Quote:
Originally Posted by ardecila
Well, I certainly agree that we shouldn't fetishize height = density, but it's worth noting that these areas of Istanbul (or Paris, etc) achieve those densities with very small apartments and limited access to natural light.
I don't think midrises in the US will ever be built like that again (the codes simply don't allow it). Under our laws, the only way to get that ultra-density is with true highrises. Micro-units are another option, but I don't see entire neighborhoods being built from those.
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In Istanbul it's not necessarily that the apartments are SUPER small. I have some friends who used to live in a dense part of Istanbul and their 1 bedroom wasn't really that much smaller than your typical 1 bedroom in NYC or parts of Chicago. It's that some of these places have had a mass influx of people from Central Asia who will pile people into smaller apartments. Kind of akin sometimes to what happened in Lower East Side in NYC over 100 years ago (but not even close to as dirty as what happened in NYC) but on average maybe not as bad. And they each have a private bathroom unlike 100+ years ago in NYC but that's another story for another day.
Regardless, if you had a bunch of those developments in Chicago even with the US standard apartment sizes you could achieve some great densities.
So just doing the math on this one - if you filled an entire square mile with exact replicas of this development with 226 units each, and the average number of people per unit is 2 then you'd reach a density of 106,479 ppsm entirely with these 9 story buildings...which is still greater than the majority of areas in Chicago right now even with high rises. Maybe a little less in case the number of feet is off a little - I found out it's 387 x 387 in that lot but if it was 400x400 for example then you're still achieving densities of around 80K ppsm.
Sayin'