US was because of intense land speculation that artificially drove up land prices immensely.
Paris being very packed come at a cost, we have barely any greenspace in that city. This make the city not only hotter in the summer but also harder to cool down in the evening. Housing problem in Paris are primarily due to unoptimal use of appartments (either empty or not fully used) and housing assets always increasing (which is a global problem)
Paris has plenty of green space; too much green space is extremely bad for cities: it creates sprawl. A smart city is built dense enough that you can walk to a park instead of having parks at your doorstep.
@thebabbler8867 it is one of the worst in Europe in term of trees and park coverage, you can easily look it up. Also you seem to complete ignore my argument regarding how it help dealing with the heat in the summer. Paris has anything but "too much greenspace", also two of the biggest parks are beyond the Périphérique and part of the city administratively but not physically.
Yes the whole Paris thing is one of the worst, most frustrating anti-development arguments. Clearly Paris achieves its density by being almost entirely midrise which means that for a North American city other than NY, it would require the vast majority of existing buildings - which tend to be lowrises - be replaced with midrises. Yet the goal of most NIMBYs is to prevent neighbourhood change and they often oppose highrises on the grounds that they stick out and don't conform to the neighbourhood's "character". Yet somehow replacing almost all buildings would preserve neighbourhood character better than only replacing a few? It's clearly either ignorance or gaslighting.
During Haussmann's renovation of Paris, Haussmann demolished thousands of homes displacing 350,000 people in order to achieve the "Paris mid-rise density". So unless a NIMBY is willing flatten their home and be displaced in order to achieve the mid-rise density, the Paris argument is silly.
What’s missing from this debate is any discussion how purchasing power determines where people live. The simple fact is, wealthier people are going to buy/rent the most expensive housing, and the most expensive housing is going to be located in the most desirable areas of the city. Option A) the wealthy occupy a large number of mid-rise buildings, pushing poorer and poorer residents further and further away from desirable areas of the city. Option B) the wealthy occupy a small number of towers, allowing poorer residents to live closer to desirable areas of the city. You can’t talk about housing and affordability without realizing the rich buy first and the poor get the leftovers. If you want to live in a nice area of the city, then you should want those wealthier than you to take up less space in the city. That’s accomplished by building expensive high density towers marketed towards the rich, plain and simple.
The best place for rich people to live in is converted offices. Offices are difficult to convert to small residential units due to inadequate utilities and lack of windows, but that makes them perfect as a giant, low occupancy studio apartment, a pre built high rise mansion. towers are extra expensive in manhattan because of how tiny the lots are, hence the unique phenomena of "skinny tall" skyscrapers. disproportionate floor space is dedicated to shafts/ structure. proper cities have apartments that are both tall and wide and benefit much more from scale, so there's much more floor space available, and the homes are just lived in by regular people.
Honestly pretty insightful. But you have to have rich people desiring to live in such places. Here in Paris high rises are associated with poorer populations, and that mindset is very entrenched
A few comments about the Video. First of all it is clear that if you build the same building but one is double the height it's obviously going to be able to accommodate more people (although not exactly double as you do need to leave more room for non livable areas) but there are many other factors. To be clear, I'm not against high rises but they do pose a a financial problems for most people. I am all for the "Paris" way but whoever uses this as an example against tall buildings must accept this method which means very dense buildings with very few open areas. 1. taller buildings are more expensive. I'm not talking about building costs or higher prices of the apartments but about something people don't usually think about - maintenance is much higher and the taller the building the more it costs to maintain it, which is why many lower income high rises end up looking like slums. Most normal people cannot afford the monthly maintenance costs of such buildings. 2. You keep making comparisons between cities, like Paris, and a section of a city, like Manhattan. It's true that the density of the city is an average and there are places with lower and higher density but it's the same with any city so Paris is much denser than NYC and if you want to compare the densest area of NYC you should do it against the densest area of Paris, yes those areas are smaller but that true to the city itself and the size of it so it's relative comparison. You should also take into account that the numbers are calculated differently as the numbers for US cities are usually calculated from the land area only, something that does not exist in other cities that uses the total area. 3. Another reason for higher density is that apartments are in Paris are smaller, which is perfectly fine but most Americans (and Canadians) will have a problem with that. 4. There is a limit of how many people can live in a reasonably comfortable way and you cannot densify a city with no limits (you can, but life will be unbearable). In a place like Paris people prefer the lower houses and accept the compromises but it's still in the limit of living well and still having enough personal space. A place that does not want to go that way but needs to densify must build high rises.
Paris mostly gets it high density by two aspects: The almost complete absence of _low_ (1-2 floors) buildings and the legal definition of the city. Paris is still just it's medieval core; all the outer parts (even those developed in the 19th century) are independent cities.
When you say that Manhattan is denser than Paris using 29k/sqm vs 21k/sqm To which I'll reply with two things: 1. Paris density number includes le Bois de Boulogne and le Bois de Vincennes which are actually outside of Paris (idk if your Manhattan numbers include Central Park, but it is defacto inside of Manhattan) 2. Removing these gives you a more accurate number. e.g. Paris 11th arrondissement has a density of 49k/sqm
6:20 "for better or worse, we have more expectations of space these days, for reasons of light and air" Definitely for better. Darkness, mold and lack of ventillation of tightly packed back-houses is definitely not something urbanists should want to return to.
I was at a hearing about a new mid rise project in Toronto the other day, in a very boring car centric suburb. All the home owners basically opposed the plan because, and I quote: "We don't want apartment people in our neighbourhood". "Apartment people", the newest euphemism for: Low income, blacks, immigrants. (Or even worse: Low income black immigrants). Nimbysim is just another offsprint of racisms quite honestly. So embeded in our North american culture.
Idea: let's allow both styles, put them in various cities or various parts of cities. Maybe there is no answer which one is "better", as some people simply prefer one over the other. Once we reach the stage of calibrating the correct amount of each style, we have really come a long way.
I’d love it if someone made a video on the drawbacks of Parisian architecture especially the Hausman bits. Like I personally love it but one cant straight up copy it you have to learn from it. Like how would one improve fire safety, accessibility (lifts), natural light access, ventilation and thermal comfort, general feng shui vibes, waterproofing, acoustics, green space, etc?
Agree with all of this. But i think its important to also not overlook beauty. Its hard to imagine paris without these beautiful buildings, and high rises simply cant compete with this architectural class. Coming from somebody who lives in the ugliest european capital (athens) visiting paris was a breath of fresh air.
Well, the tall towers have a place in city centres I think. However, I do _love_ the look of Paris' medium density - and where I live, NIMBYs would lose their mind at the concept of anything more dense than separated townhouses.
As someone from Paris, I have such hard time picturing New York City, to the point ive watched walk-throughs and tried to google map to get my head around it, and I kinda do now
The comparison is somewhat misleading as the average population density of Paris is tanked by a handful of arrondissements (1st, 7th, 8th) that host most of the country's government buildings, embassies, many museums and institutions, etc. Most arrondissements have between 23k and 40k inhabitants on average. The 11th arr has a 40k population density, and my neighborhood has a 45k population density. That's not even accounting for the recurring underestimation of the population in Paris (even in public housing). When advocating for mid-rise density, the 11th, 19th, or 20th are good examples. They have neighborhoods exceeding 45 or 50,000 inhabitants per square kilometer.
manhattan's "daytime population" (counting office workers, tourists etc) literally triples from ~1.5M to ~5M. so if we're counting average occupants, manhattan wins even more
@@OhTheUrbanity I specifically didn't mention corporate offices and commercial buildings because there are tons also in Paris. But there is less land area occupied by national government buildings and institutions in Manhattan than in Paris. About two thirds of the 1st, 7th, and 8th are government and institutions. The 16th also hosts tons of embassies and consulates. Paris is a bit like a peach, the truly representative part is the fleshy portion of the fruit minus the pit. 😀
@@FullLengthInterstates Paris too, as it often passes 6 million on weekdays, but we're talking inhabitants, not just living souls in a given perimeter at a given instant.
Always wondered if some neighborhoods could adopt a development model that allows new developments to be a certain amount of stories over the average in a neighborhood ie, if someone bought a plot in a suburban development where the average height is 1 story, the new development would max at 3 or 4. as time went on, the average number of stories would increase, allowing new development to go to 5-8, etc
Paris is way too densely populated, which results in constant noise, traffic, pollution, litter, cramped apartments, making it hard to drive, hard to park... Every street and restaurant and shop is always crowded, and the high-ish and tightly packed building blocks everywhere cause some kind of constant low-level claustrophobic feeling. I get that many cities need to address housing shortages and excessive urban sprawl, but this solution might actually make things worse in my opinion
@@OhTheUrbanity That's not a very insightful answer. Many people live in big cities despite hating it for the job opportunities of said cities. WIth this same reasoning of "people live there because they like it", you surely believe people enjoy living in slums and favelas? Else they would move somwhere else.
@@chienbanane3168 You're saying that people dislike some aspects of cities but live there anyway because those factors are outweighed by better opportunities in the city. But setting a population/density cap and forcing low-income people to move away doesn't fix that. They'll still have to commute in for the opportunities or live somewhere else with worse opportunities.
