Part of it is household size; the modern household has decreased in size dramatically, now that raising children has moved from "we need as many children as possible so that at least a few of them make it to adulthood" to "giving children a quality life is expensive".
A good deal of it is transportation. In 1800 most people walked, and the rich used horses. By 1900 we had railroads and streetcars; by 1920 we had metros; by 1950 we had automobiles. The effect of the automobile has been strongest in America; a single highway interchange in Atlanta takes up as much room as the city of Florence, Italy. https://www.treehugger.com/urban-design/you-cant-set-shop-si...
That section eyeballs to be around roughly ~1.5 mi across. Larger than 2000 ft but a lot less than 5.5 mi.
Living standards affect density, but they're not the reason we can't fit 190 people per acre.
Let's say you're in 1900 making 6 story apartment blocks. You could set up a residential district that's 30% road, 20% open space, and 50% building.
Make your average apartment be 600 square feet with a 20x12 living room, two 10x12 bedrooms, a 10x6 kitchenette, a 10x6 bathroom, and an occupancy of 3. Probably slightly reshaped for the sake of windows.
With some extra space for hallways and stairs, you can reach an average ground impact of 75 square feet per person.
That means it only takes a third of an acre to house 190 people, leaving the other 2/3 for businesses. For comparison NYC is currently 75% residential.
Such an apartment isn't huge but it's still twice the size of college dorm.
These days you could build 3x as high and give each person over twice that much space and have lots of elevators and still fit 200 people into a third of an acre. Rent out the bottom floor to shops too.
Until 1961, New York had a zoning code that was concerned with exactly none of those things, and planning for services and basic infrastructure was haphazard at best. While the current zoning code is overly restrictive, it at least prevents growth in places that would not have the services required to handle it. (It also prevents the growth in a lot of other places as well, but that's beside the point.)
That's why I looked up how much of the city is residential right now. If you only spend 1/3 of the city on apartments, that leaves you a lot of room for everything else.
> What about playgrounds and parks?
Oops. I had a thing about making an entire block into a park out of every 3x3 but I lost it in editing. So yes there's lots of room for parks.
> And can all these workers get to work using the available infrastructure?
The base idea was set in 1900 and housing the same number of people but in better buildings, so yeah they can still get to work.
For the idea of fitting more people into the current city, I'm not sure, but it would probably work out. Have more mid-rise housing right next to jobs, and use the tax boost from having more residents to add more mass transit.
As far as zoning, the issue is not housing vs. services and infrastructure, it's the size of the housing. Detached houses have an awful use ratio.
Unfortunately NY is set up as a centralized archipelago; existing transport infrastructure is pretty much saturated, and encouraging outlying areas to gain jobs is not workable because Manhattan is the only place accessible to every single part of the metro area within one or two seats on public transport.
It's hard to use the tax boost to add more mass transit, because you'd have to bond based on projected revenues, which is fickle at best. The only places that tie redevelopment and transit together successfully seem to be in Hong Kong and Japan, but in those places the mass transit operator either already owned the land being redeveloped, or got it for pennies on the dollar as a de facto public subsidy, which would be impossible in the US due to the Just Compensation clause of the Fifth Amendment.
Manhattan has a density of 72,000 people per square mile. If it were its own city, that would make it the 6th densest city in the world[0]. The top three are Manila and Mumbai, at 108,000, 74,000, and 74,000 people per square mile, respectively. So, regardless of levels of development, modern cities cap out under 80,000 people per square mile, with Manila being a slight outlier (but not by much).
190 people/acre - what you cite for Antioch - is 121,600 people per square mile. I'm not able to find any reputable sources that back that statistic, and estimating populations of cities from antiquity is inherently a bit tricky. 500,000 people would also put it at 50-80% of the population of Rome during the same time period, and more populous that Constantinople, though it's not included in any of the four lists of populations of large cities on this page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_cities_through...
[0] There are two more, at 108K and 80K, but they both have populations under 70,000, so they're not comparable.
- Elevator (making high-rises socially possible)
- Air conditioning
- Electric lighting (making windows less necessary to fill interior space with workplaces, and much safer than ceiling gas lights)
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Architecture-Well-Tempered-Environmen...
Steel suitable for pipes, and long-distance water pipes, really did not exist before the 1860s, and mostly arose for and from the Pennsylvania oil industry. The earlier options were generally ceramic pipe (OK for horizontal flows, but prone to breakage), and open acqueducts (dating to Roman times), with wood or bamboo used for some shorter runs (tens to 100s of meters generally).
