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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: 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.