I kind of wish apartment buildings in the country, just outside of town were a thing. I don't love living in an apartment, but to live in one surrounded by a couple acres of lawn/trees/whatever and maybe some actual fields seems like it would be a lot nicer.
(My current apartment happens to overlook a field in the middle of a city. It's great when they plant clover in the spring and the whole thing is bright red for a couple of weeks.)
That's an idea that dominated construction in Europe after the war, and it just didn't work very well. See [1] for one of the better examples. There are others, like the french banlieus, with 20-story apartment towers that basically turned to slums.
What works much better, as far as I can tell, is a high-density neighbourhood with park nearby. See [2] for an example from the same city.
It works well many places. Maybe not quite 20-story appartment blocks, but Norway has plenty of examples of mid-density 5-6 story apartment complexes in groups pretty much in the middle of nowhere that are popular and function well.
I think a key distinction is that to work well these developments needs to be demand driven, and social housing needs to be integrated without being allowed to dominate.
Norway has its share of bigger apartment blocks built rapidly right after the war to cover a lot of social housing too, and they tend to have been a bigger problem. But most of the house building in Norway after the war was part funded by government through cheap loans etc., but were managed by private house-building associations that built based on which locations and types of housing was attractive to people. And that's what has driven a lot of the building of areas like the ones mentioned above.
So there were fewer large scale attempts at building these huge social housing estates that have served to basically concentrate social problems in some countries.
E.g. near where I live now in London we have a couple of major council estates that used to be big problems because they were basically a way of building cheap housing out in the middle of nowhere with no services, and dumping thousands of underprivileged people together there. It was thought of as massively progressive at the time - you built pretty much villages (these estates have their own shopping parades) out in the middle of nowhere. But while many of the people given flats there were regular families, many were also people with additional problems ranging from mental problems through drug/alcohol problems and other issues that contributed to making the estates themselves hotspots of social problems that affected everyone. One of these estates had a life expectancy five years below the UK average for a long time, and it took decades to normalise things there.
Currently, partly as a result of financial constraints, partly as a result of harsh lessons like that, most new social housing in London at least comes in form of concessions by developers as part of the planning process that involves much lower concentration of subsidised or council run properties in any development, rather than building these large estates.
So I don't think the problem with the more suburban apartment complexes had much to do with the concept, and much more to do with an execution where it was often driven by ideology and totally unproved theories about city planning that were allowed to run amok in the post war period in an urgent need for volume that favoured large projects even when how they affected the integrity of the cities was unproven.
To extend on your post, all the failed blocks seem to have one thing in common: too much density. Anything higher than maybe four story high packed or slightly higher sparsely packed tends to enter a downward spiral except when "risk groups" are consequently priced out (and even that is only possible in exceptional locations like New York City where low density would be completely unaffordable even for buyers of luxury apartments). In lower density environments (the medium density the article is advocating), the exact same mix of people seems to create much less of that downward spiral.
My hypothesis is that it is not the relative fraction of potentially troubled individuals (for lack of better words) that makes or breaks a neighborhood, but their absolute density. No matter how many affluent, stable, nice people you add to the mix, they are pretty much invisible when it comes to creating a positive or negative impression. If "misery per acre" reaches a certain threshold, sad individual fates start influencing each other negatively, multiply and eventually dominate the whole place. Up to a certain, moderate density, stable individuals pull up the troubled, upwards of some undefined density threshold, the troubled start pulling their environment down.
You're right: the outcomes of this sort of developments vary widely. In many cases (including, as far as I can tell, my example), they are now inhabited by older people who are quite happy with them.
i just believe the evidence points at high-density mixed commercial/residential housing to be the dominant option. My second example, for example, is from Berlin's historically poor neighbourhood, with unemployment today still at 13% (3 times national average). Yet it's the place where everyone wants to life.
Your example, of London requiring social housing as part of new developments, is the kind of policy that's made with an eye towards such observations. It's not just aimed at creating affordable housing, but something that will benefit everyone living there.
