no houses

[dagibbs]

What I first noticed when I got here, the city of Dongtan, is that there were a lot of apartment buildings. Fields of them -- where Ottawa might have a pair of similar towers, or maybe in extreme cases, 3-4, here there were fields of nigh-identical towers, 6, 8, 10+ of them. And they were tall, seriously hi-rise, look up at them from my 14th floor hotel room hi-rise. What took me longer to notice, though, was that there were no houses. By that, I mean no single-family-dwellings. None. There's 4 types of land: commercial (stores, restaurants, etc), industrial (e.g. Samsung), residential (i.e. hi-rise apartment buildings), and park land. No single-family-dwelling residential. No lo-rise residential (as one might see in Rome, or, though less-dense, some sections of Montreal).

Comments

Awesome!

[moonlessnights.livejournal.com]

That is awesomely dense living! The per-capita ecological footprint must be near zero.
At that point, the next question becomes: is it finally time for arcologies?

[dagibbs.livejournal.com]

Not zero, because there's still elevators, heating (though reduced), cooling, and of course cooking, lighting, transportation, etc. But, definitely much reduced. And there's a lot of buses around -- far more busing than I'm used to seeing, which also reduces the costs & footprint.

[icedrake.livejournal.com]

Sounds pretty much like my part of Moscow. The vast majority of residential construction within city limits was apartment buildings. I'm talking well over 99% here.

[foms.livejournal.com]

One of the problems that we have in most of north america is that Le Corbusier and his ilk convinced the people who had power over this so we have zoning laws and habits of thought in people who control zoning laws that don't allow tall buildings without accompanying large areas that aren't used for much on most of our land.

[dagibbs.livejournal.com]

These tall buildings actually do have areas of grass around them -- the spacing/distance between the tall apartment buildings didn't feel all that different from what I was expecting. Just there were more of them, they were taller than usual, and there were no single-dwelling homes.

[foms.livejournal.com]

It's my understanding that, with the way that zoning tends to work, in north america, three- to five-storey buildings with commercial and light industry on the ground and residential space above is about the densest that we get, excepting for down-town cores and "projects". If the space between tall buildings were used better (leaving aside parking lots, which are a kettle of fish of a different colour), then the objection wouldn't be there. Empirical evidence seems to suggest that, by and large, that space practically isn't used at all.

[dagibbs.livejournal.com]

I haven't looked at zoning laws in North America at all.

And, yeah, they definitely had far less in the way of parking lots in Dongtan. Or, at least, big visible parking lots around apartment buildings -- there may have been/was underground, or at least, under building, parking.