I don't know much about skyscraper plumbing at all, though I doubt it's just scaled-up 1-4 storey kit.
And by 1931, the Empire State Building was 102 storeys tall (443m).
For more on multi-storey plumbing considerations:
http://www.who.int/water_sanitation_health/hygiene/plumbing1...
I believe that the upper floors of all the pretty buildings in Paris were cheaper before elevators, too. (Perhaps the streets were quieter then too.)
Apart from the stairs being a pain, your water pressure is also weak.
In a five story building, the water can get that high just with pressure from the mains, though the pressure will be much weaker than on lower floors, so the building doesn't need to have any mechanism for increasing the pressure. It probably wouldn't be done for newer buildings, but when the older walk-ups were constructed it would have been considered acceptable as a way of keeping costs lower.
My understanding is that this was fairly standard in tall buildings everywhere.
Obviously there were no elevators.
The top floors in most prewar walkups in NYC are the cheapest today, even though all have sturdy fire escapes. People don't want to walk up 5 flights of stairs every day, and they also get swelteringly hot on the top floors during the summer, whereas lower floors stay cooler.
That isn't my experience with the top floors of NYC prewar walkups today (and trust me, I've had a lot of that!), but I could see that being an issue in other places or in previous times.
I don't think that'd have been a driving factor in ancient Rome, though, given how different their uses of their plumbing technology were from ours. They had public toilets and baths (at ground level), so water pressure for washing and bathing wouldn't be a concern for top-floor apartments the way it would be for us today.
Being on the top floor of a building without A/C can definitely be an issue with respect to heat.
However, while having to lug a bunch of groceries (or whatever) up multiple flights of stairs can be an pain, is "walking up 5 flights of stairs a day" really a big issue? [Obviously for some people with infirmities it will be.] I work--well, when I commute--in a 4 story office building and most people, including myself, take the stairs when we move between floors for meeting, cafeteria, etc. We at least used to have signs encouraging taking the steps.
Just thinking anecdotally, myself and many of my neighbors in NYC are probably dealing with a dozen or more flights or stairs up and down on a daily basis (two flights down out of the apartment building, half a flight up to the street level from the sunken entrance, another 2 flights back down into the subway station, 2 flights up on the other end of the train ride, a flight in the grocery store, two flights at the gym, etc, etc, etc). Escalators are often present, but many people walk up those anyways. I'd feel comfortable saying people living here are generally in far, far better stair-climbing-shape than most of the country.
Some examples:
- I biked to work. Carrying my bike up 5 stories of narrow stairs, bumping into everything, every evening was not a fun way to end my day.
- Moving any heavy/bulky object will make even paid movers cry.
- It makes coming and going feel like a sizable task.
That said, I still preferred it over a lower floor, because it meant no noise from above and less street noise.
How common is this? I never see people take the stairs when there's an elevator. I always take the elevator even if it's just one floor and I have to wait a while.
Also, if you had heating, somebody had to lug up coal, and parents (about everybody was one, at the time, and the mothers were pregnant quite often) would have to lug up small children.
And it isn’t “5 flights of stairs a day”. Chances are the toilet was at least one stair away, too.
This all depends of course on the overall state of your fitness, and how heavy you are. Ideally, one never would use an elevator and hence be very fit and less overweight. And this doesn't count in any kind of medical condition which limit or even prohibit you from taking many (or any) stairs.
For all the practical benefits both elevators and cars have brought to the modern human, they certainly have a big drawback on the average fitness. I try to use stairs as much as possible, and on an average day I certainly klimb 12 flights, but would no longer consider an appartment in the 3rd floor without an elevator for when it is needed.
I think every single apartment having its own kitchen and every person having their own set of cutlery/dishware/pots/pans/etc is very, very new.
People. Furnishings. Possessions. Food. Water. Waste.
If something didn't move independently, you moved it personally.
Privies tended to be outside, at ground level. Pisspots were standard items.
Gardyloo!
This isn't really true - the Aurelian walls were about 14 square kilometers, but a significant portion of the city's 1 million people lived outside the Aurelian walls. We don't have a good sense of how many people lived within the Aurelian walls, but number that's often cited (1 million people/14 square km = 70,000 people/square km, 2.5 times the most dense city in the world today) is not actually representative of what ancient Rome looked like at any period in history.
> How many people want to climb 20 stories
> of stairs every day of their life.
