We have builds like this, but not as big in Taiwan. They almost always have an area downstairs that the food is placed so people can come down and get it.
I imagine they also have the same thing in China.
Betcha the delivery guy delivers for one or more from many takeout food spots that are probably located inside the building itself.
We need this in North America if we ever want to solve the housing crisis tbh. I’m talking Soviet-style, grey concrete commieblocks. Yes the buildings are ugly, probably lack amenities, cheaply constructed and not well maintained, but we desperately need cheap, dense housing if we’re going to bring down the costs. Building more luxury Manhattan condos and suburban single family abominations does nothing to bring down housing prices.
Yeah but I’d also like to see such huge buildings in the middle of nature. Imagine 10.000 people with their own daycare, school or even medic / doctor surrounded by fields and food forests so they can produce their own food. Generates it’s own power, centralized super efficient heat storage system for winter, cleans up it’s own water etc. And have a fast mass transport to the next hub, like a chain of such buildings a few miles apart linking to the next big city. That’s my solar punk.
It’s basically a whole city in a building. The big advantage for this is that the city is not taking up massive amounts of space.
American Fork, Utah, has 33k inhabitants on 19 square kilometres. The building in the OP has 20-30k inhabitants on 0.04 square kilometres, which would mean that if you house all of American Fork like that, you’d get between 18.92 and 18.96 of untouched nature in return.
I’m from Poland.
I’m talking Soviet-style, grey concrete commieblocks
So the commieblocks are always:
- few minutes walk from school, kindergarten, grocery, doctor’s office, post, dentist and bus stops
- sane distance from another block
- either surrounded by good greenery, or next to a park
- surprisingly good quality
- small elevator
- little parking spaces
Vs “modern” blocks:
- large elevator
- the blocks are so close, if you open your window you could pee in the neighbours coffee cup
- usually surrounded by pavement, cement, or car parking
- better at noise reduction
- you’re more likely to need a car to go to doctor’s office or drop your kids off, or go to the grocer.
To me the ideal is the commie era urban planning with modern techniques, but that’s uncommon.
When I was in the Czech Republic a lot of old commie blocks were painted and surrounded by grass with wide passages between them.
It was incredible compared to what I saw in Poland or where my Russian friends lived. (they managed to flee the country)
Depending on the city in Poland they might also be either painted in pastel colors or there might be murals on them.
Example:
And the wide green corridors between them were a constant feature as far as I know (at least I don’t remember NOT seeing wide grass + trees + some flowers corridors between 'em).
I do agree that Czechs picked better colors for it and keeps them fresher.
What’s even the point of living if we have to live like packages sitting in a warehouse? Living for the sake of being alive sounds like torture.
I’d much rather a cleaner healthier city scape to live in than a slightly bigger personal home space. I’m a garden person though so i prefer to be outdoors.
3-5 story housing with no parking works in France/Europe. No elevators/pools is huge cost savings. Room for cars ridiculously expensive where land is ridiculously expensive. Bikeable/walkable communities FTW. 5th story units would be cheaper, but young people need cheaper.
elevators are required for ada compliance
3 story houses/buildings exist without elevators. There is no proposal to outlaw ADA compliant buildings.
We don’t even necessarily need those, fucking row townhouses like old Chicago or New York would be a massive improvement in space usage and density alone. Just modify the design to have a garage in the back and make the alleyway larger. Hell you could narrow the front road if you do it right.
Hell you
couldshould narrow the front roadif you do it right.and turn it into a pedestrian plaza with a few shops and restaurants.While I like the enthusiasm we are still talking about the US here, even just for controlled semitruck or emergency service access it would still need to be wide enough for say a firetruck even compensation with utility alleyways and back end garages. But you could set it up to be relatively easily converted to such a thing if the required modifications to infrastructure and emergency services are done, but even then it’d be twenty years off even on a rapid timescale.
To be fair, I didn’t say make it impassible, I said narrow it. It’s easy enough to make a pedestrian plaza that a box truck or a firetruck can fit down. It works in the majority of the cities and towns in Scandinavia. They’re not going to build affordable rowhomes or high density housing in the states anytime soon so this is literally allll wishcasting from top to bottom.
Fair enough, though my point was moreso to do with how absurdly massive American fire engines and semi-trucks there are smaller tanks. A Stuart tank from WW2 or fuck even a M60 Patton are smaller than a standard American fire engine.
The problem is that, for the property owning class, the unaffordability of homes is broadly a feature and not a bug.
