04-29-2022, 01:26 AM
(04-28-2022, 11:05 PM)plam Wrote:(04-28-2022, 09:40 PM)nms Wrote: I don't know if I first came across it here, but apparently Vincennes, a suburb of Paris, France, is the 9th densest place in the world for population, yet it also appears very human-scaled with no large towers. (so says this Twitter thread). It's not even 2-square kilometers (less than half the size of the University of Waterloo campus), and has a population of 49,700 people. I would like to see a proposal for more density that does not include incredibly tall towers that will only beget more tall towers while ignoring what makes a community great at the street level.
I'm never going to say that we shouldn't have tall towers but I do think that having lots of 4-6 storey buildings is perhaps actually more effective in getting lots of density.
You have to define "more effective".
We're looking at political feasibility, and right now building so much as a duplex in an existing neighbourhood is completely impossible.
Towers are the ONLY way I see to build density at least until our pols get the stones to tell NIMBYs where to shove it.
Hell, we can't even build reasonable density in greenfield developments (partly because we have no plan for developing or servicing dense developments). It's pretty amazing to see here in NL, forget the city centre, look at the brand new suburb built in the last 10 years. While I'm sure it's less dense than Paris (and other places here), it's still relatively extremely dense, but has huge green spaces, services, transportation, good architecture etc. It's not about age, it's about policy and design, and we just don't have it.