Quote:
Originally Posted by Via Chicago
there are plenty of cities on earth with huge skylines that are miserable and dispiriting places to live. there are others with enormous amounts of wealth that make daily existence untenable for your average middle class person. im much more interested in the quality of life your average resident has in any given city. shouldnt that be the barometer we hold ourselves to? whether we have the biggest collection of piles of steel or not dosent affect my day to day life. and gloating about wealth stratification/inequality is kind of a weird flex.
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Mostly agree. Hong Kong actually fits this - it ranks near the top of high rises/skyscrapers of any city in the world. It also has the most millionaires of any city in the world. Simply put though, it was the most depressing "first world" city I've ever been to. It's not all shiny like everyone thinks - pretty dirty actually in many spots - and many of the smaller buildings are falling apart or look like they are in some neighborhoods. A lot of the buildings are pretty depressing concrete blocks actually. Unless you make a lot of money, it's not that great of a place to live unless you are content with pretty small living spaces (some people live in 70 sq ft "apartments" without any windows and barely any air flow). There's a lot of living situations there which are definitely less than ideal.
Once upon a time, I used to be all about extreme height but these days, I think I've grown out of it as of a handful of years ago. I like height but very high density levels and great urbanity is easily achievable at the 6-8+ story level on a consistent basis. I think actually there's some great examples of this in Chicago in the last few years (maybe the 4-8 story level). As TUP mentioned, "Chicago" needs to focus on filling in the gaps and making an even more cohesive environment between neighborhoods. The north side is great, for the most part (the industrial areas where LY is for example is another story) and parts of other areas but - well...there's a lot of opportunity in the city to improve this IMO.