@@OhTheUrbanity I see your point, but I definitely think it needs to be balanced against the negatives of an overcrowded environment. Most people would choose a longer commute over living in a 3m² apartment, but they might still have to live in those apartments if city planners decided building them was the way forward, as having a job is not a preference but a necessity. My point is that Paris is already past the point of the cons outweighing the pros, of course there is subjectivity in this claim but for example : commuting to and from work takes me 1 hour and 15 minutes twice a day, despite being only a 11Km (7 miles) distance. Commuting the same distance to and from downtown L.A. would only take around 20min
Basic geometry still stands of course. But in practice high buildings will almost always take up space around them such that the density increase is rather limited. Manhattan and Hong Kong are exceptions but this is due to very stringent historical constraints on islands, besides building so high is very expensive. Psychologically the vertical dimension is more impressive than the two horizontal ones such that particularly slender highrises rather give an illusion of density than providing it. The most dense cities on earth suprisingly often look more like Paris than American downtowns. This is because it works better in practice and functions can be mixed better in mid-rises. One has to look to whole cities rather than single buildings. Of course this doesn't mean that there is anything wrong with high-rises or American downtowns with nice skylines. But it does illustrate how skyscrapers are almost never really *needed* for a reasonable density and are more of a stylistic (expensive) choice. That is more the argument I think.
Urban density will ultimately be determined by available resources and most importantly available energy. High rises need elevators and public transportation require electricity which requires fuel. A good reference on how current low density suburbs can be redesigned to increase density is : Planning the New Suburbia Flexibility by design, Avi Friedman, UBC Press 2002. For long term low energy cities a good reference is : Carfree Cities. J H Crawford , International Books, 2000
I like the idea of a single or two high-rises per block among mid-rises. Of course, it doesn't work in cities with classic architecture to maintain but in new developing cities experiencing an economic boom, maybe it does. You keep walkability and mixed-use spaces, but avoid that "lonely tower in a park" effect, while maintaining visibility and sun access for the mid-rises.
I would suspect a good bit of the offset of the large towers is not only tower in park but also has to do with foundation work and utility lines. The main argument ive heard is that its cheaper to build eruo style townhouses and midrises because once u get above a certian hight the cost of adding floors increases often significantly, thus creating the case you see in america where towers are for rich people
they use that argument in my city but I don't really buy into it because the cost of buying land and maintaining properties can get really expensive and it's slower. so think about the cost to get 1 project approved, and the cost to get 3-4-5- projects approved. so yes steel is expensive but so is land and other costs
Honestly half the critics tell me that high-rises are just "luxury housing for the rich" and the other half tell me they're "ghetto slums for the poor".
@@Lildizzle420 One thing you may not have thought of is that higher buildings are usually going to be entirely customized. 4 and 5 story buildings, and 5-over-1s, are a lot of copy and paste; every discipline of the designers doesn't need to do as much work as a high-rise requires. Anyway it all adds up...
The problem with highrises is sustainability - they cost more, take more time to build and have greater wear and tear for elevators, sewage and water infrastructure, so it cost more to own a house in a highrise.
All those things are true but some people are prepared to pay the premium to be closer to places of employment, culture, education or whatever they value. The free market should have a stronger role (not an unlimited role) in determining if tall buildings are allowed.
@@zen1647citis are for everyone, not just for rich ones. And housing crisis is nothing that the rich are concernd with. They can put up with the exploding rents. It needs affordable housing, not just more more housing that realisticly nobody can rent🤦♂️
What people don’t realize is that Haussmann’s plan dislocated 1000s and disrupted Paris for years, and like the Eiffel Tower, the newly built urban area was severely criticized by many as being too cookie cutter, with every block looking the same, and very little green space at first. So the NIMBYs have always been with us, and nothing except another single family home in a neighbourhood of the same will be tolerated. In fact I’ll go even further, in my city Vancouver, people get their knickers in a knot if the new single family home doesn’t LOOK like the others in the neighbourhood, no matter how architecturally excellent it might be. A contemporary house, even if its scale is sensitive to its neighbours, and with complimentary finishes, is hated or rejected because it doesn’t fit in with the 1920s Craftsman Bungalow aesthetic, a design I personally love, but realize it is not for everyone, and if someone is paying 2 million for a 33x100 piece of dirt, they’re going to want to build something a bit bigger that a 1200sf single story house, and do we really want any civic government to be able to say no, absolutely not, to that proposal? Both sides have to find some middle ground and be willing to compromise to find sustainable and livable solutions. It doesn’t do any good to be judged a very livable city, if nobody else can live there.
I'm all for Paris-style density, but I promise I've only ever deployed this as an argument for approving mid-rise, not to oppose high-rise. I was also thinking that Manhattan can be an example of density done wrong, but entirely because of the roads, not because of the buildings.
Excellent video. I wish our big cities weren’t so broken. Until then, I’ll continue to live in smaller cities, so I don’t have to choose between astronomical housing costs or long, crowded commutes.
Thanks! this brings a new perspective and new concept which I haven't heard of... FSI is all that I am aware of but FAR is something new I will learn more about it... .
"The Empire state building doesn't take full advantage-" translates to "i don't think that access to light is important at all and it's objectively better to have a fugly brick turned on its ultrautilitarian end"
There is a new project in Montreal of 5,000 units at Molson s brewery ( dated 1786) complex next to the st -Lawrence river . Including a community center , a historical park ( Molson family ) and a school close buy . Access by ferry to St-Helene island will also be part of the development.
now that you mention FAR, I feel like that's something that I haven't seen in urbanist videos in a while. It was one of the earliest things mentioned in the one class I took called American Urban History, but it's a metric that I don't really see a lot
Even just making all zoning mixed use and banning surface parking lots in favor of parking garages would be a massive win for walkability without changing housing density. Small towns like Medina, Ohio are that way, the airbnb I stayed at was a house with a spacious yard yet was a short, safe, comfortable and interesting walk to the town square. There were businesses among the houses as well.
High rises will definitely allow more green space... however, one of the things they will always require from the developer's perspective is GREAT infrastructure. Pre-existing great infrastructure. There may not be an expectation that people will be using cars to access it, but it still needs to be at the intersection of 2-lane roads or be at the intersection of a large road and a train line to get the connectivity to sustain the demand that it needs to be a good investment.
The Y shape buildings stacks its human occupants, on a small percentage of the plot, but uses the largest part of the plot to store cars on the ground floor. Apparently, cars deserve more space than people.
I think you're going to have to make a part two of this video. I don't think that they * some in the comment section understand what you're trying to get at So at this you're talking about whether density is more in mid-rise cities versus high-rise cities. But your goal is to tell why sometimes you need high-rises. Here's the thing. Paris is in a very expensive city with very high cost of living. Maybe it could benefit with some high-rises to can housing more affordable. Like what if it added five extra stories on a traditional Paris style building. Zagguart or stagnate them for light purposes the higher stories tho. Maybe it wouldn't be that big of a deal if it was like that.
Great video. The "towers in the park" concept is quite common in the UK and normally are very ugly brutalist old social housing blocks built decades ago. This is I think one of the reasons why many people here are against tall buildings.
Concrete brutalism has been damned in the US for a long time. It is common on college campuses, and the best way to think about it is that many dystopian films have used them as a backdrop. Kind of a "we think you are ugly" message from Hollywood.
One argument I’ve heard against high rises is that they don’t foster community whereas mid-rises are more likely to. High rises are said to result in more anti-social behaviour as a result. The person I heard that from cited Dublin as a place where this was studied. There are apparently a lot of mid rise apartment buildings. Any thought on this?
The lack of more dense building in the US have a lot of consequences, like the fact that most of their public transport are trash. I mean most of the US public transport aren't owned by the states but by private company who only seek profit, which mean each bus/métro/train stop must earn profit. And if you lack of more dense area, it's difficult for these private company to put profitable station. Even city like los angeles have trash system sadly. PS: also if the US rely more on public transport, they could reduce the wast number of parking lot they have. In some place it's more than 50% of their cites, no wonder why they aren't more dense. But it seem to be a vicious circle
While I personally think row-homes are peak housing, Paris style is great and high rises are great if dense enough. I don't think my town could survive it though, practically a riot over one small 6 story, in a completely built-up area.
Why do North American condos have such inefficient parking? Put in a underground lot or a multilevel parking. It would also reduce car theft and break ins.
@@Urbanhandyman The fact that most people are economically illiterate is why democracy is failing us right now. If everyone was made to study economics in high school, democracy would be very good.
Usually because land was cheap, there are a lot of cars, and condo dwellers don't deserve good green space. Older inner city neighbourhoods are often pretty nice because they were laid out before mass car ownership. Condo buildings were often built later, after suburban car-centric sprawl, so are further from the city center and near newer low density residential areas without amenities. They're the cheaper housing where people go because higher transport costs are cheaper than the higher housing costs to get a condo near the city centre. Condos in more central areas usually do have undeground parking because of higher land costs, but that also gets quite expensive as bigger buildings need deeper excavations. Some also have a mix of underground and surface parking. Some of them offer an opportunity to now redevelop their large surface parking areas into new homes though, as the city has grown up more around them, and the new buildings can provide underground parking (and less parking per home may even be needed as the area around them has developed and is less car-dependent)
NIMBY: Tall buildings are unnecessary! Paris works entirely off of dense midrise buildings!
Me: Great! Let's do that.
NIMBY: ...no.
Dense midrises are a better alternative than tall buildings, but not a better alternative to single family dwellings, at least according to the people who own the land such projects would be built on.
@@timogul _"according to the people who own the land"_ -- I'm not sure that's correct. I agree, for people who already own a structure on the land, of course they want housing shortages, to keep their real estate values propped up.
But I would expect people who just own raw land, to likely prefer zoning that allows higher density, because a developer can make more money from high density construction than single-family detached housing, and so that would make the value of the land itself higher, since those developers are then going to be among the parties interested in buying it.
@@harvey66616 Hypothetical people who might eventually own some land do not get a vote. Only actual people who actually own land. People who are developing land want low density housing, because it's more profitable. If high density housing were more profitable, then there would be a lot more of it.
@@timogul I have no idea what hypothetical people you're talking about. I didn't mention any.
As for your other two claims they are patently false. *Developing* land as low density is *not* more profitable.
