The question I would pose to Peter then would be "Should we accept this atrocity that people NEED to get up in the air to escape pollution?"

Who cares if the actual building is so called "environmental" when everything it represents, condones and creates around itself from a social interaction is contributing to the further harm of the planet from an environmental standpoint?

Urban living seems to beget the notion that "someone else" will do the farming, energy production and everything else necessary to live. Otherwise all those urban dwellers will be on the road to their suburban jobs - and that doesn't seem to be the case. So I wonder who that someone else is that will farm food, build merchanise, ship products and provide basic services to all the high rise escapees?

So what is the optimal height for a building? I mean, we could eliminate the need for elevators if we simply built one-story buildings. Would that be better?

The posting is kind of silly, because very few people can afford to live high up. If he wants to be gossipy and sell condos, then he's just making a spectacle of himself...

BUT, I'm sorry, with increased populations you get increased specialization, and urbanization makes sense as a result! Our brain power makes it such that fewer people are needed to grow food.

Projections indicate that population growth will slow as less-developed countries develop more infrastructure, create more leisure time, etc, and that's a good thing. Until then, we have to deal with the people already on the planet!

I am all in favor of correcting the abuses of the system as laid out, getting rid of pesticides, GMO, high fuel consumption, etc, but we shouldn't scrap the system and turn everyone back to subsistence. We need more specialization, more brian work, more urbanization, if we're going to create technologies and ways of living that will (help) solve the current system's shortcomings.

Here is a reminder to people. There are 6 BILLION PEOPLE ON THIS PLANET! Pick your future. EIther we "reurbanize" which means going vertical ala Blade Runner, or we go back to nature (which in essense is a form of sprawl). I happen to believe that we don't have enough open land for everyone to do the latter. Some degree of reurbanization is a necessary evil.

Here is a reminder to people. There are 6 BILLION PEOPLE ON THIS PLANET! Pick your future. EIther we "reurbanize" which means going vertical ala Blade Runner, or we go back to nature (which in essense is a form of sprawl). I happen to believe that we don't have enough open land for everyone to do the latter. Some degree of reurbanization is a necessary evil.

The Swiss RE building and other buildings of Norman Foster are excellent examples of high rises that use natural ventilation, sunlight, and well thought out floor plans for effective work spaces and social interaction of the employees. Many of his buildings feature interior gardens and terraces as well. With the increasing population, we have little choice but to build up, but if you build in this way, we can do it much more ethically and comfortably.

God, lloyd, were you doing crack last night? Your posts seem even more messed up today than normal. First the moose, now this.

Most TH articles support city living, and this post struck me as odd.

BTW, elevators are counter balanced, so they require very little energy to move up and down.

LA: but as buildings get higher they take up a higher proportion of the floor area.

But a big problem is that cities are not requiring the addition of open space, farmland, parkland or any other type of enviornmental protection in the ratio that they are building high rises.

High rises are profitable. And this is the driving factor, not the betterment of society.

So it's much like mass transit - it creates another lifestyle option for a small percentage of people, but doesn't correct the original problem.

If we're so overpopulated perhaps we need to rethink how many children we are having.

In some 'somewhat' well designed cities (I'm thinking of Portland), the denser downtown has a mode split of less than 50% of people driving single occupancy vehicles. Part of this is smaller blocks, denser development, mixed-use, common-sense, good planning, etc.

But I find highrises to be better than putting each of those offices, restaurants, and residential units on a quarter acre lot in a suburb.

Too many people.

I'm definitely against megacities or excessive density -- I believe urbanist development of 4-5 stories is a reasonable limit for most areas. Beyond that, community ties and accessibility to the street are reduced. Outside the city, retrofitting suburbia to be more natural (and produce some food) would be nice.

But based on previous posts, I thought our author was without exception pro-density. Change of heart?

In Seattle, we're enjoying a boom in the cities--for the first time in years, they're actually building upward in the cities at a rate approaching that of the outward suburban sprawl. I understand that I'm in the minority in my beliefs that all forms of growth (if responsible and planned) are positive, but I'd rather see the upward movement than outward, and force populations to recentralize. This has always been the key problem in the Puget Sound Area--decentralized populations with even more decentralized working areas. A properly designed mixed use high-rise in a properly planned downtown is one cog in the machine for fixing this phenomena.