Verdichtung | Hacker News Reader

Verdichtung

alexeygy.github.io

54 pointskenty22 comments

> Zersiedlung is the Swiss-German term for urban sprawl

That is perhaps a more interesting word than Verdichtung.

Zer is a prefix that gives a destructive meaning to the base word. Teil is piece. Teilen is to share. Zerteilen is to break into pieces. Druck is pressure. Drücken is to push. Zerdrücken is to crush.

Siedlung means settlement.

It’s not always destructive as in “to crush”, it can also lend an air of diffusion, dispersion, fraying at the edges, which is perhaps closer to the idea of “sprawl”. I’m not Swiss, so it could be different there, and I can’t speak to how common “Zersiedlung” is in Switzerland. In Germany I would say it’s probably strictly a governmental/admin term of art, if anything.

In my German-speaking opinion, Zersiedlung is more about destruction of landscape than about fraying of settlements. You don't say that a village is zersiedelt, you do say that a landscape is zersiedelt.

You are right. "Zersiedlung" is a term of art in land-use and development planning to describe the undirected expansion of settlements into rural areas. I happen to work in the periphery of planning and approval and the term comes up quite often. The English equivalent would be the mentioned "suburban sprawl".

Interesting, zer- seems to be similar to Slavic raz- somewhat.

In Russian: davit - press, razdavit - to crush.

Siedlung corresponds to Russian selenie "settlement". Zersiedlung appears to correspond to "rasselenie" (morphologically) and it means more like settlement as a dispersion, movement from a single point in different outward directions.

So I suspect zer- doesn't mean destruction per se, it's just that destruction often involves this movement of parts in outward directions from an original center, which explains the frequent association of zer- with destruction.

My impression is that German prefixes don't have such well-defined meanings that a new word created with one automatically has an unambiguous definition relative to the base word. There seem to be parallels with raz- but I'm not sure if they have a common root.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-Eur...

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Slavic/o...

I live in Zurich-wollishofen and love it here. There are some areas of dense housing (Green City, Entlisberg, etc) but despite that there's a farm that's a 5-minute walk to get to, two other farms that are about 30 minutes, a fourth farm that's 45-minutes, and finally a fifth farm that's over an hour and includes a 400 meter climb up a ridge. We do much of our shopping at the farms.

The lake and swimming is a 10-minute walk with many green areas, and I gather mushrooms on the uetliberg/Albis ridge that takes me about 25-minutes to get to on foot.

Zurich has dense housing areas but its also well-integrated with nature and it's not just my neighborhood - there's lovely forests all around the city with streams and waterfalls, wild garlic and berries and mushrooms..

Hong Kong (while obviously quite different) is similar in the sense that many urban areas are fairly compact and walkable, and regions of very high density housing alternate with parks, forests, playgrounds, zoological gardens, water front, etc., so that groceries, restaurants, public transport, but also recreational areas are never more than a few minutes away.

Quite a contrast to suburban sprawl.

That sounds great, but that experience of the 15000 or so people in Wollishofen can't be provided for the half a million folks living in Zurich. That's the whole point of Verdichtung. That you get higher density in exchange for short distances. If everybody lived like Wollishofen does, then you'd have suburbia as far as the eye can see. In a sense, Wollishofen has the cake and gets to eat it too (because it's so close to the dense Zurich center but is itself only sparse). Which is nice for the small minority living there, but not a model that can really be applied everywhere.

Isn't it what they're saying? Wollishofen is getting densified (Green city, etc.), so that access to green space stays the same.

It's similar for people in Altstetten, in 10-15 min walk they're in a forest in one direction, and can go swimming in the Limmat in the other.

My first experience with this was in Maastricht. We started walking in the city center and before I know it we were on the outskirts. This was unexpected to me at I'm used to North American cities.

This is what is called "tiivistettävä" in Finnish. I live in such an area, with traditional wooden housing, in the city core. If some houses get in bad state, the city orders to throw them down and some low-rise apartment blocks are built on top of them, thus increasing the number of people that can be housed per square meter.

It's a fine line between the noble intentions of the urban planning concept and creating a horrible mismatched pot-pourri of different building styles and ages, though. Ideally buildings in an area are somewhat congruent with each other.

Urban sprawl is an issue here in part because of the abundance of water, land-locking expanding city centres.

The house in Zurich I live in was initially built something like in the 12th century, but the floor I reside on was added in the 17th century. This is the case for most houses in the old town. So this is going on for a while.

I suppose here’s the type of story where it’s all sounds good and you say show me the data. And then, if you’re inclined, run a notebook and look for comparable metrics from other cities.

https://www.nyc.gov/site/hpd/about/open-data.page

This was particularly interesting:

“Neither cooperatives nor the city typically sell flats. Mostly because …they really love recurring revenue and absolutely would hate to deal with short-term income as they are generally *non-profit institutions*.” (My emphasis)

Doesn’t seem like NYC can run their buildings at a profit, considering all the repairs that are reported as unfixed.

> “Neither cooperatives nor the city typically sell flats. Mostly because …they really love recurring revenue and absolutely would hate to deal with short-term income as they are generally non-profit institutions.” (My emphasis)

FWIW that was a bit misleading, the goal of the city or the non profits (Genossenschaften) is to provide housing, not selling flat. (There's a goal that 1/3 of all housing in the city has to be non-profit by 2050, this was voted back in 2011)

Yes. Thanks for pointing this out. I was hesitant to keep it in the article too as it's a bit too much of a simplification since I pool in different actors like Baugenossenschaften, the city and e.g., pension funds together. Further analyzing would have indeed been better but I wanted to keep it compact.

Yeah, it felt a bit weird to me since if anything to reach the stated goals they need to buy a lot more land/buildings. (The recent failed cantonal initiative would have helped them)

> "...the goal of the city or the non profits (Genossenschaften) is to provide housing, not selling flat."

I can only speak for NYC and the efforts here. We have a dog's breakfast of different efforts--housing lotteries, Section 8, and programs for down-payment assistance to buy a home for first time home buyers. I made use of the last program, having had no success in the first for the past 13 years (I've received probably 3-4 letters from different lottery programs saying I was moving up in the program, but they always fizzled out).

> "There's a goal that 1/3 of all housing in the city has to be non-profit by 2050, this was voted back in 2011"

This sounds like a remarkable program. I wonder about these non-profits. Who runs them, how are they governed, what is their measure of success (since it's not monetary), and how do they measure it.

https://housingconnect.nyc.gov/PublicWeb/search-lotteries

https://www.nyc.gov/site/nycha/section-8/about-section-8.pag...

https://www.nyc.gov/site/hpd/services-and-information/homefi...

Will remember it for the next article to run some more empirical number crunching, thank you! This was more of a rationalist view on things and focussing on Zurich only.

> "...to run some more empirical number crunching..."

Don't get me wrong, more number crunching when an article is above survey is always appreciated.

My idea was simply when non-profits come into the game, I feel there's an opportunity to find data. And finding it, why not share it?

"Verdichtung" is almost funny considering that Zurich is a city with not even half a million inhabitants. For example in the greater Moscow area live roughly 35 million people in an area about 1/4 the size of whole Switzerland with its 9 million people. THAT is "Verdichtung".

Megacities are obviously a different beast. Interestingly though, as far as I know, Moscow is heavily expanding into/incorporating/eating up the neighboring towns, expanding borders and building metro stations instead of mainly doing Verdichtung. I guess there are/have to be some projects where they build a bit higher but it is not the main shtick.

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