As for your claim that if higher density development was more profitable there would be more of it fails to account for the zoning issues, i.e. the whole point of this video and others like it. Cities lack the density they need because entrenched interests want to keep supply low and retail prices of real estate high, not because developers prefer low density development or make more money on low density development.
@@harvey66616 Of course developing land for low density is more profitable, because you can sell the properties for more money. This is property developers' entire jobs, to buy properties and then upgrade them and sell them for more. Do you think they haven't considered building higher density projects before? You might argue that on a _single_ plot of land higher density might bring more money, but it's diminishing returns, because the higher the density on a single plot of land, the lower the value all around it, so a typical development project will involve multiple properties at once. They want to increase the value of _all_ of them.
Most of the US unfortunately seems to consider those mid-rise Paris buildings as high rises. You want 6 stories?! What is this, Manhattan?!
Also, I've seen complaints about the height of 2 story buildings at planning and zoning hearings - from neighbors who live in taller also-two-story single-family homes and just don't like any apartments at all.
The US need a a lot more mid rises and high rise buildings
Also the hypocrisy have don't have to go far to find a Shitsville Indiana type town of 5000 people with a ten storey building at its heart to prove the yokels are sophisti-macated like NYC 😊
Many of the nimbys fear supposed "riff-raff" moving into the neighborhood
Haha, 6 floors isn't jack. What we need is 10-15 floor housing everywhere in cities.
Great overview of FAR! Also, the "towers in the park" concept (popularized by Le Corbusier) has always been a bit dubious, but even more so when the 'park' is almost entirely just a giant surface parking lot...
If it was an actual park, with good transportation, commerce, maybe some buildings as offices to encourage said commerce, it could be fantastic.
But the moment it becomes a car park, it's just doomed. The worst is they could put the car park underground.
Towers in the park is really common in eastern Europe and usually it's an actual park with lots of playgrounds, greenery, schools, shops, and other amenities. They're quite nice.
@@gavinkemp7920 this is precisely what StuyTown, referenced in the video, is like. It’s actually quite livable despite the fact that the housing stock is kinda bland and ugly. My girlfriend lived there when we first started dating and it was always good to visit (albeit she did live on the edge of the development furthest from transit so it was never fun to visit her apartment specifically 😅)
@@gavinkemp7920 We do this a lot in sweden and yeah it's perfectly fine, it's not super amazing but it has upsides and downsides like anything else.
@@gavinkemp7920 but it's impossible for every park in a "tower in the park" to be like that. Also, residents of the apartment tower may not want so many members of the public to get so close to their residences. I personally prefer the apartment blocks of Barcelona, which mostly all have a sizable internal courtyard which can house green space soley for the residents. Unfortunately many of those courtyard have been filled in with buildings, but if the original design was respected and enforced with laws then it could work very well
seems a few early comments are missing the point of the video. It's only a 7:30 long video, and the thesis is very concise. There are a lot, lot of other factors at play in other cities, but this video only addresses density of mid rise vs high rise in different city configurations. Not affordability, not liveability, not connectivity, etc. (at least, not as a focus.)
Yep, its concentrated about density, nothing else.
Density is just one factor in the grand scheme of things.
What (non-urbanist) people actually like about Paris's mid-rises is the architectural style, not the density or the height.
Do you mean Paris’ mid-rises?
They absolutely love the density too, but they either don't realise it or have false preconceptions about why it "can't work back here"
@@barryrobbins7694 yeah thanks, let me edit that
Just speculating, I really don't know a lot about all of this, but maybe they also like the sense of enclosure
@@etiennelevesque6015 Right, I'm really just pointing out that nimbys might be more accepting of new development if we focused on creating picturesque architectural facades in addition to functionality.
I live in a Paris suburb. Even in my suburb the density is about 7500/sq km or 19000/sq mile. There are some individual houses, but packed together in small lots, and lots of midrise buildings with 4-7 stories downtown.
We still have 2 train stations and buses every 10 min. About half the people in my city including me don't have cars. You can walk to the pharmacy, post office, bakery, hair salon, vet, doctor, and small supermarket...
When I lived in FL, I had to drive everywhere... Making me walk places has really helped my health.
To be fair the need to drive everywhere in the US isn't just density.
A big part of it is also that there's basically zero commercial zoning in subburds/near subburds.
I grew up in a subburd that was technically a food desert. (Neerest supermarket was about 5km away. 1km away is enough to be qualified as a food desert). When a grocery chain tried to open up a grocery in an abandoned pool store (which would have been about 1km away from my house) the city refused. Instead that abandoned building stayed in zoning limbo and is still abandoned a decade later.
I think the best case for midrise housing is when it's cheaper per unit and floor area than a highrise. Increasing height helps to offset the land value, but at a certain height, the increasing complexity of construction and overhead from amenities makes it so the building becomes more expensive per livable area as you increase height
The goal the construction industry wants to achieve is to raise that first economic barrier to height. Make things less prone to become more complex as you get higher. It used to be like 3-4 stories, then it was 7-8 and now it's 12 stories before any major complications emerge.
Add to that the fact it becomes painfully windy and cold to have a balcony/open space anywhere above mid rise height, so it feels much more like a prison than a home for residential.
In the only city I lived, there was a single residential complex above medium "single digit number of floors". They sold well at first, but nobody wants to live there anymore, there are tons of empty apartments on the higher levels, even the few "luxurious". Just because it is too high for comfort.
Not to mention, low and mid rises are better for promoting community, as you still get the feeling of connection to the street and the ground.
In Buenos Aires the land price is usually directly tied to the zoning code. So the price of a plot of land will depend on how many square maters you can develop on it (among other things like location).
Unless you plan to make the empire state housing complex, high rises, on average, are cheaper per unit than mid-rises but more expensive to maintain. That maintenance cost is often why high rises get abandoned, or turned into a slum in the long run.
As a Parisian, I will add a 3rd argument as to why I prefer mid-rises : It's much more human scaled.
Everybody hates "La defence", the office high-rises neighbourhood right outside of Paris because of its sense of gigantism that goes along with it. Even though it's quite nice seeing it from afar, walking through it is not pleasant at all and besides white collars, nobody is happy to go work in these giant skyscrapers.
At the end, I will trade the highest density high-rise for a reasonable density compacted mid-rise every day of the week.
I find here in Vancouver, excluding the city centre, the use of highrises mixed with midrise on major corridors and then mid-rise between (replacing the old (1940s and earlier primarily) single-occupancy houses built on them, none of which were built to last), creates a nice mix - you still get to leverage height, but it's not crowded, since it isn't walls and walls of towers (looing at YOU waterfront Toronto lol).
Human scale is a great way to put it. I honestly think a 5 over 1 design throughout as much of the city as possible is the way to go. The city is a better more lively place when street corners have a shop or cafe or restaurant. 2 story or 3 story is a waste of land but build too tall and the people inside live at the mercy of their elevator. My elevator went out over Xmas but even my mother in her '70s was able to climb the stairs to the 4th floor.
I think Singapore is a good example on how to use a highrise building to increase density. Most buildings is around 8 to 16 storeys high or sometimes higher. It's sparse enough to let a lot of greenery around it, but too wide to become 'a building in the middle pf parking sea/featureless grass'.
I think such a mix of mid-rises and less tall (under 30 storey) high-rise buildings is a very good idea for many high-demand inner city neighbourhoods.
I can't say that my experience living here in this Yishun neighborhood is typical of all of Singapore but I don't see a lot of greenery around. Most buildings are close together for walkability. Maybe in the newer estates there might be more greenery.
@@waisinglee1509 the oldest buildings in Yishun date back from 1976. It's likely that these will be redeveloped by the HDB within the decade.
Depending on the climate of the area, building denser leaving no site space left may not be best. In Paris it may work, as huddling close together conserves heat, but Singapore being *very* tropical needs that porosity dense midrise rows simply do not have. I think more spaced highrises work better the hotter the climate gets, so as you get denser you get more air space.
@@waisinglee1509I think they mean that NParks does a good job planting trees all over the place as compared to other cities lol
Love the little chuckle I get every time you use one of those awful “no zoning changes” signs our Alx NIMBYs designed in MS Paint
The guy who distributed them just ran for council this year, and got absolutely crushed ❤
It’s a red herring argument lol they never actually want Parisian density, they just want to stop any development that’s not low density. It’s like when people say people are all for cycling, but not without removing lanes, parking or any other inconvenience to cars.
I want parisian density. most european urbanists are like that.
This is the kind of video that is why I love your channel. Good, concise, cuts straight to the point without getting too bogged down in the wrong points. There are many benefits to mid-rises. But they should be used as an improvement over inefficient low-density development, not used to hold back high-density development in pursuit of some theoretical "perfect" state. Because if you're just suggesting cutting the height of a building in half without also pushing for building a second building to make up for it, you're just advocating for less housing and less density, rather than actually helping to achieve these goals in the optimal way.
Especially if they oppose high rises because they're more expensive to build and "we need affordable homes, not expensive market-rate towers", but then don't make it any easier to build midrise non-market housing (n.b. Jericho Lands).
When those high rises even include below market housing, making them smaller directly reduces the amount of below market homes being created.
Midrise neighborhoods like in Paris has as drawback that you live pretty close to your neighbors. On the other hand, they reach the critical density to have basically any service you need in shops immediately below your appartment, which makes them very lively. Considering Paris suburbs, they actually offer super diverse urban landscapes. Inner suburbs are just as dense as Central Paris, and even most of remote suburbs are actually denser than the typical US suburbs.
There's not a single place in America that comes close to the density of Paris except for Manhattan. ALL of America's cityscapes are not truly urban, but are actually suburban, because they're comprised of an overwhelming majority of single family homes.
