Comment by ggm | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ggm | Hacker News Reader

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As a NIMBY opposing a 32 (revised down to 24) storey build in an area where the town plan said 15, I think about NIMBYism a lot.

It's very contextual. Australia is renowned for historically high levels of home ownership, and the dream of the quarter acre block. In the present reality a quarter acre is beyond most peoples pocket, or else located two hours out of town. We're on track to continue Urban densification and I'm completely OK with that in principle, but not at 32 storeys high. We'd get to the right place if we built 5-10 levels dense cityscape like most of Europe.

Towers surrounded by parkland is a bust model. Towers are an antipattern.

Build human scale you can walk inside of, have lots of shared private garden spaces, and parks. Keep skyscrapers for the city core and a few transport hub developments. People need human scale architecture.

All those Dutch 4 and 5 storey streetscapes, and the Victorian ones in Edinburgh and parts of Glasgow, they "hide" significant private green space inside the streetscape. These cities are greener than they look on the pavement.

Australian cities are pretty OK. We can go denser without loosing the trees, and without becoming Hong Kong.

Large cities provide so much more opportunity to people than towns and smaller cities, that I can't see the ethical case for limiting densification, even if maximizing densification moderately compromises the character of the neighbourhoods that current residents live in.

If we were a completely utilitarian society pursuing some kind of minimax I could agree with this. But, we aren't. Cities have form which reflects lots of social pressures and my memory of standing on the empire state looking down is that different quadrants of new York and new jersey reflect different views of density and land use from green spaces to the projects.

My area (west end, that's the name of a specific suburb in Brisbane) is a working class high density single storey suburb, now overtaken by extensive modern builds of three, four and five storey small development (we call them six-packs from the typical number of flats you can fit on a block), Brisbane's first highrise (torbrek, a 1960s tower. Interesting building) and subsequent 9 to 15 storey developments. It's gone from under 5,000 residents in early 2000s to over 10,000. (Last census 2016 was 9,000. It's probably 14,000 or so now) It's had fights over parkland, schools, bus services. Huge social change, housing cooperative groups sent to the suburbs to free up valuable land for the state housing commission to reduce public sector debt, factories which still occupy an inner city residential landscape, some on prime river real estate. In 12 years time we will host the Olympics and some of this will be used for showcase development.

It's not just about more people. It's about what kind of life you want people to live. South East Queensland is the same area as LA and will be 5m people in the next 15 years. It's not one thing, it's many things. There's room for a mixture of high rise and medium and low density urban living in Australia.

Life expectancy tends to go up as population densities increase. On top of that, people's environmental footprints shrink.

We can talk about all the specific cases where people lost something as the older character of the city made way for the new, but on the balance, there must be more cases of lives improving, than degrading, when we see not only gains in average income and life expectancy, but more people able to live in the cities that provide these superior conditions.

Consider that Hong Kong now has the highest life expectancy in the world:

https://www.cnn.com/2018/03/02/health/hong-kong-world-longes...

Interesting take on things. It's unclear to me that this isn't about diet and genes. But, if it is density we also have to accept it's heading to an asymptote, and so eg building everything the height of Burj Khalifa won't make us live to 250.

The entitlement here is scary. You have every right to buy the land under that tower and build something yourself.

If you choose not to do that, then you can be quiet about whatever happens there. It's not yours. Mind your own business.

This ain’t anarchy, people have a say in what goes on around them, even if they’re not millionaires.

I am going to buy all the land surrounding your house and use it to build airports and coal processing plants. Not your land, not your business, so I better not hear any complaints alright?

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