Quote:
Originally Posted by muppet
Shenzhen is the only city in China that is instigating a protection for its urban villages -though this was agreed well before the new law. The rest across the country are being blitzed in what's been measured as the greatest urban demolition ever seen.
(Urban villages btw are semi-legal midrises that sprung up in the 1990s, but encapsulate Chinese streetlife).
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I didn't know about the new protection measures. The main reason I brought up Shenzhen is that it's urban villages are particularly dense, in the hundreds of thousands of inhabitants per square mile (like 500k ppsm on average?).
From an outside view that might seem hard to believe but the buildings are very tightly packed, much more than would be typical in North America, and only separated by laneways that are 15ft wide at most, often only 5-10ft. The land is also overwhelming residential, not much institutional uses, factories or parks (those are mostly outside of the urban villages I think?). And the buildings get pretty tall, up to 10 storeys or so (typically 6-8).
Usually to make a profit you need to increase FSI about 3 fold. However once you go skyscraper mode, you're not really going to be able to have your towers glued together without any spacing between them, you need to increase the spacing to allow light to reach down to the lower floors. Shenzhen towers are usually not as tightly packed as in Hong Kong, so the ground floor coverage might be 1/4 of what it is for urban villages. That means they'd have to be 4x3 = 12x taller than the 7 storey buildings already in place, or 84 stories tall... I suppose if the developers can sell the units at a higher price per sf in the towers thanks to the better views or less packed nature of those redevelopments, they don't have to be that tall. But I think you basically need to go 50+ storeys tall for redevelopment to be viable (that's assuming you have to get the land at market price... which maybe developers get below market price due to government intervention?).