As a Parisian, I'm pretty sure NIMBYs would NEVER DARE to allow their neighbourhoods to get as dense as Paris. They also don't realize our flats are SUPER SMALL compared to American standards of living. It's normal for a mid-class Parisian family to live in half of what their American counterparts would accept. I'm living with 2 people in a 38sqm flat, I'm the lucky one with the only bedroom, my friends sleep in a small 4sqm closet with a window (technically too small to be called "a bedroom") and the living room. I doubt Americans would accept that lol
So yeah, if Americans are willing to go back to the density they used to have in cities with mid-rise buildings everywhere (in cities), sure you might not need high-rise or not as much, or at least concentrate those elsewhere like we did with La Défense. But that's not gonna happen.
American housing affordability issues are largely caused by legal occupancy limits and practical occupancy limits. Americans complain about house prices but we focus on "average house price", because we know our price per square ft is actually very low.
While culturally Americans don't like small apartments and tenements, there are a lot of homeless people/ poor renters paying 60% of their income, who would love a smaller room. The floor for rent is $700-$1000/month right now, the difference is that gets you a room in a major city, or a 750sf/70m2 apartment in a rural town. Wouldn't it be nice if the rural town also had small rooms available so renters could really save money?
Yes, Central Paris appartments are super small. Yet appartments are larger in the midrise buildings that are being built all around in the Paris suburbs.
Americans actually do live in tiny appartments just like you describe, like for example in New York or Los Angeles. I am not saying that this is a good thing. I think we can all agree that at a certain point quality of life really starts to suffer when you decrease the size of your living space. I know for example how it is to share a 44 sqm appartment with another person, it's cramped but not awful. I also think that Americans are willing to accept less living space if they can gain something else in return. There is a reason people pay sky-high rents in some cities. And I think Americans are no exception.
The sqm price is more expensive in the US than in France and the quality of housing isn't even there. You compare apples and oranges. Real estate isn't more expensive in Paris than in NYC, LA, San Francisco or other big American cities.
The French don't like living in houses too big for their needs. That's why there are many cheap big empty houses in France. In Paris more than the population lives alone, the rest mostly couples. They don't need big apartments and sharing an apartment or even a bedroom isn't a thing like in the cities listed above. Those who want to live in big houses simply buy or rent big houses.
Oh, and just as a reminder, in Paris, most of what is today an apartment complex with 6 stories of 2 or 3 apartments per level, used to be a single family home, with kitchen and dining room at street level, office and living room above, bedrooms for parents and children in upper floors, and maids bedroom under the rooftop.
on the flip side, paris’ building codes of “no more than 7 stories” is ironically causing its own housing crisis. every city needs to be more flexible to to meet its own demand.
This is incorrect. Limit is 37 meter, which can be 12 stories. The issue is almost all land is already developed. Existing buildings need to be taken down or made higher.There are *many* projects across Paris that transform 5-story buildings into taller ones. But this is a costly affair, and it's only adding handfuls of extra homes at a time.
It's expensive to tear down and replace. You have to pay for the land, building, demo, and disposal.
After the dissolution of the Soviet Union.There is one area in Moscow called the business district. Because all the skyscrapers are built.Right after the liberalization of building height regulations .
Because NYC doesn't have an even worse housing crisis than Paris? Please 😂😂😂 They do not need to build higher, they need to invest in the suburbs where there are still countless opportunities for housing development and fully integrate them into an ensemble with the city economically and transportation wise. Newsflash, they're already doing that. It's called the Grand Paris, and it's going to be a game changer.
@@GrandPoivron sorry, 12 stories. but this arbitrary limit causes its own problems, like you mentioned. its not worth it to build up only a couple more stories.
It's true that you need high rises to achieve higher density than Paris, but i dont think that any city really needs to be denser than Paris
Shouldn't density be determined by how many people want to live there?
@@OhTheUrbanity A city should accomodate however many it can while maintaining its spirit/identity and history.
In the case of Paris I think it would suffer if they started building more Montparnasse towers in the otherwise uniform and coherent hausmann centre. its in parisians interest to avoid Brusselization, both for economic reasons and quality of life. To densify, maybe they could crack down on empty housing held as assets, or airbnbs ect. make better use of their existing housing stock. make sure the housing there exists for housing people, and not as speculation.
There is also already plenty of space to densify the outskirts much of which has single family houses, even in areas that are well served by transit. there is no sense in that really. Perhaps also building dense/tall housing near La Défense, where there already is an established skyline of mostly offices. there is plenty of space in Paris, without even touching the centre that much.
@@OhTheUrbanityTall buildings are terrible to live in. For instance, most of the highrises in New York cap out on the tenth floor: nobody wants to live higher than that, because transportation becomes inefficient. Waiting on elevators gets old.
@@OhTheUrbanity It should be up to the state to encourage economic development in a way that evenly distributes it amongst more cities, much how mid rise housing are better than towers, mid size cities are better than megacities. 10 1 million inhabitants cities is better than 1 10 mil inhabitants one.
Exactly. There's the obvious livability factor (people want to live there but if even more people got there it would be Kowloon, and not that many people want to live like that).
Beyond that, there's the resource and energy efficiency argument (for economical and environmental reasons). Dense habitats are more efficient than sparse ones, UP to a certain point, after which adding more floors because wasteful. And that point happens to be the height/density of Paris.
I'm not saying it's a perfect city, far from that, but it just happens to exist near the golden mean that should serve as example for others
There are a few things that help to make mid-rise neighborhoods more popular. 1. Ornament. Bigger buildings are more imposing and ornament softens the presence of a building, especially organic ornament that reminds us of trees and flowers. The street becomes an art gallery and individual houses within the block get personality. 2. Shops, cafés on the ground floor. The anonymity of big buildings is compensated with social connection on the street level. 3. Keep the courtyards inside the blocks spacious and green. While the streets can be busy, the courtyards can have gardens or be like a small park. Children can play safely.
but apparently courtyards should be closed to the public to keep it safe for kids. like courtyards for building community.
@@yay-cat Where I lived courtyards were open. I also know places where courtyards are open at certain times.
I think high rise housing in the US suffers from the stigma of public housing projects from the 60s and 70s
And threat they pose to property values. A lot of people don’t want a glut in the housing market
@@ecurewitz mainly because their houses are their main investments. They lose the value of their house, they lose all of their wealth.
That's even more true in France. It's such a challenge to build high rise housing in France because they are associated to poor public housing neighbourhood. Everyone wants to build midrise instead because that's where the traditional Parisian bourgeoisie lives. And that's actually what is getting built in all Paris suburbs.
This is racial/cultural in nature, and has no acceptable solution yet. It is not simply black culture that causes flight, but sometimes just xenophobia against foreign cultures that causes diversity to die and housing in general to become stacked with one ethnicity or culture.
@@ecurewitz Property value loss used to be dealt with back in the day by using "Jewish lightning." Landlords would intentionally have accidents or neglect maintenance until the inevitable happened, then collect on the insurance.
This channel improves my ability to argue for more housing more than anything else I consume.
The density achievable by mid rise cities is very important for weaker economies that still want the benefits of urbanism but do not have the land value to sustain skyscrapers. Since mid rises are viable everywhere from downtowns to rural towns.
but skyscrapers help to maximize the value of a city if you want the best transit, best land use, best agglomeration and more urban green space.
The way I see it, skyscrapers are the end goal, the "ideal" of urbanism, but mid-rises are the much more achievable "sweet spot" on the way to get there that have most of the same benefits for a fraction of the cost.
That being said, chiding a place for not focusing on mid-rises when they've went all the way to skyscrapers - as it so often happens in North America - is just outright stupid.
The "Paris vs Hong Kong" argument that is so often brought up is also idiotic. Hong Kong is not some hellhole compared to Paris. From what I've heard from my Hong Kong friends, the people in Hong Kong tend to love their built environment. It's other issues such as cost of living, over-financialization or that-one-party that are bringing down their quality of life.
@@Meta7 I feel like i'm going insane. why do urbanists want skyscrapers? They're disgusting to look at and live in
@@jenm1 You're obviously starting this argument in bad faith so I'm not gonna bother but basically, a skyscraper allows you to go everywhere you need to go on a daily basis without even leaving the building and get run over by some F-150 truck. That and to me, looking at the cityscape from the 40th floor is cool.
If your ideal life is staring at nature or a yard all day, all the power to you. But having nothing around but trees is pretty boring to me.
@@Meta7 Why would you assume I'm starting in bad faith lol? I'm far left dude. I support density. What a straw man you created out of nothing. I live in NYC. I'm asking why people want more of this? There's no space for human beings yet it's somehow crammed. And fyi, I don't support suburbia or yards but thanks for starting *your* argument in bad faith.
@@jenm1 Also, for what it's worth, skyscrapers are really out of the way. If you hate skyscrapers, they don't take up much space for everyone else who prefers other lifestyles.
A single skyscraper can house as many skyscraper-lovers as an entire suburban neighborhood or rural village, if not more.
To discuss housing density without discussing public transport is a serious omission.
Much of central Paris and New York are dense as people don't need to park at night, therefore less space for cars.
Suburbia uses more cars and needs lower density to accommodate them.
thats BS.....Suburbia uses cares because it was specifically designed to be car dependent. One or 2 parking spaces dont take THAT much amount of square footage. And most regular suburban streets are too wide for the amount of traffic=even more waste of space.
Largely, my attitude is that I wouldn't live in a high-rise block of flats myself, but I think they can work well in some contexts, especially for student accommodation. My city is seeing a lot of this kind of development of late. It has much more potential for profit than plebeian housing, and Brits still haven't been fully convinced to give up their private gardens. It's a pity because the main reason for this explosion in student accommodation is not for the purpose of consolidating existing students away from other housing stock, but because a new university campus is under construction. My overriding impression is that the private sector is not willing to fix our burgeoning housing crisis while there is easier money to be made elsewhere.
