There's a war happening within cities, and the battleground is the sky.
Cities in the US, including New York and Washington, are embroiled in debates about whether or not to lift height restrictions on buildings and skyscrapers. We've seen this battle happen elsewhere: In 2008, the fight for Prague's skyline was won by height enthusiasts, when City Hall approved a development project from ECM, to build high-rises of 104 meters and 75 meters in the Pankrác region, despite fears from UNESCO that this would hurt the city's placement on the World Heritage List. And in 2010, some districts in Paris had their height restrictions lifted, allowing new buildings (previously restricted at 121 feet) to be built up to 590 feet.
Now, in New York City, Mayor Bloomberg is pushing to overhaul zoning laws in Midtown East that have placed height restrictions on buildings. And in Washington, Congress is considering overhauling rules that have restricted the height of buildings there for over a century (90 feet for residences; 130 feet for commercial buildings).
For all of these cities, the height issue was a heated one. It's no wonder, as there's much at stake. For architects and real estate developers, there's all of this vacant space in the sky they could be profiting from. For some urban planners, there's a fear of building ever-upward, shrouding city streets with shadows, eliminating light and openness.
In an effort to keep up with central business districts in the likes of Tokyo, Mayor Bloomberg, for his part, hopes to overhaul Midtown East's zoning restrictions by October 2013 (just before the next mayoral election and the official end of his reign as King of NYC) and for the city to begin granting building permits four years thereafter. According to his administration's proposal, "the top Class A tenants who have been attracted to the area in the past would begin to look elsewhere for space," if the city doesn't begin allowing taller towers.
The arguments against doing this in cities across the board are manifold. In an article in The New York Times about Midtown East, Councilman Daniel R. Garodnick was quoted as saying we need to account for the stress this will place on transportation (Midtown East runs on the Lexington Avenue line, which is already overstressed), sanitation, and safety.
Writing in defense of Washington's current height restrictions, Kaid Benfield, director of the Sustainable Communities and Smart Growth program at the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), argues that taller buildings can impair light quality and tree cover. He further cites Richard Florida's stance that "creative classes" -- the lifeblood of cities -- tend to congregate in low-rise areas, like Greenwich Village and SoHo.
Furthermore, after Hurricane Sandy left many in New York City stranded powerless in "smart" high-rise buildings, I question whether our cities are at this point equipped to handle life in the sky.
The thing is, facts are facts: More and more people are moving into cities with less and less space, so many believe the only place to build is up. As Carol Willis, founder of the Skyscraper Museum, recently told Future Cities, we need vertical density in order to sustain this growth. Antony Wood, executive director of the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat, takes this even a step further, claiming that the future is not just in taller buildings, but in connected skyscrapers, where everything horizontal goes vertical. "179,000 people are moving into cities every day... They've got to go to a vertical city," he told us in October.
If density is our destiny, can we achieve it without building taller towers? Some seem to think so. As Edward T. McMahon, senior resident fellow at the Urban Land Institute, writes in a blog, being dense (in the good sense!) can be more about clever planning:
Julie Campoli and Alex MacLean’s book Visualizing Density vividly illustrates that we can achieve tremendous density without high-rises. They point out that before elevators were invented, two- to four- story "walk-ups" were common in cities and towns throughout America. Constructing a block of these type of buildings could achieve a density of anywhere from 20 to 80 units an acre... Once a low rise city or town succumbs to high-rise mania, many more towers will follow, until the city becomes a carbon-copy of every other city in a "geography of nowhere."
As a New Yorker who lives in the kind of mid-rise walk-up described above, in a mixed neighborhood of high-, mid-, and low-rises, I don't think there's an easy answer here, nor can there possibly be one that applies across the board. But it's true that there is really no turning back from demolishing the small to build tall. So we'd better make sure we get this right.
Re: Looks like NYC's going to get taller Mary, that caught my eye. It is 300' higher than the Empire state building though.
I am surprised that there is demand for this sort of thing given the proliferation of remote working technology and the subsequent reduction of people working in cities.
Looks like NYC's going to get taller Today's WSJ says the designer of the world's tallest building may help design a Manhattan skyscaper mroe than 300 feet taller than the Empire State Bldg.
Cities can't get airborne, citizens can... A simple way to look at vertical densification is to observe what it has already caused, i.e.:
vast industrial farming areas almost emptied from their former rural inhabitants, from where an ever increasing proportion of processed food is supplied to captive urban populations
huge factories and offices bound to find ever more outlets for their products and services beyond all real needs -- a trend called economic growth or consumerism...
gigantic road and transit infrastructures for commuting from suburbs and smaller peripheral towns into the city and back home.
