The morality of high density living

I spend almost zero time in automobiles, but about an hour a day in a subway car. Cities are unnatural and bizarre, pretty damn twisted, actually. I would imagine humans are like animals with some sort of hard-wired instinct regarding personal space, which are ever bubbling just under the surface of apparantly tamed beasts. While I think cities are fucked, I actually prefer cities and I don't feel like arguing for or against them for that reason. If you could take the assholes out of the city and replace them with nice people from rural or suburban areas, that'd be even better. Hopefully, the transition from human to sardine wouldn't turn them all into a bunch of assholes, too.

And yet in Tokyo you very much are a sardine. Is it something about density which leads to consideration, or is it something specific to the Japanese character, that famed politeness and sense of obligation and even guilt? Or the 'spirit of wa' or harmony so strong here? Could the Japanese be as harmonious if their society were more diverse?

Because high density is either joy or hell, depending on whether you trust the crowd you're in, and like them, and, perhaps, think the same way. (Although Richard Sennett is making the opposite point, saying it's good for us to encounter otherness and strangers, what's good for us and what we want and seek out are not necessarily the same thing.)

the high desity they propose is illusional, and not enough to support fixed public transport without subsidy (rail, light rail, tram)

Same goes for low density

when i was in london last year i thot, this is nearly big enough, and i fell in love with the tube.

another thought you inspired me to question my blog.
i think that it is dense.
information, opinon, image dense.
unsorted dense.

i like to think of it as hong kong rather then des moines.
but part of hong kong is the two three four five sided noise.

the comments are for that noise, and they seem to be empty.
am i calling plantively into the wilderness.

is it too dense ?

hogarth gin lane

rio shanty town

council estates, london

calcutta slums

you live for free rent momus, in a borrowed flat-what does density mean for those who cannot afford it ?

how different are council flats from hogarth ?
the utopian high density visions of international style architechts have failed, they are impossible to live in, they have rotted ?
what do you want to do with that ?

In St Petersburg, Florida, there is an anti-cruising law in certain areas that prohibits just that. If you drive around the block (to show off your car) more than twice in an hour, you can be ticketed.

Drivership and citizenship, in the US, are more or less the same thing. When do cars assemble? When have you seen cars on a 'protest drive'?)

On the bridge from St Petersburg from Tampa, during morning rush hour, driving very, very, very slowly to protest when a gay anti-discrimination law did not pass.

Florida is a weird place.

There's nobody who cannot afford some form of high density!

I don't agree that the high density visions of the International school have failed. I lived next to the Barbican for three years, and that seemed (although an atrocious art centre, compared to, say, the Pompidou Centre) a des res. High rise living for affluent urbanites to rival the high rise living poor urbanites had been enjoying for some time.

Now, in Berlin, it's considered cool to live in a (preferably ex-socialist) 'plattenbau' or high rise apartment. Rents are low, but the flats are high and the views great! And they have such retro decor, dahling!

Layna: Wow! Interesting! Go slow car protests! Isn't the cruising law, though, specifically about prostitution?

No, not at all! It was aimed at teens who drove around a certain area of a few blocks, occasionally waving or honking at one another -- sort of like hanging out in the mall, I guess, but in cars. I guess it kept other traffic from getting through that area.

they are ugly, undemocratic and imposing.

and the berlin thing, i am sure is a form of slumming.

I just wrote this, which isn't related:

What's really striking here in Tokyo is how there are basically two types of zone. There are the areas around train stations, which are bright, bustling, decked with plastic blossom, full of yakitori vendors, shops, crowds, and then there are the dormitory areas, where almost windowless houses crouch along tiny alleys, almost unlit, and quiet as the grave.

Both these zones are dense, and both are anonymous, but the density and anonymity have different characters. The people in the commercial zones are 'showing', the ones in the dormitory zones are 'hiding' (or sleeping). You can be anonymous in a crowd in the first zone, and anonymous because alone in the second. You can be solitary in both; Tokyo is full of restaurants where you can slurp your noodles facing a wall, amongst similarly solitary slurpers. It's liberating.

Western cities also have 'residential' and 'commercial' zones, of course, but here the contrast is more extreme. The transition between the 'lively' areas and the 'dead' ones is so sudden, it can be shocking, exhilerating.

i am trying to work out why this surprises and upsets me, what assumption it overturns abt histories and cities

where does toyko fit in with the planning?

Tokyo certainly has the medieval bit, a feudal skeleton of roads leading to Edo Castle. It was where the circular Yamanote line crossed these that the big post houses and railway stations sprang up.

by georgia/victorian terraces I mean as they are lived in now, rather than in victorian times.