Another thing is that Paris *has* tall buildings. The suburbs have plenty, but you can also find some in the inner city (Italie XIII and Front de seine)
if nimbys started using paris' midrises as an argument against tall buildings, and started advocating to build midrises to 'avoid' building high rises
id support them
i think the second point you used as an example for what they say isnt actually a bad thing, building many mid rises does provide the same housing as few high rises, and does so cheaper and without standing out in the location as badly
the reason tall apartments get made in suburbs(which nimbys oppose) is because theres only a few bits of land zoned for it, so builders bid up the price, which means they need to build higher to recoup cost
Coruscant or bust
Edit: jokes aside, at this point I feel like North American cities need to hire people from Korea, Japan, China, and France to come to our cities and help us unf*ck this situation
Coruscant is not that dense, as counter intuitive as it sounds, with only about 1000B people on a planet wide 5000+ floors. It was calculated it sure wasn't close to be as dense as Hong Kong's Kowloon.
@@mariannerichard1321
I guess most of the planet is completely empty, because what we see in the films is extremely dense.
Whoever said Coruscant has 1 trillion people didn't know enough mathematics too realise that it's not enough.
@@موسى_7 I would guess, there are some floors where they have giant warehouses where they do vertical farming, someone needs to feed these 1T mouths.And probably quite some industrial space as well. Maybe even huge indoor gardens, some no go space in ruins, public aquariums, etc.
@موسى_7 isaac Arthur did the calcs. Every km square geodesic could have a single 100 storey building on the vertex and all the land in between empty. Would result in several trillion people in those buildings
Unfortunately Japanese have not been able to undo their own similar mess in parts of Okinawa Prefecture. The UA-camr "Where I'm From" has a good video about it called, "Japan's Worst Traffic is NOT in Tokyo" and I recommend it quite highly. It seems that Americans have actually had more success correcting this mess than Koreans, Japanese, French, Chinese or even Canadians. But we really did make a mess of things in the meantime and so everywhere you look there are all sorts of random obstructions.
1:51 wow a FAR of 1.5 is wildly funny to me. That’s suburban here in Germany. Source: I’m a member of a mid sized suburban city’s planning commission.
Paris had the great fortune of being completely redeveloped within a short time span, with the backing of an absolute monarch (Napoleon III) on the plans of a competent architect (Haussmann). That makes it nice to look at, but a completely unreasonable role model.
I am not sure if the point of this video: sure, you showed that you are good in algebra. But what makes Paris great is not the density per se, but the highly mixed use of that relatively dense occupation (living, shopping, leisure, 3rd places, etc.). And areas are very well connected by the Metro. So as a resident I can live in a relatively small part of the town without ever having to leave (by car).
The argument for density is not that we don't have the space, but that low density reduces connectivity. At some point, density can become too much, just go to Mumbai for example.
Many people point to the high density of Paris as an argument against allowing tall buildings in their city (e.g., Vancouver, Toronto, etc.). They say "we don't need to allow tall buildings, look at how dense Paris is". This video was a response to that.
@@OhTheUrbanity Fair play. It came across as an anti mid rise piece in its own right. Clearly not the intent.
@@MarkHolmes1 The conclusion of the video was this: "Simply allowing Paris-style mid-rises everywhere wouldn’t be the perfect housing policy but it would be a massive win. It’s unfortunate that there’s a lot more energy around shrinking tall buildings down than there is to opening up more neighbourhoods to the mid-rises that people say they love."
Was 80% into what felt like a tall vs mid rise on a false premise around air rights when commented. My bad, the ending is fair enough.
Montreal is seeing a lot of mid-rise development outside of downtown, although perhaps it’s mostly on former industry-zoned lands, like Griffintown, along the Lachine Canal, Little Italy, and Hochelaga.
Another banger. You touched on this in the "allow density everywhere" part but one more thing I would note is the *turnover rate* in a given area.
During the Ottawa upzoning debate this important fact was shared:
"Does that mean your current R1 street in Alta Vista will turn into Brooklyn overnight? No, the city says. The city estimates that the the typical turnover of houses is about 0.5 per cent a year, meaning in a one-hectare city block, just three properties would turn over for infill in the course of 25 years. (For reference, the lawn of Parliament Hill is just under two hectares.)"
So many opponents frame upzoning as "forced-density" and treat allowed heights as the new minimum, but if we actually needed as few new homes as they claim then most neighbourhoods would see minimal change from broad upzoning and many smaller buildings would still be constructed.
For my master's final project thesis I took a look at suburban and inner city density along subway lines. This was back when in Toronto there was a lot of debate about whether to extend the Sheppard subway eastward, or continue it as an LRT.
One of the key arguments against extending it was that there was a lack of density to support grade separated transit along the corridor because it was in the suburbs. But Toronto's inner suburbs seemed denser than most suburbs with a fair bit of high rises (mostly in the Tower in the Park model mind you) and frequent bus service along arterials. And when you look at the Bloor-Danforth line to the south, it runs through mid rises and compact detached housing.
What I found was that while the suburban census blocks with high rise towers in the suburbs were the most dense, it was not enough to make up for the low density suburban housing surrounding them. Meanwhile in inner Toronto while the midrises along Bloor were not as dense as the high rises along Sheppard, the compact housing in the neighbourhoods in behind allowed the area to achieve a significantly higher net density overall.
I'm working on my thesis right now on TOD on light rail. I'd love to read your work.
Let's see if UA-cam allows URLs in comments:
ufdc.ufl.edu/AA00083921/00001/pdf
@@nellwarnes7273this is the third time I have replied, so hopefully it will show up.
Google COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF DENSITY AND RAPID TRANSIT NEEDS ALONG SHEPPARD AVENUE EAST and it should come up.
Give me Paris! It makes New York feel like a small town.
Skyscrapers are simply inefficient, and are a lazy solution for cities that are not urban to attempt urbanism without building dense.
I would love to live in a place like Paris.
Paris is Paris because of Haussmann and his very special way of urban planning. People like Paris because there is beautiful architecture, urban life, street cafés, nice shops, monuments, small parks and everything that makes this place a worthwhile place. All this has grown over centuries and is a cultural heritage. You can get inspired by it and get the right architects who build accordingly for the very people that will live in those new mid-rise buildings. Unfortunately, what most architects build these days is certainly not what people appreciate.
gimme a nice midrise "parisian" style neighborhood a couple shops and a cappuccino, and I'm set for life
First of all, Paris has a high rise district called La Defense. It's technically outside of Paris, which brings me to another fun fact - Paris as an administrative area only covers the very downtown of the city, it's like NYC was only covering Manhattan. No wonder it's formally so dense. However 80% of Paris urban population actually lives outside of Paris.
Second, mid rise is denser because it fits all urban purposes. Therefore the entire city can be made of mid rises, with a relatively modest suburban area, which on average will be much denser than typical US model of small high rise downtown and huge low rise sprawling suburbs. It's also way more viable for efficient public transit. (low rise can sustain pretty much only a basic bus service on its own). Adding that Europe default zoning is mixed use (and there are huge areas that are built up without zoning at all)
You’re totally right! Just to clarify for other people that La Defense is almost only office and hotel spaces so no permanent population stays there. There’s also the 13th and 15th arrondissements within Paris where some high rises can be found at 20+ stories
Great Video! I think the "tower in the park" is supposed to be suburban neighbourhood that replaces a block of single-family homes, as they are not hard to find in Paris surroundings. It's really not suppose to be compared with wall-to-wall mid/high rises. The "tower in the park" gets a lot of hate in Us-Canada because most of then are in the state of decay right now, but many of them are fairly well designed neighbourhood, with built-in shops and grocery stores, some with daycare facility, clinic and community centers, and interconnected with foot path.
modern suburbs in asia are all tower in the park. It combines the best elements of urbanism/ density (still higher density than most mid rise downtowns in the US) while still giving residents a good view and plenty of recreational space.
Tower in the park looks like Brezhnevka/campus brutalism to Americans. There is also a deep rooted suspicion in the US of "the home makes the man", i.e. put people in housing that resembles a prison, they will become criminals.
Tower in the park developments in the US were not typically used to replace single family homes. They were built primarily as public housing projects and destroyed historically black neighborhoods in the name of 'slum clearance'. They get an especially bad reputation due to the horrible upkeep of public housing projects in the United States, and the tendency to replace the 'park' with parking spaces. While the development pattern is not inherently flawed and has seen great success in Eastern nations it has a troubled history in the United States
In my life I've lived in everything from a dense apartment neighborhood (15 floors +) to a townhouse complex to a typical single-dwelling suburb to a small farm outside a major city. I've basically experienced it all. For me a medium density ( 2 - 5 floors) mixed use suburb is the Goldilocks zone. This sweet spot avoids the alienation of super-dense living and the morgue-like silence of suburbs. Dense enough so that everything is close by but open enough to have some elbow room.
In DC and some parts of Florida you can see how some lots get redeveloped in to mid to high rise buildings where you would not really expect it.
And in Florida the high rises later self-redevelop into rubble.
The good answer is that you can have green space and density with high rises or density without green space to get the same density with mid rises. I'd like the green space.
Every one of the Paris examples had a nice private courtyard in the center. That is much better access to the green space than many of the high rise examples.
@@sambennett5441 The courtyard is often tiny and not somewhere to hang out because your are going to distrub each neighbor if you make any noise. I have lived in both classic midrises in Paris and highrises in its 13th district, and the quality of life is much better in the highrises.
