
The Relationship Between Skyscrapers and Great Cities - misnamed
http://www.citylab.com/design/2016/01/skyscrapers-cities-tall-buildings/431655/
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jpatokal
Equating skyscrapers only with supertalls (200m+) is pretty misleading. For
example, both Sydney and Singapore are currently experiencing massive
skyscraper booms, but they don't appear on the charts because they're "only"
in the 150m range.

Also, the "cities" are poorly defined. Tangerang is a suburb of Jakarta and
should be counted as such, while Mandaluyong is in Manila. I suspect the same
applies to a number of those Chinese cities.

~~~
astrodust
It is odd picking that metric. Those are exceptionally tall buildings.

For example, somehow one of the largest cities in the world, São Paulo, didn't
even make the list despite having an outrageous number of tall buildings:
[http://static.panoramio.com/photos/original/2169111.jpg](http://static.panoramio.com/photos/original/2169111.jpg)

Where's Tokyo? Hong Kong? I'm confused why these were omitted.

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sho
> Where's Tokyo? Hong Kong?

The graphs are for new completions, which almost by definition favours
developing countries. Evidently Tokyo and HK didn't complete any 200m+
buildings in 2015. And while São Paulo has a very impressive concentration of
tall buildings, it has _zero_ above 200m.

I agree about 200m+ buildings being a strange metric, though. For all intents
and purposes there's little difference, from an urban dynamics perspective,
between 150m and 200m construction.

~~~
astrodust
There are many cities where building a 200m+ building is impractical,
ridiculous, or totally out of character, yet these cities are highly dense,
and by any definition, "great" cities.

I'm really confused as to why they'd pick this particular metric. Later on in
the article they talk about density patterns which is a much better predictor
of health.

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broysox
It's surprising to see Boston this high on the list despite the insurmountable
limits it faces building upward:

1) The Logan height restriction that much of downtown faces due to the
airport's proximity:

[https://www.massport.com/media/11778/BOS_COMPOSITE_Ver2pt0_d...](https://www.massport.com/media/11778/BOS_COMPOSITE_Ver2pt0_dec201_small.pdf)

2) The city's most desirable neighborhoods (Back Bay, Beacon Hill, South End,
Charlestown Navy Yard) are protected as historical districts:

[http://boston.maps.arcgis.com/home/webmap/viewer.html?webmap...](http://boston.maps.arcgis.com/home/webmap/viewer.html?webmap=95cbbaff8b664fd9aac5f00ee50b8c05)

3) The overall NIMBY attitude toward new development (surmountable yet heavily
suppressed by nearly 400 years of it):

[https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2015/04/23/boston-
storied-...](https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2015/04/23/boston-storied-
history-nimby-ism/ABus2RAm8JRWdIWjq15alM/story.html)

That said, there are somehow 5 in the pipeline at 600+ feet:

[http://boston.curbed.com/maps/boston-tallest-
buildings](http://boston.curbed.com/maps/boston-tallest-buildings)

~~~
ComradeTaco
Much of it has to do with the preposterous price of real estate and pent up
demand in Boston. Finding a condo anywhere near a transit station 20 minutes
out will cost you north of 400K. 10 minutes and you're looking at 600K.

~~~
astrodust
Sounds like a bargain compared to some other cities.

Urban demand is at record levels. San Francisco's prices are basically
nonsensical at this point.

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hoodwink
The history of tall buildings is that of huge egos. Sure, market forces cause
rational developers to build more density when land prices are high... but not
skyscraper high. The risk is too significant. The existence of these
monoliths, in my opinion, is best explained by psychology, not standard
economics.

~~~
TheArcane
Can any economist here explain why skyscrapers are a bad idea?

~~~
jabl
Not an economist, but it's said in the article, skyscrapers tend to be
expensive per "m2 of usable floor space". One reason for this is purely
mechanical, the building must be much sturdier in order carry its weight.
Also, a bigger fraction of the interior space is taken up by elevator shafts.
Both of these contribute to lower usable floor space and thus higher expense.

Then there's also the question of the environment of the building, roads/mass
transit/etc. also place a limit on how high the density in an area can be.

IIRC some of the highest density urban areas (in the developed world) are not
terribly high, e.g. city centres like Paris or Barcelona where buildings are
~10 stories or so.

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cwmma
Comparing cities is very tricky because different cities governments cover
different things, think Minneapolis and St. Paul or Boston which didn't annex
many of it's suburbs compared to cities like Chicago or New York hence why it
has such a high building hight, because a real comparison would include
Cambridge, Somerville, Brookline, Quincy, Newton and other jurisdictions that
are part of the core city.

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newswriter99
I am surprised they left out Houston, which has the most urban sprawl of any
US city. There's tons of construction going on in the city as well. But for
the lack of zoning laws, Houston would be a larger city than NYC.