IIRC correctly the plan for the thames gateway is about 16 dwellings per hectare and that US burbs very much lower. (might have my acres and hectares back assward but I don't think so)

five points wz right down in the tip of the island, pretty much, no? what surprised me that so as early as 1838 1856, there was so much MORE grid than "organic", marching up towards what wasn't (i don't think) yet central park — and on the lower WEST side it's gridded also (ie the jumbled bit is pretty tiny)

i only got the book two days ago, i haven't read any of it

also i'm only looking at a map, where you can see street organisation but not get a clue abt the kinds of buildings that line the streets, which are presumably nothing like so uniform

Chinatown gets a bit twisty (lower Mott) and the density of streets is much greater, parallelling the Paris left bank, which is probably why Camus liked it.

(by lower east side i probably mean lower west side btw: nyc is the only city where my total left-right inability transfers to east west AND north south!!)

(why would germans and italians be the only ones who wanted to feel at home? i don't follow yr distinction)

As for Travis Bickle? Yeah, sometimes I wonder.

momus might like cecil taylor unit.

Being lazy, I hadn't sorted at all. I had a bag full of any old rubbish. I took it out knowing there is no day of the week when unsorted garbage is acceptable. I searched for, at least, the official garbage place, but couldn't find it. Japan is so tidy, there's just no way you can dump a single, small bag of rubbish anywhere without someone noticing. I walked around the block, looking for a place, and there just wasn't one. People looked at me and my suspicious sack, knowing I'd missed 'General Burnables -- 1230 Saturday' and wondering if I'd have the audacity to try and lay my sack at their front door. So I came home with my trash and hid it on the terrace. Now I will get in trouble with my flatmate. You can't win.

That was indeed dense, Julio. So dense, in fact, that my appetite for their music was entirely sated by the short extracts on Barnes and Noble's site. That's enough notes for today already! (But no lyrics.)

(good pics on this site too)

Although yes, the five points area was altered considerably in the early 1900s, and many alive today remember the WTC area ('radio row') that was demolished in the 1960s to make way for the towers.

The "modern" road system isn't a grid, its a heirarchical system where "local" (i.e. residential) streets feed into bigger "collector" streets and then into big, supposedly limited access "arterial" streets. The idea is that traffic is like water flowing in a pipe network - you start at a big water main, then divide into smaller pipes as you distribute water out, and finally ending in tiny pipes that lead into your house. Except traffic doesn't really work like that (for a variety of reasons), and in fact the old grid is a much more efficient wroad system.

I agree with James Kunstler in that linked article when he comments that Toronto has the kind of attractive high density street life so markedly missing from American cities. That really struck me when I visited Toronto. I disagree when he blames the impoverishment on 'the formal idiocies of Modernist urban theory and practice'. It is specifically the car, and the mindset Ned talks about, which have created the 'deadness' of so many places in the US, not Modernist theory.

You would get to look around the apartment (hmm, outside toilet this century, let's skip to the next) and also the neighbourhood. I think many of us might find the pre-car streetlife (soda fountains, horses) surprisingly attractive. We might find the post-car streetlife even better.

Then I went to live in Barcelona for 5 months. I lived in a reasonable apartment in a very, very large apartment building with three other guys. My bedroom window opened into a square interior shaft running through the center of the building. (very typically Spanish) As a result, I could hear everything and anything that anyone in the whole bloody building was doing. By the end of my stay there, I knew by heart the sequence of alarm clocks (beginning at 4:30am) that would call out every week-day and Saturday. I now appreciate the blissful peace and quiet I receive here in Australia. I don't think I've even seen, let alone heard my neighbours since I arrived home two weeks ago.

I don't mean to generalise, but one thing I noticed about many people in Barcelona is that, by and large, they don't give a flying fuck about anyone else. In simple things like attitudes towards smoking (in the Metro, for fucks sake!) or excessive early-morning noise it seemed to me that most people didn't give a single moment of thought for the dozens of people living within a five-metre radius of them. I have a theory that this is brought on because of high density living. (and in BCN there really is no alternative) When you're forced to live in such close proximity to other people, where you can hear every bloody thing that anyone says or does, how can you avoid building up an anger and resentment for other people in general?

I thought they were building a superblazo big crazyspeed railway thing there? Not dense sounds good to me. Of course, Berlin is not dense for, erm, historical reasons... (though same could be true of Tokyo but isn't) (or East London)

but I'm too sleepy to contribute tonight
I hope I can re-find it later!

