Parks need a certain level of activation, and developments like these tended to fall below those thresholds. If not active, parks become ill-maintained, desolate, and foreboding. In the worst case scenario, they become havens for crime, since there are no witnesses or bystanders to help out someone getting mugged.
A giant tower in a park just encapsulates everyone and leaves the park empty.
Easily observable and any why the campus model took root.
It’s also not that safe and requires its own police precinct.
In short the park is too large compared to everything else and so it isn't enough of a draw for locals to keep out the rif-raf.
Note that I said drive, not take transit above. Although the density might be there, the sky scrapper in the park ends up acting like a cul-de-sac: all transit has to make long detours to get to each one and so the effective speed of transit is unacceptably slow for any trip thus forcing people to drive just to get a reasonable trip time.
The thing about the tower in the park ethos was that every building should be surrounded by park and the neighborhood should be more park than city. That’s way too low of a density to keep parks safe.
Towers surrounding a park, like Central Park in New York (or any decent size park in Manhattan) works well. Towers as a city wall like Grant Park in Chicago also work well. In both cases the park is a focal point of the urban form which puts all attention on the communal area it represents.
The purpose of "towers in a park" was to break up the urban form, and have density without urbanism. One big problem they were trying to avoid is rooms where the "view" out the window was of a ventilation shaft between buildings. They wanted towers with "no such thing as a bad view" by positioning them in a staggered layout and with substantial setbacks. This creates a bunch of awkward negative spaces in the layout and the architect just stamps "park" on all the vacant areas.
The result might be good views from inside the buildings but the no-man's-land between them becomes an alienating place with broken sight lines and blind corners. Toss in a criminal element and you end up with some really unpleasant spaces.
It originates with Le Corbusier and his Radiant City concept from the 1930s. See https://99percentinvisible.org/article/ville-radieuse-le-cor.... The influences quickly spread through Europe and North America before exploding everywhere post WWII. There are several Wikipedia pages about Le Corbusiers, including https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ville_Radieuse but in a simple search I couldn't find one that gives a good overview of how influential it actually was. A lot academic urban planning literature discusses it. OTOH, the idea of less crowding long predated Le Corbusiers, and his vision may have been inevitable, but it was Le Corbusiers who packaged it up into a comprehensive concept, which helped the practice to spread much more rapidly and uniformly around the world.
Parkland that is not often used to capacity that has a lot of people near it would likely have more crime, because you’ve essentially created a glorified alleyway. E.G. Central Park in the 70s, when you didn’t want to be nearby it near sundown.
Central Park is a good case study of this phenomenon, because it’s now one of the most heavily used parks in one of most densely populated areas in the world, and billionaires pay premiums to live next to it. That didn’t always used to be the case, and it was considered dangerous.
1. A low traffic urban park still has some traffic, and criminals want reasonable waiting times. You might wait all day on a hiking trail.
2. Escape routes. Harder to make a clean getaway on a trail. Often one way out, a single trail head, and then a drive. That's another thing, you probably need a car. In an urban park you can vanish back into the city from multiple exit points.
3. Crimes of opportunity. Most muggings aren't planned out far in advance. Driving to a hiking spot and patiently waiting isn't the psychological place typical criminals are operating from. Serial killers, maybe... and sometimes those killings do happen in secluded hiking areas.
I've travelled and hiked in the US a lot. In outdoor tourism spots away from cities, I think the main threat for opportunistic thefts would be 20-30yo foreign tourists (shoestring travelling Europeans, South Americans, etc). Cities would be completely different.
Near me, sometimes people report smash and grabs through car windows at trailheads.
To put it another way, hundreds of miles of forest trails sounds like a lot of work.
but i'd assume that the main difference is that the hundreds of miles of trails and national forest behind your house doesn't have a residential tower stuck in the middle of it.
but afaik the difference between "commieblocks" and towers in the park is that there was a lot less park per commieblock. you had more buildings clustered tighter together than the prototypical western towers in the park development.
but also, it is an artifact of the political system: crime shot up after the dissolution of the USSR. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_the_Soviet_Union
A city park is within walking distance, requires no vehicle to get to, can be visited on a whim, and potential victims are more likely carrying valuables (jewelry, electronics, nice handbags). Criminals can visit the park, commit a crime, and disappear back into the dense city on a whim, without planning or preparing.
Most crimes in this context are crimes of convenience. Hiking long trails is not convenient.
The other thing is that people visit their local, convenient parks unless there is a really good reason to travel far for one; and if everyone has their tower in a park, then why would they go to anyone else’s?
Back when I was a daily hiker, I would have been carry seriously expensive gear. A few thousand dollars at least. Way more expensive than I would have walking around town. It would have been work to track me down in the forest though.
As one of the other commenters pointed out, in a national forest the crime occurs as car clouting at the trailhead. I would leave my car unlocked, and depending on weather, a window rolled down.
The parent poster must live next to a different national forest than the ones I hiked at, if you hiked at a popular trail it was completely normal to get back to the trailhead and see cars with their windows busted out.
I'm sitting at my desk in an office in Gastown in a low-rise. The streets are covered in feces and broken crack pipes.
Parking garages in these developments also tended to be centers of crime since they were big, desolate, and no one lingered in them to witness anything.
Japan has plenty of those (e.g. Roppongi's Midtown, Tokyo Tower, Shinagawa's corp. park)
I can see thousands of examples of “tower in a park” style residential neighborhoods online in dozens of different countries. Are they all fake?
who said they were fake? I just said the reality often didn't pan out that well.
The question is about whether you believe they are fake or not. I don’t have any claims in either direction.
e.g. “Didn’t pan out that well” according to what authoratative sources?
You can’t get around it via linking a wikipedia article with opinions expressed by other random people, without any more authority or credibility than many HN users.
Edit: And if there is no source with such, then it needs to be proven via logical arguments, observational evidence, etc.
Anything that user writes in the future will automatically supersede it.
And your opinion about the interpretation of someone else’s comment can never outweigh anyone else’s opinion on the same… so it seems empty of any substance.