I think this is amazing. Not every attempt to solve housing problems will be a hit but we have to try or else we’ll never succeed. Hopefully the next round of solutions will learn from these attempts.
I will say that it might seem contradictory but really high density housing with adequate services (grocery,medical,school) is actually lower impact than huge sprawl. Sure the impact on that one kilometer is dramatic but in a suburban sprawl situation the land use for the same number of residences/units is going to be orders of magnitude higher. Even the transport links might use more land than the the land used. I’m thinking large city streets and freeways, that’s a lot of real estate.
An old saying goes that it is better to be a doctor than an architect. A doctor buries their mistakes, but all an architect can do is recommend their client plant ivy.
This might be a fine application for immersive IT on the grandest scale. Provide the fully complete 24-hour sensory experience of actually living in, or next to, one of these monuments to oversized municipal egos before the first shovel touches the dirt. Use IT to determine if the benefits match the (simulated) lived reality…before the City has an ugly, dysfunctional 50+ year problem on its hands.
And have the members of the current Community themselves provide an evaluation of whether the project as simulated meets their wants and needs, and not just the needs and wants of the City Council, builders or architects. There would have been a lot fewer Brutalist buildings and high-rise urban renewal housing projects built, if such an accurate immersive simulation had been available in the 50s-60s.
Such a simulation is probably beyond the capabilities of this generation of IT professionals. It would be a very hard job to model the diversity of residents, situations, environments, future economic scenarios, etc. over the lifetime of the proposed large building. Validating the QoL of the simulated environment would be even harder. (Maybe start with known failures and see if the simulation predicts the observed issues.) But if the QoL impact of large projects can’t be properly assessed, maybe smaller, more human-scaled projects are the responsible approach. Sprawl or no.
I will say that it might seem contradictory but really high density housing with adequate services (grocery,medical,school) is actually lower impact than huge sprawl. Sure the impact on that one kilometer is dramatic but in a suburban sprawl situation the land use for the same number of residences/units is going to be orders of magnitude higher. Even the transport links might use more land than the the land used. I’m thinking large city streets and freeways, that’s a lot of real estate.