**ok I bookmarked it so I'll be back.
I'd also like to say that I hella

there we go

"That reminds me of something very perceptive someone once said on this very board about Tokyo: 'It's the one place I've been where the default position is not that people are assholes'. Consideration and responsibility are the norm here, and as a result you're trusted on a lot of stuff, as you wander around in public, and you learn to trust."

I disagree with the assertion that consideration and responsibility are "the norm" in Tokyo. Although it's definitely safer than many cities of comparable size, the myth that the Japanese are somehow inherently more polite is quite simply that - a myth. Commuting during rush hour in Tokyo you will see the same type of behaviour as any other large city in the world. I've been pushed and elbowed more than I ever was in North America and it's not uncommon for an entire bench of college students and salarymen to sit and watch a pregnant woman or senior citizen stand for a whole train ride. On the surface - yes, the Japanese are more polite, but that's due more to their tendency to hide their real feelings. When you walk into a store here you are immediately greeted by several people yelling (loose translation): "thank you for your coming!" Do you really believe that any of them give a shit that you walked into their store?

"You stop clutching your wallet, and you notice that girls are dressing as sexy as they did in the west in the 60s, and don't seem too concerned for their safety"

Violence against women is grossly underreported here and as a result most women aren't taught to be careful. For example most major Japanese cities now have women only cars on the commuter trains and subways because train groping is such a widespread problem.

I'm not trying to hate on Japan, but I do get frustrated with this image that is so prevalent in the West of a super-advanced utopia devoid of any of the problems plaguing western society. Once you spend a bit of time here, learn a bit of the language, make some friends and observe the culture from a closer vantage point; you realize that we're a lot more alike than anyone wants to admit.

Can we get some love for inner ring or streetcar suburbs, where there are yards and gardens but also sidewalks, economic and cultural diversity, public transportation, and walkable stores, libraries, etc.?

My current neighborhood (Clarendon, Arlington, Va.) is vibrant and diverse and pedestrian-friendly. It's in the midst of gentrifying but still includes holdouts of middle- and low-income housing (occupied almost entirely by recent immigrants).

Presently, the rage is for building large New Urban yuptopias: retail, apartments, and townhouses glommed together. I have mixed feelings about them, personally: on the one hand, I'm glad they're infill, mixed-use, mixed-income, street-oriented, and close to public transportation. It certainly beats mowing down a forest somewhere out in the country and slapping down another mall with a ginormous parking lot.

On the other hand, these complexes are presented as a luxury object of desire rather than a sensible way for everyone to live. The townhouses are $600,000ish and the apartments $2,500-a-monthish. The stores are Pottery Barn and Williams-Sonoma rather than a dry cleaner, a deli, and a post office. The hope is that this way of developing trickles down to be accessible to normal people.

Fucking awesome pictures, cozen, nice link.

There are a lot of luxury high-rises just popping up now. Expect them to have lots of fancy schmancy amenities (gym, concierge, broadband, etc.), and expect them to cost between two and three thousand dollars a month for a not-even-all-that-big apartment.

But there are still thousands upon thousands of the two- and three-story garden apartments built to meet the area's sudden need for lots of affordable housing in the runup to World War II. They're uniformly well built and generally pleasant, clustered round idyllic courtyards like this

http://www.silverwood-associates.com/Media/Q_images/Q_CrtLgCr.jpg

The cheapest, and least well-maintained, are in the Woodbury Park (Courthouse-ish) and Gates of Arlington (Ballston-ish) complexes.

In a somewhat nicer middle ground are the Sheffield Court, Colonial Village (both Courthouse-ish), and Park Ballston complexes.

There are some older high-rises near the main library that are also quite reasonable.

(Apologies to the entire rest of the universe for taking up threadspace with offtopicness.)

It's thoroughly absurd considering what my pal found right nearby. Though not as absurd as what they're charging in some parts of DC proper. Beginning to think DC is just a big joke on people who try to live within the city limits, honestly.

Try here and here and here.

(Though I should say that $1,700ish is pretty close to normal for this market.)

Well, this is because there's not a huge lived difference between a close-in suburb and something with the same general feel that happens to be inside the city limits. In what way are Silver Spring, Bethesda, Chevy Chase, Arlington, or Takoma Park more "suburban" and less "urban" than Georgetown, Burleith, Tenleytown, Cleveland Park, Glover Park, or Friendship Heights?

The main difference is in where the political borders fall--in what way is a huge house with a huge yard on Foxhall Road NW "urban," while a high-rise apartment in Rosslyn is "in the suburbs"?

(Living in Maryland or Virginia also adds the bonus of having the right to vote, but I digress.)

Compare a single-family house on Staten Island with a loft apartment in, say, Newark. Which is "in the city" and which is "in the suburbs"?