Night-clubs and discotheques where masses of nubile singles gather together every night until early morning, yet where everything is set to prevent the subtle glances and whispers deemed to promise meaningful matches, e.g. violent music, darkness or dazzling laser light, modern lonely dance styles... far, far away from the ancient Saturday night dance halls with life music and calmer areas for possible conversations (with the presence of the elders likely to deter young impostors from squatting the most desirable ladies...).
So, there must be also a simple way to figure out a solution, i.e.:
spread a substantial part of the city dwellers into the surrounding farmlands by creating opportunities for them to become neighborhood part-time farmers-workers/employees/entrepreneurs.
preventing the consequent sprawling of road networks through mass-produced personal electric vertical-take-off-and-landing (e.g. ultralight tilt-rotor) aircraft.
striving to imitate nature in terms of symbiosis, mainly as related to sedentary species (i.e. plants) collaborating with mobile species (especially flying ones), trying hard to meet the challenge of identifying human society's pendants of these species and their respective roles -- e.g. with nurseries, kindergartens, public schools, colleges, universities, high-schools, hospitals, old-age homes to be considered the sedentary, and nurses/parents, pupils/teachers, students/professors, patients/doctors, relatives/geriatric personnel, the mobile symbiotes...
How else could we stand be it only a tiny chance to make our dream of the global village come true?
Re: Stranded in high-rises Mitch, I agree. And that's just the thing... if we're going to build taller towers, we also need to invest in tech and infrastructure that is going to keep the people in those towers safe. Disaster-proofing should be our next big step after what we've learned.
Stranded in high-rises The only solution I can see for residents stranded in New York high-rises during disasters is to do more to disasterproof the city -- build more floodproofing of the type that exists in Hong Kong (which sees a Sandra-class storm a couple of times a year). That's expensive, and it should be done before -- or at least in parallel with -- construction of more and taller high-rises.
Re: Too high may be relative One thing that I hope people don't overlook in Nicole's blog is the scale of some of these proposals. I see the logic in allowing some upward expansion, but in cities like Prague or Washington you don't have to jump from 90-120 foot limits to 600-foot monsters. Start by doubling the current limits in those cities where a 50 or 60-story building would be the proverbial sore thumb. The construction and utility costs of monster skyscrapers don't translate into efficiencies, and I believe that four or five 20-story buildings not only provide more growth potential but can be built in more environmentally friendly means than a couple of 50-story buildings, and they can fit in with the character of a city like Washington.
Mary, there are long term trends and short term trends, and there are regional trends.
At the moment, the short term trend is that there is still a need for human labor, though that's been dropping in the industrialized countries. As the opportunities become scarcer, people will move to where ever they think the odds are better. The trends I speak of are longer term (ten to twenty years).
In areas like China where manufacturing has been growing their economy, the peasantry is still making the transition from farmer to factory worker: a phase many countries went through last century. The long term trend, even in China is about to change as the drive to squelch complaining workers and avoid the rising cost of labor, Asian factories are looking to a new generation of robots to bail them out.
Over the next few years Foxconn, Chinas largest private employer with over a million employees plans to replace labor with a million robots over the next few years. Other Asian electronics companies have made similar announcements. That dynamic is going to affect China in ways no one can predict. I fear their real estate bubble is about to burst as ours did a few years ago. Their centrally controlled economy may or may not weather it better, we'll see.
I think the move to cities will continue even as the jobs dry up. Teh rising cost of fuel will make long commutes too expensive to drive a car to work for many people. For those with a lower income, that cost is becoming a significant portion of their take home pay.
Re: Sands of change I'm with DerrickWood on my preferred living locale. I attribute it to being raised in a very small midwestern city and encouraged to love wide open spaces as a child.
That said, I see telecommuting and other forms of automation as vital to sustaining rural and exurban municipalities. I've been telling folk in my rural area of Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, that telecommuting is going to be key to sustaining their lifestyle going forward. I am not sure they believe me. I've spoken to regional investors about this as well, but they seem to shrug me off. Odd.
Re: Sands of change Wow, wbalthrop, great message post there. Your reasoning makes perfect sense to me. If large cities are not required and in fact become too cumbersome to sustain properly, smaller ones will take their place.
But then, how to account for the trend in supercities, particularly in places like China?
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