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Posted May 30, 2015, 9:34 PM
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7 Reasons Why High-Rises Kill Livability
7 Reasons Why High-Rises Kill Livability
September 29, 2014
By Taz Loomans
Read More: http://sustainablecitiescollective.c...ill-livability
Quote:
What do you do when you’re the city of Portland and millions of people are supposed to move into your city in the coming decades and you have an urban growth boundary? Build up, right? To a certain extent yes, but not above the fifth floor, says world-renown architect Jan Gehl. “I would say that anybody living over the fifth floor ought generally to be referring to the airspace authorities.
- You’re not part of the earth anymore, because you can’t see what’s going on on the ground and the people on the ground can’t see where you are,” he warns. As the Portland Comprehensive Plan update is underway, residents are looking on with alarm as the city is proposing to allow building heights up to 40 stories in such questionable places like historic neighborhoods and bridgeheads all in the name of density. --- The high-rise is not the only answer to density. In fact, it may be a very unsuitable solution that undermines the character, livability, social fabric and even the public health of a city.
- 1. High-rises separate people from the street: According to Gehl, a city is best viewed at eye-level. Sure the views from a high-rise can be stunning, but you aren’t able to see people in a way that allows for connection. Because it’s not as easy as walking out your front door, people who live on the high floors of a high-rise are less likely to leave their houses. This separates people from the outdoors, the city and from other people. --- “What high-rise does is separate large numbers of people from the street, so we end up with a city that is detached from street life, we end up with a city that is based on enclaves and gated communities,” says urban planning expert Michael Buxton.
- 2. High-rise scale is not the human scale: High-rises are simply so tall that they make no visual sense to a pedestrian at eye-level. You can’t even see the whole building unless you’re in another high-rise. You become lost and engulfed in glass and steel canyons which can be isolating and dehumanizing. --- The Preservation Institute tells us that when you walk through a traditional urban neighborhood, with buildings five or six stories high, you can see the faces of people looking out of their windows, and you can see personalizing details such as flowerpots in windows.
- 3. High-rises radically reduce chance encounters and propinquity: Because high-rises tend to separate people from the street and each other, they greatly reduce the number of chance encounters that happen, which are crucial to the liveliness of a city and to creating social capital. And because people are cooped up in tall buildings, they are less likely to experience propinquity, a concept introduced to me by architect and urban designer, Kevin Kellogg. Propinquity is “one of the main factors leading to interpersonal attraction. It refers to the physical or psychological proximity between people.
- 4. High-rises are vertical sprawl: How could high-rises possibly be sprawl as they take up so little actual land? Sprawl is when something is built inefficiently and takes up too much space. With high-rises, they take up too much vertical space for something (in this case dense housing) that could be achieved with much less height. Think of the South Waterfront in Portland, a sea of speculative high-rises that largely remain empty.
- 5. High-rises=gentrification and inequality; Low/Mid-rises=resiliency and affordability: According to Suzanne H. Crowhurst Lennard, co-founder and director of the Making Cities Livable International Council, “the construction industry is a powerful engine for fueling economic development. Tall buildings offer increased profits for developers. --- However, the higher a building rises, the more expensive is the construction. Thus, the tallest buildings tend to be luxury units, often for global investors. Tall buildings inflate the price of adjacent land, thus making the protection of historic buildings and affordable housing less achievable. In this way, they increase inequality.”
6. Are High Rises Even Green?: Contrary to public opinion, which thinks high-rises must be sustainable because they allow for so much density, Patrick Condon of the University of British Columbia says that high-rise buildings are not green at all. He says, “high-rise buildings are subject to the effects of too much sun and too much wind on their all-glass skins. And all-glass skins are, despite many improvements to the technology, inherently inefficient. --- Glass is simply not very good at keeping excessive heat out, or desirable heat in. Our high-rises, according to BC Hydro (the province of British Columbia’s main electric utility) data, use almost twice as much energy per square metre as mid-rise structures.”
7. High Rises are not good for your health: This assertion may sound laughable to some, but the effects of the high-rise on mental health have been researched and documented. Psychologist Daniel Cappon writes in the Canadian Journal of Public Health that high-rises keep children and the elderly from getting the exercise the extra effort it takes to get outside encourages them to stay at home and flip on the TV. --- High-rises, he says, also deprive people and especially children of “neighborhood peers and activities.” And he believes that the level of alienation and isolation, things that have been proven to negatively impact health and even shorten people’s lives, increase with the height of the building.
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