Living in the Court House/Rosslyn metro area is surprisingly BETTER from my personal pedestrian standpoint than most of DC. For one thing, you're in walking distance of a lot more options for shopping and recreation. It strikes me looking at Puffin's list of neighborhoods that the real diff between 'urban' and 'suburban' by what I know is that 'suburban' must mean you can walk to TWO real grocery stores AND a major shopping area as opposed to having a half-dozen bodegas.

Within DC proper, it's only Dupont, Penn Quarter, Capitol Hill, and Woodley/Cleveland Park that hit that kind of mix of housing/office/retail/restaurant/transportation. But based on projects under construction and on the boards I think in 5 years there will be an essentially continuous neighborhood stretching from the Mall to north of U St straight from North Capitol to Rock Creek.

Michael Rennie Told You So: The Washington DC Metro Area Thread

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/14/realestate/14nati.html

This is really distressing--the hard paper had more pictures, of a really lovely, green suburban neighborhood of 50s tract houses. The neighbors want to sell the property to a developer, who will either put up mixed use condos or million dollar on a quarter acre properties.

My mom has moved back to the rural Indiana town where she grew up--she's about three blocks from her mom now--and it is weird to see how exurban sprawl has surrounded this little town (which is about 40 miles from Indianapolis). There is some development going in on a former cornfield across the street from her cousin, and he and his neighbors are doing something similar to the people in that article--banding together with three or four neighbors who face the road and trying to sell all the properties at once. They're asking a lot of money, too. He's not too thrilled about the development going in, he thinks the houses are ugly. The houses I see going up in that area have stupidly large lawns--I swear some of these places are set on five acres or more.

Uh...

robert caro still otm

Brookings says american cities are way worse than cow country:
http://www.brookings.edu/papers/2008/05_carbon_footprint_sarzynski.aspx
http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/Files/Images/RC/carbon_footprint001_rc.jpg

Wait, no, I thought that was the other way around? Am I misreading something drastically?

This report quantifies transportation and residential carbon emissions for the 100 largest U.S. metropolitan areas, finding that metro area residents have smaller carbon footprints than the average American, although metro footprints vary widely.

city folk don't drive as far as country folk

I can't see the little map/diagram, it's too small.

the PDFs with all the good shit are at the bottom of the link

Rank Metropolitan Area
1 Honolulu, HI
2 Los Angeles-Long Beach-Santa Ana, CA
3 Portland-Vancouver-Beaverton, OR-WA
4 New York-Northern New Jersey-Long Island, NY-NJ-PA
5 Boise City-Nampa, ID
6 Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue, WA
7 San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA
8 San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont, CA
9 El Paso, TX
10 San Diego-Carlsbad-San Marcos, CA
11 Oxnard-Thousand Oaks-Ventura, CA
12 Sacramento--Arden-Arcade--Roseville, CA
13 Greenville, SC
14 Rochester, NY
15 Chicago-Naperville-Joliet, IL-IN-WI
16 Buffalo-Niagara Falls, NY
17 Tucson, AZ
18 Las Vegas-Paradise, NV
19 Stockton, CA
20 Boston-Cambridge-Quincy, MA-NH

but basically "green manhattan" isn't all it's cracked up to be

yeah I'm sorry, I didn't realize they left out rural averages entirely. I started with the top 100 list and then worked my way backwards

Yeah, dude, you crazy. I don't know what a quintile is (a fifth?) but the NYC usage is in the lowest slice of emissions per capita.

80 Toledo, OH
81 Des Moines, IA
82 Chattanooga, TN-GA
83 Akron, OH
84 Knoxville, TN
85 Columbus, OH
86 Richmond, VA
87 Wichita, KS
88 Springfield, MA
89 Nashville-Davidson--Murfreesboro, TN
90 Kansas City, MO-KS
91 Oklahoma City, OK
91 Baltimore-Towson, MD
93 Tulsa, OK
94 Dayton, OH
95 St. Louis, MO-IL
96 Louisville, KY-IN
97 Indianapolis, IN
98 Cincinnati-Middletown, OH-KY-IN
99 Lexington-Fayette, KY
100 Washington-Arlington-Alexandria, DC-VA-MD-WV

bah. I got a 36 on the science part of the ACT, really I did

I should go back and use my mod edit powers to make myself look less of a dipshit

Can't tell you how unkeen I am to know Momus' thoughts on "Asian cramming and stacking"

this thread was one of Momus's all time great "isn't it that case that my preferences are both deeply ethical & cutting edge too" moments

yes it was at least an excellent revive even if I read top 100 lists backwards