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Comment by xasos | Hacker News Reader

> The future for housing for most people on the planet (including the US) is in cities and urban environments.

I agree. Skyscrapers would provide the best bang for buck in terms of space. You could fit a lot more people into a city like San Francisco.

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As a general rule, skyscrapers don't increase density much, as most of the space is taken up by elevators, plumbing, electrical, and so forth. A block of five-floor walkups is almost as dense as a 50-story tower-with-empty-space-around-it, and much less expensive to build.

Walkups, not skyscrapers, are the best bang for the buck.

Interesting. Most of SF residents I know still live in small houses or low-rise buildings, so there is a lot of potential for more living space (if current situation worsens in that way it is)

How much space around the skyscraper? Surely at least half of each floor is usable, right? I can't find any normal tower floor plans that differ.

Ten times as many floors is a lot of floors...

This is an excerpt from a book called At Home in the City: an introduction to urban design which explains how the same plot of land can accomodate different types of development and different densities. Medium-rise blocks can match and exceed the density of high-rise blocks - see the attached pic in the excerpt below for an example:

"In 1972 Leslie Martin and Lionel March published a cogent analysis of the key forms of urban development. They postulated that on any given site development can take three basic forms which they called 'pavilion','street' and 'patio'. These forms cover different proportions of the ground area.

If developed with buildings of the same height and depth the pavilion form would provide the lowest density and the patio form the highest. On the other hand, constructing a given amount of floorspace would need buildings of different height depending on which form they took. Figure 2.2 illustrates this principle [see: http://imgur.com/LmJ1tTg ]. It shows that the same amount of floorspace could be built on the same site as a fifteen-storey tower block, five-storey linear blocks or a three-storey perimeter block."

Interesting, but they seem to be keeping the floorspace constant on purpose there. With such a narrow tower you could fit four on that plot!

The myth of that, however, is that Tokyo, one of the more denser cities in the world, is not a city of skyscrapers. Even London isnt, so there is something else to living up to density in urban environments (though I live on the 16th floor in a beijing apartment).

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