Kaid Benfield, Sustainable Cities Collective - The great Danish architect and walkability guru Jan Gehl ...has concluded that the most comfortable building height for urban pedestrians is between 12.5 and 25 meters, or about three to six stories. Could that be part of why people love these historic city districts so much?
I’m not going to argue that we should never build above five or six stories (although some architects do). I can go higher, especially in the right context. But I do think that, in their passion for the highest possible densities as an antidote to low-density sprawl, too many urbanist advocates overlook the considerable benefits of still-relatively-high city density at a human scale.
Indeed, consider the environmental benefits of density, which has been shown to reduce the amount of runoff-causing impervious surface in watersheds (because of the huge amount of transportation-related pavement required to serve sprawl) as well as reduce driving rates per capita, compared to sprawl. ... The research shows that these benefits are found mostly at the lower end of the density spectrum; the environmental gains begin to diminish at a density of about 20 homes per acre, and there is little additional benefit to these indicators as density increases beyond about 60 homes per acre.
Although we can achieve a density of 60 homes per acre by building high rises, we can also do so by building to the dimensions of a historic district ... My friend Susan Henderson, an urban planner, calculated the density of the neighborhood around Boston’s Louisburg Square, shown just above, at about 53 homes per acre.
The good news is that there are some terrific examples of recently built urban, smart growth development assembled at a human scale similar to that of well-liked historic neighborhoods. Two of my favorites are shown above. First, Fruitvale Village in Oakland, California, is a mixed-use, mixed-income, transit-oriented development built next to a BART station. It’s mostly three and four stories tall and, importantly, modulated in its dimensions so that pedestrians enjoy a variety of facades and sight distances. I visited a few years ago and found it delightful.
My favorite newer neighborhood development in the DC area [is] the terrific Bethesda Row in suburban Maryland. .... Building heights in Bethesda Row range from two to about six stories. It is immensely popular with people, who fill its shops, cafes and plazas at all hours.
The development is not admired by all smart growth advocates, however. One professional friend told me at a recent meeting that she thought Bethesda Row was “an inefficient use of land,” particularly objecting to its two-story portions
... Today’s Bethesda has plenty of high-rise buildings. What it needs are more mixed-use, highly walkable projects that serve as great ambassadors for human-scaled urban density
... Unfortunately, a lot of what is being built in the name of smart growth these days is far less human-scaled and, to my eye, far less appealing.
3 comments:
We need to reduce the human population around the globe, and do it without killing anyone.
0.5 live birth per person, globally, guaranteed by post-partum sterilisation of both parents. Couple that with crash programs to replace Capitalism by a global economy of open-handed sharing, reforestation to the 50-75% level, creation of terabit communication available to everyone everywhere around the planet, a global transport net for goods and people, and technology to reduce energy draw to what we can get without combustion. If we do that, starting no later than 2030, we can be down to around 100M humans (the population when Poplicola declared the Roman Republic, Cleisthenes created the proto-democracy in Athens, and Siddharta Gautama developed Buddhism) by 2100.
It'd be a squeaker, but we can do it. If we choose to.
The alternative is that Nature will reduce our numbers mercilessly, possibly to zero. Nature is no respecter of persons, which means the evil are much more likely to survive, if anyone does, than the good because they have no conscience to impede their selfishness.
Are you going to pay for jack booted thighs to wait outside birthing rooms, so they can grab the parents and force them into a surgical procedure right after birthing? I'm sure that will be popular.
The only things that really work to reduce the birth rate is educating women, free birth control, and abortion on demand. Repressive measures don't work.
Repressive measures will make some people go out of their way to have more children. It happens in China with the one child policy. Another problem with the one child policy, China now has a wide gender disparity, with 122 males to every 100 females born. This means there is a whole army of "bare branch" men who with no hope of marriage that are ripe for use by the government for military adventures. Young women get married off by their families to much older men, because they older men are finically secure. Sounds like a plan…NOT!
I hate auto correct, my comment was supposed to read "jack booted THUGS".
Post a Comment