It’s not cities, it’s their scale
Anti-urban voices have taken advantage of COVID-19 getting out of hand in New York (8.4M, 28k people/sqm) and come up with the simplest…
Anti-urban voices have taken advantage of COVID-19 getting out of hand in New York (8.4M, 28k people/sqm) and come up with the simplest argument against density: city living puts more people at risk of pandemics so we should retreat to low density suburbs.
I could bore you for 10 minutes attempring to make sense of all sorts of counterarguments. But regardless of what we can say, low COVID-19 numbers in Seoul (10.3M, 17k people/sqm) and Hong Kong (7.5M, 17k people/sqm) basically destroy that line of thinking.
Instead, I’m going to focus on scale.
Cities do not scale graciously. People keep their size whether they sit in the cozy 4200 square feet of Paley Park or they run for their lives in the 19 acres of wasteland of the Place de La Concorde.
People will take a similar number of steps to walk a couple of hundred feet down the entire length of beautiful Stone street in Manhattan or the couple of hundred feet of void from the sidewalk on Peachtree St. to the entrance and to the elevators of Bank Of America Plaza in Midtown Atlanta.
If you can visualize these places and think of how different the experience of each is, then you are visualizing scale. And you are also getting a sense of how the wasteland and the void do not a city make.
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As cities grew, planners just made room for big. Minimum lot sizes have increased footprints, minimum parking has increased bulk, efficiency has increased the size and the distance between, and reduced the number of schools, hospitals and other institutions that were previously closer to those they served.
With centralization and the increase of their area of coverage, which makes sense from a financial point of view but not from a social infrastructure one, comes the gargantuan growth of their needs.
Hospitals, for example, need more loading docks to truck in more supplies. They need more storage areas, larger ancillary service areas such as cafeterias or laundry. They need larger parking facilities and more ambulance docks. They need more personnel and protocols for human interaction.
And that personnel needs to cover larger distances to access different areas, to go to the bathroom or take a break and find a coffee.
Though unbelievable for many, the monster scale of buildings takes a toll on the people who have to travel large distances while at work, just to navigate the interiors. A simple «fight or flight» just like what happens in the Concorde wasteland and the Bank of America void is constant.
The toll is not only derived from the buildings themselves but from the expected scale of development. Larger footprints means less buildings per block, and that means less residential units per block, and that means the few available ones go for a premium unaffordable to most.
Throw in rent control and mandatory inclusionary housing and the market priced units go up by millions at a time. Of dollars, not of units, sadly.
So the people need to go further to find an affordable place to live. That means they have to commute. Another failure of scaling. The same system with more cars for added capacity has not scaled up but just increased its size. This is a critical distinction. Think of a bathroom. If the footprint increases from 80 square feet to 800 square feet, the only change is that the user will have to walk farther to reach the toilet and the sink, which will remain the same because the users -humans, the last I checked- do not increase in size. It will just be inconvenient. Larger but iconvenient.
So we have an overgrown city with first rate financial institutions, national headquarters of thousands of companies, world-class hospitals, a hub for services and where most wealth is created in the entire world, with critical systems that do not (can’t?) operate at the same global scale.
The «global city» needs to be a city first, which as any other organism has a limit to growth. We are not heeding it, the system is rigged to ignore it but I strongly believe that the consequences are still, not without pain, avoidable.
Financial efficiency has taken precedence over the quality of urban systems. And this is where we are. Gargantuan cities that are sick because their scale is not human and their experience is overwhelming.
Not because of density but because of scale.