@@sambennett5441 not really, Paris is overall not very green and very few Haussman apartment blocks have any green space in the internal courtyard. Not all of them even have a courtyard. Barcelona is a better example of housing blocks with an internal courtyard, though many of those courtyards have been filled in with other buildings instead of green (enforcing the rules to eliminate those buildings in the courtyard is difficult).
@@poshbo Yeah. I'd say you can get to densities of 30.000/km² relatively easily with mid-rises while still having adequate open and green spaces. 40k/km² is more challenging and beyond that it's impossible. If you mix mid- and lower high-rises densities of 70k/km² along with some decent open space should be easy.
@@bojstojsa7574 I guess if I designed a city from scratch it would look like Barcelona but with some high rises dotted around (both residential and commercial) and the internal courtyards of the midrise housing blocks being kept as green space). That kinda accords with that you're saying
As someone who lived in Paris, I am painfully aware of one aspect that everyone should consider when talking about densities achieved the same way: heat. While mid-rises are a good thing, and most often enough, packing them so close like that is a great way to get heat islands during summer. Nights can easily be as hot as during daytime, with no way to efficiently cool inside, apart from built-in air conditioning. And as summers tend to get hotter in average in Paris, this won't get better...
There's a lot of obsession with air flow in building planning, but most people don't live somewhere with perfect weather. Insulation is more important to retain heat or keep units cool, and closely spaced buildings are least affected by wrong temperature wind. As the climate gets worse, A/C has to be presumed. To omit A/C as many northern cities are doing is just hubris.
@@FullLengthInterstates I agree about insulation (and shutters!), but without air conditioning, it has its limits. During severe heat waves, even the best insulated places will get hotter to some degree in daytime, as there is no cooling. And during the night, as it's still hot outside, often above or near 30°C thanks to the heat island effect, there is still no effective cooling, so this will get worse from one day to another. Vegetation and water (ponds, canals, etc) are one good way to alleviate this, but the possibilities are limited in already dense areas.
The heat island effect seems to start at a relatively low impervious coverage. I travel almost every day from a rural area to a former streetcar suburb that is no more than 30% improved. The temperature increase from majority-wooded rural to city single-family is 5-6 F (straight suburban is actually a little more). High-rises with larger parks should help some, but probably not more than that single-family area.
@@josephfisher426 Indeed. Do you spend the nights there? This is at this period that the heat island effect is at its peak, when most buildings are made of concrete releasing heat collected during the day.
@@Kyragos Those are vehicle-based observations: generally afternoon and evening before midnight. Since it is a lower-density area, there isn't a great deal of mass for heat storage, and I believe that the difference dwindles to 2-3 F by the middle of the night. One city observation location (in a large park) even has one of the typical low minimum temperatures for the general area.
When I lived in the city proper, I would guess it was another 2 F warmer there during the day and it was continuous.
An issue I’ve seen in the urbanist community since joining is that some people seem to have nostalgia for old European cities and want to just go back to that. And yes, old European cities have great urbanism and are proven to work, but it’s not the only way to do things. This isn’t too common within the urbanist community, but I’ve definitely run into this.
i'm glad you mentioned that the banlieuex of Paris are
"another matter". more detail would have been good.
it's also worth mentioning that the centre of Paris we so admire,
is the result of a massive tearing down of what was there in the mid 1860s-70s.
i don't think the same admiration would be expressed for what the Haussman scheme replaced.
Paris suburbs have incredibly diverse urban landscapes. Most inner suburbs of Paris are actually as densely built as Paris itself. Also with the Grand Paris Express metro lines that are being built a massive regeneration is going on.
As a planner in North America, I would LOVE if we could legalize the mid rise densities of Paris in most neighborhoods. I'd even settle for four stories. 😅
As a french that only slept 2 nights in Paris my entire life, I think What the U.S. lacks is mixing different stuff together. The example of N.Y. in the video shows 3 kinds of zones, but if you look a smaller cities in France, you may have mid rise downtown, But you really have a variety of buildings anywhere else.
I may think of this small village around a train station, you have 2/3 stories between the station and the central plaza a few hundred meters down the road, plaza surrounded by 3/4 levels building with shops at street levels. On the other side of the rail is a cider factory, with a few single family homes in the woods further south. As for the norther part, you have 2/3 stories buildings along the "second main street" and single family homes on the alleys connecting this T shaped main road network. You also find 3 farms, one of which have been rehabilitated as low rent housing (a big farm building is cut into 5 or 6 homes ) and the other two have cows, masticating grass in their field between 2 or 3 stories apartments buildings... As you continue further north, the streets turns to a road, with small packs of 1 to 5 single family homes spread here and their, with or without a farm in the center, accessed by a small road you need to put your wheels in the grass if you encounter an other car going the other way...
This totals less than a thousand people, most of the area is low density, but since there is this spot of lowish mid rise, it is still interesting to offer a train stop at the station, and to further connect other small villages of the same kind with a bus line. So the train will take you in the city center (half million people city) fast if you have some business in the "capital", or you can take the bus to the suburbs for work, or to see your friend in the next village, all of this with the peaceful picture of cows from the window of your bedroom
The interesting feature of such a place is that it brings together a dense enough mix of affordable flats or raw homes, with a mix of medium income to a few kind of rich people (one of the single family home I speak of above hires 5 people just to clean the home, trim the grass, care for the horses, water the flower gardens, clean the dead wood in the forest etc... Their swimming pool have more surface than my entire lot^^) instead of segregating the top tier in gated "heaven".
And for the North American planer, I hope that you will get to spread the message that this kind of development revolve around a car restricted (like, truck must go around, and small cars will struggle going 20mph without scratching their paint on the corners of planter or even just the narrow street) but the total area annoying for drivers is not even as large as a wall mart. So if you can do with no car within a wall mart, you can do with only a few slow cars in such a neighborhood ! And having a few shops and community livelihood will be a quality of life boost for all the single family homes around, while making transit an interesting option.
After writing all that, I feel like "if you can park outside Wall Mart, you can park outside my mid-rise walls" is a first step before a native speaker finds a more perfect catchphrase for a 15min ci-tee-shirt
What I'm (strangely) getting from it: we just use too much space for parking spots and buildings can be very small if there are no parking space 😀
I think the point many people are trying to make is that you don't NEED skyscrapers to have high density. But what they fail to acknowledge is that you need to build a LOT of mid rises and build them close together, and for some reason they don't seem to want that either. So, yes, I agree with the conclusion of the video. 😂
Give me Paris! It makes New York feel like a small town.
Skyscrapers are simply inefficient, and are a lazy solution for cities that are not urban to attempt urbanism without building dense.
As someone who lives in Paris, it doesn't feel cramped at and even in my opinionn fosters a greater sense of community.
Basically, Paris' densest Arrondissement is the 11th which is 40,000 people/sq km.
Hong Kong's 4 districts in Kowloon are all denser, with Kwun Tong district having 60,000 people/sq km.
Mid-rises are only "denser" if you restrict high-rises environments to having a lot of space in between the buildings.
I don't know Hong Kong, but I am ready to bet that the city have a very large and frequent train/metro/tram/bus public transit network that have more problems with overcrowded vehicles rather than U.S. problems of not closing down a bus line that carries 2 people at peek hour.
the main problem with high-rises is the maintenance cost, we need to build the maximum units possible to the poorest people.
1:30 that's not a tower in the park that's a tower in the parking lot lmaoo
"Let's build a high rise surrounded by parks"... Proceeds to replace everything with grey parking lots
The reason people love Paris isn't the density but rather the beauty of the architecture and urban design, which didn't factor at all in this video.
Modern architecture is ugly, especially in North America, no matter the height or density. Make density beautiful like Paris, and the NIMBYs will learn to shut up.
As a Parisian I would say both (sculpted haussmannian façades would be wasted on a 30th floor that no one would see). But I agree, beauty matters.
Los Angeles over here continues to shove all the mid-rise apartment density into small areas of the city and busy corridors while leaving the vats majority of the city for SFHs, it's a huge shame. I like the idea of uniform mid-rise density around the city with cluster nodes of high rises around transit and other high interest spots, but apparently even in the 2nd most populous city in the US Paris-tier density is a far cry away still. It's a shame there's basically no option for modest density city wide, it's really only pockets of neighborhoods in certain cities, leaving that to be out of price range for most people.
The problem with opposing tall buildings, it ignores the fact those buildings are being built in lower density cities. People in toronto want missing middle but then want SFH everywhere but select areas whereas MTL mostly have duplexes.
There is another problem with tall buildings in existing cities. Everywhere where I have seen it - they were built:
1. car-centric, they made traffic congestion worse.
2. add load to existing public transit and other infrastructure (which is usually already overloaded).
3. in worst case - they are built with not enough parking space.
When a country has more space allocated to car parking spaces than space allocated to the construction of residential buildings, I consider that it has a real problem.
Theres several things that are missing: 1. the width of streets. Taller buildings generally need much, much wider streets, which eats away a lot of that added density. Just compare New Yorks 6 lane streets with the tight alleys in the Quartier Latin.
2. Cost of skyscrapers. Skyscrapers are extremely expensive, to the point that it's just wayyy cheaper to build a Paris style city than a new New York. Even in New York, it would be much cheaper to rezone Staten Island and Queens to allow row houses and midrises, than to built even taller skyscrapers. Theres a reason why Europe, despite for centuries being the most densely populated continent, had no skyscrapers until very recently. They don't make economic sense. The only reason they appeared in the US was because of intense land speculation that artificially drove up land prices immensely.
Dude you guys are killing it with the releases!!
Paris being very packed come at a cost, we have barely any greenspace in that city. This make the city not only hotter in the summer but also harder to cool down in the evening.
