Quote:
Originally Posted by Curmudgeon
Other jurisdictions realized years ago that tower blocks for social housing were in most cases a mistake. Many have been torn down. Social housing should be small-scale and not concentrated.
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Yeah, but they made the mistake of assuming that you could plant a bunch of blocky gray monoliths in a field, call it "towers in the park" and sell people on that sort of idiocy. They tended to provide few if any amenities and made the layout more like suburban Moscow than anything anybody would grow to love.
You can build a sea of highrises and have them be integrated and formed at a community, you just have to consider a few basics.
Here in China there's no shortage of highrises and high-density neighborhoods. In fact, that's pretty much all that exists. Granted, the Chinese don't think of neighborhoods the way that we do (I'm pretty sure they don't think of it at all) but it's just a word that corresponds to an idea. They've still built plenty of attractive districts with plenty of life in them out of nothing but highrises. It most definitely can be done and, in fact, is done all the time in a lot of the world. I would agree to some extent that social housing is better done when not concentrated but don't forget that the rest of the population doesn't like paying top dollar to live next to poverty. I'm sorry if people don't like to hear that but it's a fact of life and has always been.