Could you elaborate on why it doesn't work? That first example looks like a lovely place to live, at least compared to most urban landscapes... As long as it isn't far away from more lively areas.
These are common in north Europe, and many places in northern Europe are nice, but it's in spite of this building style rather than because of it. The problems are:
* As a resident the grass is useless. You cannot use it like a garden because it's not yours. You cannot put garden furniture there or plant things. Sitting there feels weird because all the neighbors can watch you from above.
* It doesn't work as a park either. People will not feel comfortable walking around or picnicking on these bits of grass, because they are too small and clearly belong to an apartment building.
* They turn into parking lots, because people want parking more than useless bits of grass.
The traditional closed city block structure is better and very popular. Building around the perimeter right against the street and a shared space in the middle.
These are abundant in Germany, but the green that grows between them isn't exactly a pleasant sight. They are not so much used for the greenery but as a compromise between natural seepage and vehicle compatibility.
That seepage is important because any sealed off surface area increases flooding risk downstream. Of course nobody really cares for that, but the sealed surface also determines your utility bill for wastewater treatment, and people quite certainly do care for that.
"It doesn't work" is possibly too harsh, see my other answer. But in the best cases, these developments turned into extremely boring places with almost no contact between neighbours. Today, it's exclusively elderly people living there.
There are a few factors I've heard for this trend:
- There are ample green spaces between houses, but they're too small for some of the purposes parks serve, like sports, or to have barbecue without someone calling the police.
- At the same time, they don't replace gardens because you wouldn't be allowed to grow anything.
- They are, however, large enough to lower the density of the neighbourhood, to a point where retail locations are no longer comfortably reachable on foot. It's not quite obvious from looking at it, but my second example has probably 4x the people per area than the first.
- Depending on the social structures, these developments can further crime because they offer many small, unobservable spaces and getaway routes.
Some of it may also be the result of the location where these developments were build, or that they were initially occupied by a very homogenous population (young families in the 60ies -> old people now). But the trend has moved decidedly towards higher-density mixed environments.
>Today, it's exclusively elderly people living there.//
That may be a measure of success. If people have chosen to stay in the same neighbourhood (or haven't chosen to leave) then it at least suggests the local community is functional?
There are plenty of Rust Belt or coal country towns that are decaying where all have left except the elderly.
My wife's grandmother lived in such a town, and when we visited it was clear the town had seen better days. Most things were closed, hardly any people our age, and those that remained were looking to leave. Almost everyone we saw was old.
Real estate is cyclic. When I was a kid, whole stretches of blocks in the Bronx or Brooklyn looked like recent war zones. Now they are good working class neighborhoods.
Likewise, quaint country villages near where I live now are decaying rural slums.
Only partially, I've seen places like you describe: there will be one or two 'trailblazing' projects but over the next 5-10 years all the surrounding area will develop with malls, more appartments and such.
I define suburbs roughly as a place where people commute from because it is cheaper than living in the city proper.
Sure malls and other small time commerce will develop. Malls also exist to serve traditional American style suburbs. But these places will never be urban centers in their own right.
From what I've seen there's a ton of this type of development in China. Admittedly what I've seen of China's country side is mostly out a train window so obviously I'm only seeing places meant to be serviced by trains.
Better in what sense? Miniature houses are fine but are simply different in a lot of ways compared to apartments. They offer more privacy and space at the expense of, well, expense: apartments are unit-for-unit cheaper to build and cheaper to provide infrastructure for.
I'd take more maintanence for simple lines of ownership any day. A line in the ground with everything on one side being mine. As far as I can tell, appartment body corps can be a political nightmare and contractors charge a lot for work.
Is this because New Zealand hasn't got a long history of apartments or is it difficult everywhere?
A lot of suburban apartment complexes are being built near commuter rails now and they generally have grounds that sound a little like what you're talking about.
You're just describing long-distance commuter wage-slave conditions. Last resort if apartments in the city + SFH's in the burbs are both too expensive.
(My current apartment happens to overlook a field in the middle of a city. It's great when they plant clover in the spring and the whole thing is bright red for a couple of weeks.)