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In the 160 or so years since the first skyscrapers were built, technological innovations of many kinds have allowed us to build them to reach astonishing heights. Today there is a 1,000-meter (167-story) building under construction in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. Even taller buildings are possible with today's structural technology.
But people still don't really live in skyscrapers the way futurists had envisioned, for one reason: Elevators go only up and down. In the "Harry Potter" movies, "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" and others, we see cableless boxes that can travel not just vertically but horizontally and even diagonally. Today, that future might be closer than ever. A new system invented and being tested by German elevator producer ThyssenKrupp would get rid of cables altogether and build elevators more like magnetic levitation trains, which are common in Japan and China.
Source: https://phys.org/news/2017-08-reengineering-elevators-21st-century-cities.html
(Score: 3, Insightful) by lgsoynews on Wednesday August 09 2017, @01:47PM (5 children)
The article makes a lot of wrong assumptions. Transportation issues are only a small part of the very tall buildings issues.
The article present as _desirable_ a life where you are basically living in the heights & no longer go down (to street-level). Really? This is desirable?
This is a perfect example of trying to solve a problem while ignoring all the other -much more important- issues.
First, do you REALLY want to live at the 50th floor or higher? What's the REAL point of higher buildings (except in a very few places where there really is no room left, as in city-states)?
Once you reach a certain height, there are no longer balconies, windows are not even designed to be opened. A better view? Not even true since there will be other buildings in the way!
What about security? what about fires (I saw one in an hotel in London, it happens)? Haven't they watched "the towering inferno" movie?
What about green spaces? Trees? Gardens? How do you walk, run, use a bicycle? Do they want people to stop walking altogether? Let's encourage obesity issues even more! (Remember, the article states that you _rarely_ will need to go to street level). It's even worse if you have children, where will they play? In the suburbs, you may have a lawn, a garden, even in a city (like where I live) there should be some parks with lawn, sandboxes, and sport equipment.
So your job will be on the same building as well? Or a WHOLE CITY worth of buildings will have to be built and connected through those elevators. This would be fine on another planet, but it does not make sense on earth. We are not that packed -yet-.
They also explain that there will be malls & stuff in the building. Not a new idea BTW. Do you imagine the nuisance factor? Noise, crowd... If you live near a mall (even a small one), you know what I mean, there is plenty of traffic, lots of noise from the delivery trucks early in the morning till late at night, lots of people make a huge amount of noise, you don't want to live near one of those.
It's also obvious that you'll be surrounded by many other tall buildings, which will throw shadows on your appartment (and the taller the buildings, the higher the nuisance for everybody around). I don't know about you, but I like to see some real sunlight & real vegetation! If you think about it, you'll realize that there is no point in building such city above the surface, this system would make more sense with buried cities! Then the ground level would be dedicated to gardens, sport, walks, etc.
I live in one of the most densely populated cities on earth (18 239 people per square kilometer, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_by_population_density [wikipedia.org] ). There are a few tall buildings (built during the rush of the 60/70s), but nowadays, the maximum height is 7 stories (legal limit). I would NOT want to live above the 10th level, 7th is already quite high, and enough IMO.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 09 2017, @02:31PM
From the Wiki page for Boulogne-Billancourt (Paris inner suburb which matches your 18 239 density):
> In 1929, the Bois de Boulogne, which was hitherto divided between the communes of Boulogne-Billancourt and Neuilly-sur-Seine, was annexed in its entirety by the city of Paris. On that occasion, Boulogne-Billancourt, to which most of the Bois de Boulogne belonged, lost about half of its territory.
If your area still had the big park, you wouldn't be on the high density list...
And not too surprisingly, all of Paris has density only a bit higher at 21 498, because the city planners left some big park areas.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 10 2017, @04:35AM
Say you have enough population in a given area to fill it completely with one-story buildings (so it's all streets, sidewalks, and buildings -- some residential, some business, but we'll blend them into a homogeneous mass). Now say you take every 3x3 region, tear down eight buildings, and convert the remaining one to a 10-story building for the same useable volume (10 instead of nine to allow for e.g. stairwells and elevator shafts). Isn't this better? Whether you put green spaces, parks, or whatever in those 8 spaces, you can probably see over it from 9 of the 10 floors, and there will be large gaps between all the nearby buildings. So same population density, more green/recreational spaces, and much better views.
As for shadowing, specifically, that's actually interesting and complicated. The distance between neighboring buildings goes 0,1,2 as the height of buildings goes 1,4,9. It depends on the angle of sunlight, but some pretty serious shadowing is definitely likely if you take this approach very far. However, the duration of shading scales inversely with distance -- it bears watching, but I don't really see it as a big problem for tall buildings at comparable densities. (At high latitudes, even two-story buildings can make for oppressively dark streets at high density.)
Same goes for your 7-story buildings -- how isn't it an improvement, given sufficiently-advanced elevators, to have a few 50-story buildings spaced well apart than many 7-stories close together? The argument, of course, is that you won't get a few sparse skyscrapers, you'll get many tightly packed, but there's no reason to allow that. Just require developers to provide a proportional amount of green/recreational spaces related to the height of the building they want to put in -- if they want a 50-some story skyscraper, make them buy up enough neighboring lots in all directions to provide the necessary cushion.
I don't really like cities -- I'm much happier living in the country. But I did live in apartments in town when I was in school and for a few years after, and while it's true I wouldn't have wanted to live on the 50th floor, today's elevators are pretty much the entire reason why. (The stupidity about balconies/windows would bother me a bit, but as I have serious seasonal allergies, I spend some weeks with the windows sealed all the time -- I'm sure I could get used to living that way year-round.) If I could be assured of getting to the ground floor (or perhaps a basement parking garage) in 5 minutes, I really don't see any issue.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday August 10 2017, @04:39AM
Well, you mentioned a point right there.
My view is that I don't care. Most of these really large projects are probably just prestige projects and I'm fine with that. If it should turn out that there is an advantage to living high, then these sorts of projects will eventually find it in addition to nurturing the engineering and construction ability to make such buildings.
(Score: 2) by gidds on Saturday August 12 2017, @01:18PM (1 child)
I don't know if it's what you were referring to, but I doubt anyone in the UK could read that without thinking of Grenfell Tower [wikipedia.org], a 24-storey residential block in West London that caught fire a couple of months ago, causing at least 80 deaths (possibly over 100).
I'm not sure if it made much news abroad, but in the UK it's been a national tragedy and a major story ever since, due partly to the horrific images of the inferno and its many-mile-long smoke trail, the 2½ days it took to extinguish, the already-known fire safety issues, the effect of recently-installed cladding in spreading the fire (and many hundreds of other blocks with similar cladding), it being public housing surrounded by more affluent areas, the poor handling of the tragedy by local and national authorities, and the issues it's raised about deregulation, underinvestment, and fire safety.
(PS. "an hotel" looks dangerously hypercorrective. If you pronounce the 'h', as is standard in English, then "a hotel" would make more sense; or "an 'otel" if you're French. Sorry; it's a bugbear of mine.)
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(Score: 2) by lgsoynews on Saturday August 12 2017, @04:46PM
No, I was refering to something that happened about 4 years ago, when I was visiting London (I'm french).
But I've read about the Tower fire when it happened. It is indeed a tragic -and shocking- example of mismanagement from all the authorities involved.