Posted Jan 25, 2012, 7:56 PM
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Join Date: Aug 2002
Location: Toronto
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Why Are Skylines Roughly Conical?
Why Are Skylines Roughly Conical?
January 25, 2012
Read More: http://www.carfreeinbigd.com/2012/01...y-conical.html
Quote:
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Spatial integration began as a scientific examination searching for objective realities to urbanism. Why were cities and their patterns so similar? Where and when have we begun to go wrong? And is the aesthetic, subjective driven world of Modernist architecture partially to blame? Completely independent of this work, the Duany brothers saw similarities in the gradient of intensification of cities as you got closer to the core with various ecologies, particularly coastal regions.
- Likewise, cities have a similar hierarchy. The most connected places, have the highest degree of integration, which in turn means the highest degree of opportunity. Where there exists the greatest demand, to which the market responds with supply. Building space. Where demand is greater than supply exists the most opportunity for developers. Where integration is highest is the most opportunity for every citizen to meet their needs for social and economic exchange.
- This concept exists locally, within one city, as well as globally, amongst all cities. New York, London, Tokyo, Paris, etc., are global cities because they are the most connected, both locally and globally. Within a single city, you also have a hierarchy of centers. All cities are polycentric once they get above the scale of the tiniest of hamlets. This is what sprawl apologist hacks like Joel Kotkin fail to understand. When they talk of polycentric, sprawl-based cities as polycentric cities of the future, they fail to see that New York is also polycentric. Those centers just blur together rather seamlessly, except where geographic barriers (water bodies) or physical barriers (such as highways) divide and isolate them.
- What they found was that there is a correlation between traffic and value. Just like with any network, particularly the web. The most trafficked sites have the most value. Remember that traffic doesn't mean cars, but people. This is a direct relationship in what I call logical cities. High pedestrian areas have far more people moving past, and capable of interacting with you (economically or socially) in these high traffic areas than does car-based traffic, which has to turn, wait for lights, find parking, etc., all of which accounts for increasing degrees of disconnection, dislocation, and inflexibility.
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While this is Dallas and the exercise is admittedly abstract, I want to show why downtowns have the biggest buildings. And why severing the interconnectivity to them, is why many of Dallas's buildings in downtown are quite empty, for example. As I have written before, Dallas experienced a building boom (high-rises) at the exact same time that the city, state, and federal level were gorging on highway building. Supply was being added while demand was being undercut, shipped out towards the suburbs.
Compare our growth to say, L'Eixample neighborhoods in Barcelona and Valencia. These were rapidly expanding areas, literally doubling city size, but they did so aggregately. These are both now considered the "old money" areas of those particular cities, and very much still central city as growth then enveloped them.
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