Housing problem in Paris are primarily due to unoptimal use of appartments (either empty or not fully used) and housing assets always increasing (which is a global problem)
Paris has plenty of green space; too much green space is extremely bad for cities: it creates sprawl. A smart city is built dense enough that you can walk to a park instead of having parks at your doorstep.
@thebabbler8867 it is one of the worst in Europe in term of trees and park coverage, you can easily look it up. Also you seem to complete ignore my argument regarding how it help dealing with the heat in the summer. Paris has anything but "too much greenspace", also two of the biggest parks are beyond the Périphérique and part of the city administratively but not physically.
Yes the whole Paris thing is one of the worst, most frustrating anti-development arguments. Clearly Paris achieves its density by being almost entirely midrise which means that for a North American city other than NY, it would require the vast majority of existing buildings - which tend to be lowrises - be replaced with midrises. Yet the goal of most NIMBYs is to prevent neighbourhood change and they often oppose highrises on the grounds that they stick out and don't conform to the neighbourhood's "character". Yet somehow replacing almost all buildings would preserve neighbourhood character better than only replacing a few? It's clearly either ignorance or gaslighting.
During Haussmann's renovation of Paris, Haussmann demolished thousands of homes displacing 350,000 people in order to achieve the "Paris mid-rise density". So unless a NIMBY is willing flatten their home and be displaced in order to achieve the mid-rise density, the Paris argument is silly.
What’s missing from this debate is any discussion how purchasing power determines where people live.
The simple fact is, wealthier people are going to buy/rent the most expensive housing, and the most expensive housing is going to be located in the most desirable areas of the city.
Option A) the wealthy occupy a large number of mid-rise buildings, pushing poorer and poorer residents further and further away from desirable areas of the city.
Option B) the wealthy occupy a small number of towers, allowing poorer residents to live closer to desirable areas of the city.
You can’t talk about housing and affordability without realizing the rich buy first and the poor get the leftovers. If you want to live in a nice area of the city, then you should want those wealthier than you to take up less space in the city.
That’s accomplished by building expensive high density towers marketed towards the rich, plain and simple.
The best place for rich people to live in is converted offices. Offices are difficult to convert to small residential units due to inadequate utilities and lack of windows, but that makes them perfect as a giant, low occupancy studio apartment, a pre built high rise mansion.
towers are extra expensive in manhattan because of how tiny the lots are, hence the unique phenomena of "skinny tall" skyscrapers. disproportionate floor space is dedicated to shafts/ structure. proper cities have apartments that are both tall and wide and benefit much more from scale, so there's much more floor space available, and the homes are just lived in by regular people.
Honestly pretty insightful. But you have to have rich people desiring to live in such places. Here in Paris high rises are associated with poorer populations, and that mindset is very entrenched
From now on I am shilling for vertical ghettos for the uberwealthy.
A few comments about the Video.
First of all it is clear that if you build the same building but one is double the height it's obviously going to be able to accommodate more people (although not exactly double as you do need to leave more room for non livable areas) but there are many other factors.
To be clear, I'm not against high rises but they do pose a a financial problems for most people. I am all for the "Paris" way but whoever uses this as an example against tall buildings must accept this method which means very dense buildings with very few open areas.
1. taller buildings are more expensive. I'm not talking about building costs or higher prices of the apartments but about something people don't usually think about - maintenance is much higher and the taller the building the more it costs to maintain it, which is why many lower income high rises end up looking like slums. Most normal people cannot afford the monthly maintenance costs of such buildings.
2. You keep making comparisons between cities, like Paris, and a section of a city, like Manhattan. It's true that the density of the city is an average and there are places with lower and higher density but it's the same with any city so Paris is much denser than NYC and if you want to compare the densest area of NYC you should do it against the densest area of Paris, yes those areas are smaller but that true to the city itself and the size of it so it's relative comparison. You should also take into account that the numbers are calculated differently as the numbers for US cities are usually calculated from the land area only, something that does not exist in other cities that uses the total area.
3. Another reason for higher density is that apartments are in Paris are smaller, which is perfectly fine but most Americans (and Canadians) will have a problem with that.
4. There is a limit of how many people can live in a reasonably comfortable way and you cannot densify a city with no limits (you can, but life will be unbearable). In a place like Paris people prefer the lower houses and accept the compromises but it's still in the limit of living well and still having enough personal space. A place that does not want to go that way but needs to densify must build high rises.
Paris mostly gets it high density by two aspects: The almost complete absence of _low_ (1-2 floors) buildings and the legal definition of the city. Paris is still just it's medieval core; all the outer parts (even those developed in the 19th century) are independent cities.
When you say that Manhattan is denser than Paris using 29k/sqm vs 21k/sqm
To which I'll reply with two things:
1. Paris density number includes le Bois de Boulogne and le Bois de Vincennes which are actually outside of Paris (idk if your Manhattan numbers include Central Park, but it is defacto inside of Manhattan)
2. Removing these gives you a more accurate number. e.g. Paris 11th arrondissement has a density of 49k/sqm
6:20 "for better or worse, we have more expectations of space these days, for reasons of light and air"
Definitely for better. Darkness, mold and lack of ventillation of tightly packed back-houses is definitely not something urbanists should want to return to.
I was at a hearing about a new mid rise project in Toronto the other day, in a very boring car centric suburb. All the home owners basically opposed the plan because, and I quote: "We don't want apartment people in our neighbourhood". "Apartment people", the newest euphemism for: Low income, blacks, immigrants. (Or even worse: Low income black immigrants). Nimbysim is just another offsprint of racisms quite honestly. So embeded in our North american culture.
Idea: let's allow both styles, put them in various cities or various parts of cities. Maybe there is no answer which one is "better", as some people simply prefer one over the other. Once we reach the stage of calibrating the correct amount of each style, we have really come a long way.
Parisian here. Please also consider the lack of public parks and of parking space in Paris.
I’d love it if someone made a video on the drawbacks of Parisian architecture especially the Hausman bits. Like I personally love it but one cant straight up copy it you have to learn from it. Like how would one improve fire safety, accessibility (lifts), natural light access, ventilation and thermal comfort, general feng shui vibes, waterproofing, acoustics, green space, etc?
Agree with all of this. But i think its important to also not overlook beauty. Its hard to imagine paris without these beautiful buildings, and high rises simply cant compete with this architectural class. Coming from somebody who lives in the ugliest european capital (athens) visiting paris was a breath of fresh air.
Well, the tall towers have a place in city centres I think. However, I do _love_ the look of Paris' medium density - and where I live, NIMBYs would lose their mind at the concept of anything more dense than separated townhouses.
Also, from my experience, Parisian places are more likely to not have elevators and use a single staircase.
As someone from Paris, I have such hard time picturing New York City, to the point ive watched walk-throughs and tried to google map to get my head around it, and I kinda do now
The comparison is somewhat misleading as the average population density of Paris is tanked by a handful of arrondissements (1st, 7th, 8th) that host most of the country's government buildings, embassies, many museums and institutions, etc.
Most arrondissements have between 23k and 40k inhabitants on average.
The 11th arr has a 40k population density, and my neighborhood has a 45k population density.
That's not even accounting for the recurring underestimation of the population in Paris (even in public housing).
When advocating for mid-rise density, the 11th, 19th, or 20th are good examples. They have neighborhoods exceeding 45 or 50,000 inhabitants per square kilometer.
Manhattan has an enormous amount of office and commercial as well.
manhattan's "daytime population" (counting office workers, tourists etc) literally triples from ~1.5M to ~5M. so if we're counting average occupants, manhattan wins even more
@@OhTheUrbanity I specifically didn't mention corporate offices and commercial buildings because there are tons also in Paris.
But there is less land area occupied by national government buildings and institutions in Manhattan than in Paris. About two thirds of the 1st, 7th, and 8th are government and institutions. The 16th also hosts tons of embassies and consulates.
Paris is a bit like a peach, the truly representative part is the fleshy portion of the fruit minus the pit. 😀
@@FullLengthInterstates Paris too, as it often passes 6 million on weekdays, but we're talking inhabitants, not just living souls in a given perimeter at a given instant.
@@KyrilPG The problem of population density only covering inhabitants is why most of the video focused on floor area of buildings though.
Always wondered if some neighborhoods could adopt a development model that allows new developments to be a certain amount of stories over the average in a neighborhood
ie, if someone bought a plot in a suburban development where the average height is 1 story, the new development would max at 3 or 4.
as time went on, the average number of stories would increase, allowing new development to go to 5-8, etc
You can’t help but feel humbled by the grandeur of this magnificent landscape
Paris is way too densely populated, which results in constant noise, traffic, pollution, litter, cramped apartments, making it hard to drive, hard to park... Every street and restaurant and shop is always crowded, and the high-ish and tightly packed building blocks everywhere cause some kind of constant low-level claustrophobic feeling.
I get that many cities need to address housing shortages and excessive urban sprawl, but this solution might actually make things worse in my opinion
If people didn't like the density of Paris then they'd move somewhere else.
@@OhTheUrbanity That's not a very insightful answer. Many people live in big cities despite hating it for the job opportunities of said cities. WIth this same reasoning of "people live there because they like it", you surely believe people enjoy living in slums and favelas? Else they would move somwhere else.
@@chienbanane3168 You're saying that people dislike some aspects of cities but live there anyway because those factors are outweighed by better opportunities in the city. But setting a population/density cap and forcing low-income people to move away doesn't fix that. They'll still have to commute in for the opportunities or live somewhere else with worse opportunities.
@@OhTheUrbanity I see your point, but I definitely think it needs to be balanced against the negatives of an overcrowded environment. Most people would choose a longer commute over living in a 3m² apartment, but they might still have to live in those apartments if city planners decided building them was the way forward, as having a job is not a preference but a necessity.
