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Originally Posted by closedspace
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These constant appeals to "open space" are such a mystery to me.
If you think about the places that people seem to really like to congregate (Clark in Andersonville, Division in Wicker, Armitage in Lincoln Park, Bucktown and Belmont Cragin, Augusta in West Town, 53rd in Hyde Park, Wentworth in Chinatown) or some of the most enjoyable streets to just take a walk (Lawrence, Armitage, Kimball, Foster), the thing they all have in common is that they are human scaled and there is no forced "open space" between the structures. Things are close by and the re-enforcement of street activity and lots of people leads to a variety of businesses in a small area, which is enjoyable to walk through and fun to experience.
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You're basically making the same arguments Jane Jacobs does. I assume you've read her books, but if not you should. She's not perfect, and not all of her ideas are ideal, but she is rightfully considered to be sort of the mother (or perhaps grandmother) of the return to urbanism.
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Originally Posted by closedspace
Given the choice of building something new, I can't fathom why anyone would push for fewer tall buildings further apart over more shorter buildings closer together. I'd much rather have a 6-8 story absolute height limit with no open space requirement than dedicating tons of land to gaps in the urban fabric.
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I completely agree, and that's why Paris and Madrid are two of my favorite cities. They both have that scale, a few grand, ceremonial parks in the center and at the edges, and then a good smattering of what we might call pocket parks or small plazas, no more than the equivalent of 2-3 Chicago standard lots in size, scattered around everywhere.
Chicago actually, in my opinion, has the bones for an excellent parks system (lower case intentionally, as I'm not talking about organized, top-down creation, but a system of rules that naturally lead to something like I described when talking about Paris).
By way of "edge parks" we have Lincoln Park and Jackson Park, and whatever the stretch of lakefront between Jackson Park and McCormick Place is called, as well as the forest preserves on the inland side. For centralized "grand, ceremonial" parks, we have Grant Park for the city as a whole, and then various sectors have their own "grand, ceremonial" parks, too - Garfield Park for the West Side, Humboldt Park for the Northwest Side, Douglas Park for the Southwest Side, Washington and Marquette Parks for the South Side.
And then there are dozens of smaller parks, some of them almost to the scale of grand, ceremonial ones, like McKinley Park, and some just nice neighborhood gathering spaces like Mary Bartelme Park or Ward Park, and others still like European plazas, like Mariano Park.
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Originally Posted by closedspace
For me, the most tangible impact of "density" is making long walks feel short. Towers in the park Le Corbusier style are the antithesis of this type of design. Unfortunately the renderings of Lincoln Yards resemble this kind of thing a bit too closely.
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As others have noted, where Chicago gets itself into trouble is with developments like Prairie Shores or Lake Meadows, or the Cabrini Green highrises. I would personally support the City banning development that has undedicated green space like those, requiring buildings meet the street strongly, and any park space to be specifically designed to be used as park space instead of just leaving unprogrammed voids between buildings. The development of the Tribune space along the River between Goose Island and Grand only looks marginally better, too.
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Originally Posted by Rizzo
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And file traffic circles under the adding more lanes argument. They’re best suited to semi-rural environments. They don’t function well in multimodal urban environments.
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Paris, Boston, Washington, London, etc, etc, might disagree with that. Certainly there is a limit to the number of places they're useful anywhere, but Chicago is not currently, nor has it ever been, at risk of getting anywhere near the upper limit.