Quote:
Originally Posted by slide_rule
highrises =/= ghettoes
That's a photoshopped picture of Hong Kong highrises. Yet it's often used to inveigh hostility against some supposed dystopian world. The ironic thing is Hong Kong (and many other places with these ultra high densities) does enjoy a comfortable standard of living, does have a first class public transit system and its residents do not require the expense of the automobile.
If you're not familiar with a far-off place, ask yourself why Manhattan and Chicago's Gold Coast are full of high rises, yet aren't ghettoes?
Unfortunately much of the discourse about urbanity revolves around aesthetics and not more substantive issues like limiting sprawl, higher densities, or public transit.
Right now the rage is to pull down centrally located highrise ghettoes and disperse their residents to the burbs, ostensibly to expose them to a better environment. Unfortunately the result has been to spread the ghetto to low density burbs, with the former ghetto residents now having to fork out extra expenses for suburban commutes. The redeveloped highrise ghettoes have resulted in some plum profits for the developers though.
*I should add that the environmental determinism used to justify the anti-ghetto highrise movement generally isn't reflective of reality. If educational standards and economic prospects are so dire, you can essentially live in cutesy hamlets and still be prone to criminality and hopelessness. e.g. Europe circa 1848.
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Agreed.
With high populations, how are people going to be housed? With huge numbers of people moving to the city from the country in the developing world, what kind of planning schemes actually work? In developed nations, which are beginning to suffer fabric decay due to the decline of the automobile culture, how are imploding cities going to handle the increased population densities of the working poor? (The rich and newly rich will live well regardless..)
Are people, reasoning along Pol Pot lines, thinking that cities are evil, and, that we all should go back to a past that never existed!? Are more than a small lunatic fringe actually wanting a huge die back so that 'humanity' is not doomed to communal living in mega-structures? I certainly hope not.
Of course, we have to have eye candy, and, the status that eye candy provides to define class structure. Good architectural design, combined with good planning is always to be desired. Unfortunately, the creme 99% of the time will go to those with the money (the power) so that most big city inhabitants will take public transit, bicycles, walk, drive their private automobiles and look out the window at what they wish they had.