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Old Posted Aug 8, 2011, 5:32 PM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by phoenixboi08 View Post
Yes, that's always bothered me too...but one thing you have to bear in mind, is that these cities ( I can't speak for Tianjin, but I can for Shanghai and Beijing) ARE dense (at least they were originally). That's why all of these new developments and towers aren't; "space" is now a hot commodity here. If you're a developer and you're building an apartment complex (or even a shopping/office development - as they're often one and the same anyways), you'd be wise to incorporate as much open/green space as possible because it's what people want. That's why everything always looks so compound-ish...it's saying, "hey! this is MY green area...I paid for it...keep out!" But it's usually not so bad to be honest. There are plenty of cities, like Nanjing for example, that have no incentive to do it very much because they already have a lot of open green space. At street level, everything is close enough that it doesn't make a huge difference.
These new developments are just as dense if not more so than what they're replacing . Most of the older developments incorporated courtyards of one sort or another so in terms of open space , nothing has changed really . The difference of course is that these new projects are much taller on average . The oldest areas (the HuTong districts) are packed in tight but they're usually just slums really . The size of the apartments ranges from pretty small (say maybe 300 square feet) to a couple thousand . Most of the middle class lives in an apartment of maybe 500 square feet . That's the impression I get anyway but obviously that figure will range all over the place .
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