Not that I would suggest other cities copy Houston's (lack of) urban planning,
but leaving out such a singular example seems strange. Especially since they
included Austin.

~~~
dionidium
>But for the lack of zoning laws, Houston would be a larger city than NYC.

I'm not sure what you're trying to say here. Can you explain?

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spraak
One example of being too flat is Mesa, Arizona.

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chordatum
Huge horizontal buildings would be pretty neat if they used high-speed express
tramways in a manner similar to elevators, but only provided walk-up access to
maybe 5 floors, maximum.

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ovulator
I know this is focusing on details, but there is no Ann Arbor, WI. The article
copied over the typo from the study. Confusing.

I wish the study explained why they chose the 12 cities they did.

Also their populations do not match the census like they say they do, I am
left to question any validity this study has.

~~~
jfaat
They also claim the Empire State building is the tallest in NYC, which hasn't
been true since 2012, when One World Trade surpassed it.

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wahern
> These areas boast an abundance of mid-rise, open-floor plan, historic
> buildings that create street-level interaction, where people and ideas can
> combine and recombine to form new innovations and startup companies.

Historic office buildings are anything but open-floor plan-based. Open-floor
plans suck for startups because the square footage is usually immense, which
means you can't rent office space cheaply. That's why early stage startups
these days end up working in accelerators where they can share space, if
they're operating out of commercial space at all. Where startups operate with
large open floor plans, it's because they've migrated to cheap areas with lots
of supply and low demand, namely vacant industrial areas. But those are
becoming scarce within cities.

The image of startups in open floor plans is really an artifact of necessity,
with rationalizations after-the-fact for why they might be better. And in any
event, anybody who has worked in the 1970s and 1980s era single-story office
buildings in Silicon Valley knows that the layouts were typically neither
totally open nor closed, but had spaces with varying qualities.

I have a small (2-3 person max) private office in an historic building in San
Francisco's Financial District. Since the building was constructed in 1890,
it's been principally occupied by professionals--doctors, lawyers,
accountants, engineers, etc--who don't typically have many employees, if any.
Over the past 5 years I've increasingly seen more tech startups here and it's
really ideal for them because they can rent just enough space for what they
need. And while the building management has leased a few floors in their
entirety to some businesses (a securities trading firm, a game company, a law
firm), they seem committed to keeping most of their space in a more
traditional[1] layout.

And I'm really thankful for that commitment because I hate open-floor layouts.
I like having my own, truly private space that isn't subleased from a larger
office. These types of buildings are a rarity. I don't have to walk past any
other desk (other than the security desk downstairs) coming to or leaving from
my office. I don't have to worry about questions about why I come at noon one
day and don't leave until noon the next day (all-night hacking session),
nobody knows if I'm taking a nap, doing my taxes, etc. Not that I'd be
offended by such questions, it's just that real privacy makes for a much less
stressful and more productive environment for me, and I imagine many other
people. At the same time, I really benefit from my work space and home space
being separate.

[1] Very traditional, I should say, given that large open floor plans started
in the 1950s. One of the earliest modernist skyscrapers in the now archetypal
International Style--open floors, glass curtain walls, highly segregated
service areas--the Crown Zellerbach Building, is one block from here, built in
1959. It's just a completely different architectural style internally. Night &
day.

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myowncrapulence
Why are you applying your very rare and individual use of space to an entirely
broad city layout write-up?

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wahern
Because implicit (or literally explicit, as in the article) in the notion of
dense commercial space is the idea of diversity, where lots of different
people can mingle and share ideas. When discussing street-level retail space
the notion of having diversity in leasable floor area is well understood and
accepted. If every retail space is 10,000 square feet you'll only get large
chains. To get the small shops you need small spaces, down to just a couple
hundred square feet and less.

But somehow we forget this lesson when it comes to leasable office space. If
office space is only leased per floor, you're severely restricting the
viability of smaller businesses and professionals in those spaces. Instead,
you'll end up pushing all of them outside the core business district. Overtime
you'll just end up with a smaller number of medium and large corporations from
a small number of industries who are capable of leasing the large spaces.

If you want economic diversity downtown, you need diversity in leasable office
space. Short-term that means less optimal use of office space. But long-term
it means less volatility and more vibrancy.

Silicon Valley has a ton of single-story office complexes. What's really
unique about those complexes, in addition to the sheer number, is that many of
the leasable spaces are rather small. Not small enough for single early stage
startups or professionals, but definitely small by comparison to what's
typical of office architecture today. Given the premium price of office space
in dense urban cores, if you want to reproduce in dense cities what Silicon
Valley nurtured early, those cities will need smaller office spaces.
Especially once the stock market crashes in the next year or so, and VC money
becomes tighter.

~~~
ch4s3
That's actually a pretty good point. I know when I lived in Baltimore, this
was a big problem. There's a ton of lage class B space but not much that's
small.

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equalunique
I'm amused this came up today, simply because I'm currently reading The
Fountainhead.

