Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

jayvanguard

> they also abandoned the idea of a high-density sustainable city

Paris is very dense. All of the places in the top 30 mentioned below are actually neighborhoods of Paris:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_proper_by_popula...

View on HN

That's the point. Paris is the second-lowest on that list. The other places listed are all Parisian suburbs.

"Because they exiled all future high rises to some far neighborhood like La Défense, they were segregating growth."

But the only Anglo city in the list is Union City. Nowhere in the UK is listed.

That's just an inevitable result of regression to the mean. Paris is 40 square miles while the largest of the denser French cities is less than 1 square mile. Paris has areas with much higher density, but it's impossible to sustain that level of density over the whole city. For instance, the 11th arrondissement of Paris has more than 50% higher population density of any of the other French cities (while still having a larger area than any of them). In fact, 9 of the 20 arrondissements have a higher population density than any of the other French cities[1].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrondissements_of_Paris

Reply on news.ycombinator.com