Just waiting for and taking the elevator will easily take a minute at least. So we're left with just over 2 minutes.
This is on the order of time that it takes many people to walk from their parked car to the front door at work, or even just to park their car!
That would be nothing compared to the alternative of there being 1-3 floor houses everywhere, so you'd need to commute even further than that.
> nevermind the transportation of equipment.
People would certainly be more fit in such a world. In ours, climbing 20 stories is not something many people can do at all, never mind do willingly every day. But even for a fit person, 20 stories at 10sec/story is definitely not "generous", more like a great athletic achievement given how strenuous it is to climb stairs compared to walking or running on flat ground. Gravity is a bitch.
But tell you what. I'll try the experiment later today.
Absolutely not. Before elevators most buildings would stop at around 5 stories. Climbing 20 stories is not just time-consuming[0], it's also quite tiring, you're dragging your own mass 60m upwards on a very steep slope.
And that's basically discarding older adults entirely, according to "Functional predictors of stair-climbing speed in older adults" individuals ascend about 1.3 steps per second for 8~10 steps.
> That would be nothing compared to the alternative of there being 1-3 floor houses everywhere, so you'd need to commute even further than that.
The alternative would be necessarily rethinking the entire mess and either creating much wider buildings or going back to a much more decentralised model.
> This is on the order of time that it takes many people to walk from their parked car to the front door at work, or even just to park their car!
Walking level ground and climbing stairs is not the same effort at all.
[0] and 10 seconds per floor is absolutely not generous, it corresponds to a high-cadence stair-stepper setting (100 steps/mn, assuming 16 steps/flight which is about what you get in a residential building, an office building would be 18~20 steps/flight)
And before elevators housing prices and density aren't what they are now. You'd find a lot of people willing to traverse 20 stories if it meant not living a 30 minute commute away. So we really don't have any real-world data for this.
> Walking level ground and climbing stairs is not the same effort at all.
Sure. But I think my point of this comparing favorably to commutes stands. Also, given the statistics of adults who under-exercise this is a win-win, traversing stairs at every opportunity is a great way to get a workout in.
> 10 seconds per floor is absolutely not generous
Those 10 seconds per floor was probably overly optimistic. FWIW I live on the 4th floor and (I just timed it) it takes me around 35 seconds to go up from the ground floor at the pace I usually do, and would be comfortable maintaining for 5x that distance. I take every second step. That's 8.75 seconds/floor.
> which is about what you get in a residential building, an office building[...]
Keep in mind that those office buildings have more distance between floors partly because they're designed in a world where the elevator exists. If we're supposing that elevators hadn't been invented there would be a market pressure to construct buildings that made it easier to go up the stairs.
In one of my previous jobs, our office was on 17th floor, and one day each week before lunch we'd all take elevator to floor level, and then climb these 17 floors back up. Let me tell you, last 4 floors are nothing like first 4 floors. Just try it for yourself one day -- find a 20 story building, climb to the top, see how tired you are, and how much time it took you, and then consider that you'd have to do it 2-4 times a day on average.
I suggest you actually try it once, it will probably be eye-opening.
And then of course you may want to consider that not everybody is a fit healthy young adult.
> Keep in mind that those office buildings have more distance between floors partly because they're designed in a world where the elevator exists. If we're supposing that elevators hadn't been invented there would be a market pressure to construct buildings that made it easier to go up the stairs.
No. Office buildings have more space between the floors for conduits and the like. You can bet your damn ass if they could pack more floors in the same vertical space they'd do so.
I'd guess very few -- I work in a 23 story office building (on the 20th floor, coindidentally), and from my desk I can see the stairway door in the hallway.
Other than maintenance staff, I don't remember seeing a single person use that door. We have another office on the 15th floor, and I know of no one that uses the stairs to travel the 5 floors from office to office.
So I think the number of people that want to climb 20 stories by stairs every day is very low.
I live 270 ft up a hill, and regularly walk up. At 10 feet per story, that's 27 floors. I'm also the only one on the hill who walks up it.
I have a feeling the people who installed elevators in buildings thought it through.
But the article seems to take modern to mean present-day Houston, and Dubai, Singapore... these were not devoid of human settlement before, of course, but could not look as they do now without AC.
It is necessary to move heat around to get useful work done. More people will have to become familiar with this idea personally to maintain their way of life.
Ask all those people in NYC with walkups.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424053111903639404576516...
In SimTower you can only build to four stories with stairs and escalators, I believe.