My point is that Paris is already past the point of the cons outweighing the pros, of course there is subjectivity in this claim but for example : commuting to and from work takes me 1 hour and 15 minutes twice a day, despite being only a 11Km (7 miles) distance. Commuting the same distance to and from downtown L.A. would only take around 20min
Basic geometry still stands of course. But in practice high buildings will almost always take up space around them such that the density increase is rather limited. Manhattan and Hong Kong are exceptions but this is due to very stringent historical constraints on islands, besides building so high is very expensive.
Psychologically the vertical dimension is more impressive than the two horizontal ones such that particularly slender highrises rather give an illusion of density than providing it. The most dense cities on earth suprisingly often look more like Paris than American downtowns. This is because it works better in practice and functions can be mixed better in mid-rises. One has to look to whole cities rather than single buildings. Of course this doesn't mean that there is anything wrong with high-rises or American downtowns with nice skylines. But it does illustrate how skyscrapers are almost never really *needed* for a reasonable density and are more of a stylistic (expensive) choice. That is more the argument I think.
Urban density will ultimately be determined by available resources and most importantly available energy. High rises need elevators and public transportation require electricity which requires fuel. A good reference on how current low density suburbs can be redesigned to increase density is : Planning the New Suburbia Flexibility by design, Avi Friedman, UBC Press 2002. For long term low energy cities a good reference is : Carfree Cities. J H Crawford , International Books, 2000
Electricity does not require fuel (depending on what you count as "fuel" I guess). Electricity here in Quebec is mainly hydro power.
I like the idea of a single or two high-rises per block among mid-rises. Of course, it doesn't work in cities with classic architecture to maintain but in new developing cities experiencing an economic boom, maybe it does. You keep walkability and mixed-use spaces, but avoid that "lonely tower in a park" effect, while maintaining visibility and sun access for the mid-rises.
I would suspect a good bit of the offset of the large towers is not only tower in park but also has to do with foundation work and utility lines. The main argument ive heard is that its cheaper to build eruo style townhouses and midrises because once u get above a certian hight the cost of adding floors increases often significantly, thus creating the case you see in america where towers are for rich people
they use that argument in my city but I don't really buy into it because the cost of buying land and maintaining properties can get really expensive and it's slower. so think about the cost to get 1 project approved, and the cost to get 3-4-5- projects approved. so yes steel is expensive but so is land and other costs
@@Lildizzle420 The main reason why the construction method being expensive makes such a big difference is that the land isn't really that expensive.
Honestly half the critics tell me that high-rises are just "luxury housing for the rich" and the other half tell me they're "ghetto slums for the poor".
@@josephfisher426 it's not just the land though but yes generally land is cheap but thats another cost on top of everything
@@Lildizzle420 One thing you may not have thought of is that higher buildings are usually going to be entirely customized. 4 and 5 story buildings, and 5-over-1s, are a lot of copy and paste; every discipline of the designers doesn't need to do as much work as a high-rise requires.
Anyway it all adds up...
So "low density bad" AND "tower in the park bad," what's good then? Only Kowloon walled city?
Yeah lmao. I'm already putting all my effort in advocating for Paris style density, imagine trying to convince people to live in even denser spaces??
The problem with highrises is sustainability - they cost more, take more time to build and have greater wear and tear for elevators, sewage and water infrastructure, so it cost more to own a house in a highrise.
All those things are true but some people are prepared to pay the premium to be closer to places of employment, culture, education or whatever they value. The free market should have a stronger role (not an unlimited role) in determining if tall buildings are allowed.
@@zen1647citis are for everyone, not just for rich ones. And housing crisis is nothing that the rich are concernd with. They can put up with the exploding rents. It needs affordable housing, not just more more housing that realisticly nobody can rent🤦♂️
What people don’t realize is that Haussmann’s plan dislocated 1000s and disrupted Paris for years, and like the Eiffel Tower, the newly built urban area was severely criticized by many as being too cookie cutter, with every block looking the same, and very little green space at first. So the NIMBYs have always been with us, and nothing except another single family home in a neighbourhood of the same will be tolerated.
In fact I’ll go even further, in my city Vancouver, people get their knickers in a knot if the new single family home doesn’t LOOK like the others in the neighbourhood, no matter how architecturally excellent it might be. A contemporary house, even if its scale is sensitive to its neighbours, and with complimentary finishes, is hated or rejected because it doesn’t fit in with the 1920s Craftsman Bungalow aesthetic, a design I personally love, but realize it is not for everyone, and if someone is paying 2 million for a 33x100 piece of dirt, they’re going to want to build something a bit bigger that a 1200sf single story house, and do we really want any civic government to be able to say no, absolutely not, to that proposal? Both sides have to find some middle ground and be willing to compromise to find sustainable and livable solutions. It doesn’t do any good to be judged a very livable city, if nobody else can live there.
I'm all for Paris-style density, but I promise I've only ever deployed this as an argument for approving mid-rise, not to oppose high-rise.
I was also thinking that Manhattan can be an example of density done wrong, but entirely because of the roads, not because of the buildings.
Excellent video. I wish our big cities weren’t so broken. Until then, I’ll continue to live in smaller cities, so I don’t have to choose between astronomical housing costs or long, crowded commutes.
Thanks! this brings a new perspective and new concept which I haven't heard of... FSI is all that I am aware of but FAR is something new I will learn more about it... .
"The Empire state building doesn't take full advantage-" translates to "i don't think that access to light is important at all and it's objectively better to have a fugly brick turned on its ultrautilitarian end"
The Empire State Building itself would be considered "fugly" and illegal if proposed today.
There is a new project in Montreal of 5,000 units at Molson s brewery ( dated 1786) complex next to the st -Lawrence river . Including a community center , a historical park ( Molson family ) and a school close buy . Access by ferry to St-Helene island will also be part of the development.
I've lived in Finnish midrises for a few decades. The slightly less shitty commieblock is the truest European experience.
now that you mention FAR, I feel like that's something that I haven't seen in urbanist videos in a while. It was one of the earliest things mentioned in the one class I took called American Urban History, but it's a metric that I don't really see a lot
Even just making all zoning mixed use and banning surface parking lots in favor of parking garages would be a massive win for walkability without changing housing density. Small towns like Medina, Ohio are that way, the airbnb I stayed at was a house with a spacious yard yet was a short, safe, comfortable and interesting walk to the town square. There were businesses among the houses as well.
High rises will definitely allow more green space... however, one of the things they will always require from the developer's perspective is GREAT infrastructure. Pre-existing great infrastructure. There may not be an expectation that people will be using cars to access it, but it still needs to be at the intersection of 2-lane roads or be at the intersection of a large road and a train line to get the connectivity to sustain the demand that it needs to be a good investment.
The Y shape buildings stacks its human occupants, on a small percentage of the plot, but uses the largest part of the plot to store cars on the ground floor. Apparently, cars deserve more space than people.
I think you're going to have to make a part two of this video.
I don't think that they * some in the comment section understand what you're trying to get at So at this you're talking about whether density is more in mid-rise cities versus high-rise cities. But your goal is to tell why sometimes you need high-rises.
Here's the thing. Paris is in a very expensive city with very high cost of living. Maybe it could benefit with some high-rises to can housing more affordable.
Like what if it added five extra stories on a traditional Paris style building. Zagguart or stagnate them for light purposes the higher stories tho.
Maybe it wouldn't be that big of a deal if it was like that.
Great video. The "towers in the park" concept is quite common in the UK and normally are very ugly brutalist old social housing blocks built decades ago. This is I think one of the reasons why many people here are against tall buildings.
Concrete brutalism has been damned in the US for a long time. It is common on college campuses, and the best way to think about it is that many dystopian films have used them as a backdrop. Kind of a "we think you are ugly" message from Hollywood.
One argument I’ve heard against high rises is that they don’t foster community whereas mid-rises are more likely to. High rises are said to result in more anti-social behaviour as a result. The person I heard that from cited Dublin as a place where this was studied. There are apparently a lot of mid rise apartment buildings. Any thought on this?
The lack of more dense building in the US have a lot of consequences, like the fact that most of their public transport are trash. I mean most of the US public transport aren't owned by the states but by private company who only seek profit, which mean each bus/métro/train stop must earn profit.
And if you lack of more dense area, it's difficult for these private company to put profitable station. Even city like los angeles have trash system sadly.
PS: also if the US rely more on public transport, they could reduce the wast number of parking lot they have. In some place it's more than 50% of their cites, no wonder why they aren't more dense. But it seem to be a vicious circle
omg Staten Island getting a shoutout is sending meeeee
While I personally think row-homes are peak housing, Paris style is great and high rises are great if dense enough.
I don't think my town could survive it though, practically a riot over one small 6 story, in a completely built-up area.
Why do North American condos have such inefficient parking? Put in a underground lot or a multilevel parking. It would also reduce car theft and break ins.
Cost. It's too expensive.
@@Urbanhandyman
The fact that most people are economically illiterate is why democracy is failing us right now. If everyone was made to study economics in high school, democracy would be very good.
Usually because land was cheap, there are a lot of cars, and condo dwellers don't deserve good green space. Older inner city neighbourhoods are often pretty nice because they were laid out before mass car ownership. Condo buildings were often built later, after suburban car-centric sprawl, so are further from the city center and near newer low density residential areas without amenities. They're the cheaper housing where people go because higher transport costs are cheaper than the higher housing costs to get a condo near the city centre.
Condos in more central areas usually do have undeground parking because of higher land costs, but that also gets quite expensive as bigger buildings need deeper excavations. Some also have a mix of underground and surface parking.
Some of them offer an opportunity to now redevelop their large surface parking areas into new homes though, as the city has grown up more around them, and the new buildings can provide underground parking (and less parking per home may even be needed as the area around them has developed and is less car-dependent)