That’s how you create undesirable neighborhoods which eventually turn into ghettos. Many cities in Europe tried that and many of those neighborhoods quickly became unsafe and derelict. Like many of the banlieus in Paris or the Bijlmer in Amsterdam. Because people who eventually have the means to move out will leave asap. Nobody wants to settle in such a neighborhood. So only the poor and desperate stay. Which in turn means local business will leave as well.
Look at how Vienna works. Contrary to other places, they did government housing blocks really well there.
- The blocks are spread throughout the whole city. That means, there’s no really bad place where all the undesirables are concentrated. This mixes the population. For example, I went to a school in one of the inner districts. In my class we had fresh immigrants that could hardly speak German. We had kids from poor families. We had middle class kids. We had kids who’s parents were immigrants but who were born there. We had a kid who’s parents played in the Vienna Philharmonic. We had two really rich kids descending from former nobility. We had a kid who was the son of a well-known lawyer.
- The blocks do have an income limit when you get the flat, but that limit is very high (it easily covers everyone in the middle class) and it only applies when you move in. If your income increases afterwards you can still stay in that flat and still pay the same as anyone else. That means that you got a decent mix of people living in these blocks. There’s not only poor people there.
- Most of the blocks are actually really nice. There’s parks between the blocks with nice, old trees. Many of the blocks even have swimming pools or other special extras.
Check out for example this one here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alterlaa
It can be done well. It doesn’t have to be crap.
We need mass housing, but also a focus on aesthetics.
I noticed my area has done a nice job after visiting Chicago. Chicago was concrete, roads and parking lots, and barren. Fly back to metro Vancouver and even worst neighborhood has beautitul construction, parks, trees and flower beds everywhere.I mean I agree that Vancouver is maybe one of the most beautiful cities in the world, but it’s also one of the most expensive!
Yeah I meant an hour out of Vancouver, Metro Vancouver… But still pricey
We need mass housing, but also a focus on aesthetics.
I noticed my area has done a nice job after visiting Chicago. Chicago was concrete, roads and parking lots, and barren. Fly back to metro Vancouver and even worst neighborhood has beautitul construction, parks, trees and flower beds everywhere.Do you live in an apartment, a condo, a townhome, a home or…?
I live in a wildly overpriced studio apartment. I would jump at the chance to move into a concrete block apartment with no AC and limited hot water if it took $500 off my monthly rent.
if it took $500 off my monthly rent.
You think it would take $500 off your rent? Lol, they’re not going to make things cheaper, just life more miserable.
Wouldnt that just be supply and demand? Why would less comfortable housing not be less expensive?
Ok this is a soft rebuttal because I agree we need to fix affordability asap, but is intensification really the right path?
Like something else needs to be fixed or these super condos will just enable politicians to import even more people to maintain the unaffordability.
I honestly think commieblocks don’t look that bad.
Just do what my delivery drivers do. Leave it at the main entrance and mark it delivered.
So it’s Peachtree towers in MegaCity 1.
Judge Dredd approves.
High density housing bad and dystopian. Homelessness good. Now build more single family homes with lawns pls. /s
Low-rise to mid-rise high-density housing, sure, but high-rises are bad, yes. They cost more to maintain, they either prevent adequate sunlight at lower levels or need to be spaced apart wide enough to defeat the point, and they tend to be worse for social isolation and anti-social behaviour.
low rise and mid rise are ugly as hell compared to densely packed high rise buildings or single family homes
Have to agree to disagree. Most of the prettiest areas of London consist of Edwardian mansion blocks and Georgian terraces.
China: Bulldozes Kowloon Walled City
Also China:
They probably have a number of diverse food kitchens in there, and would most likely “buy local”, anyway. That building being basically a slum, I doubt that there is much delivery from the outside.
Mailroom aside, if a delivery guy is fine crossing a city with 20/30k people horizontally in traffic, I don’t really see why this is such a bad thing when you break it down.
I count 35 floors, so you can cut it down to ~850 people on each floor after an elevator ride, and a building like this will probably have at least 4 elevator areas sectioning the building almost equally.
So you’re down to about ~210 people after entering the right side of the building, that’s like a big street / small neighborhood (and how far you have to walk should scale closely to that). And with this much people in one area you can really easily batch deliveries. And a delivery place will probably settle quite closely to such a hub of people anyways.
at least 4 elevator areas sectioning the building almost equally.
each elevator lobby also has its own address. It’s less confusing than you’d imagine, and also any delivery drivers will have been there before.
Also: big buildings usually have cargo elevators. It would be insanity to “door-dash” every last package on the passenger cars, limited by what could be carried or lugged on a hand-truck. Instead, they would load up the whole car from the truck on a loading dock, then deliver one floor at a time, start/stopping the car where needed.
Luckily each unit has a number that indicates the floor and each floor probably has a floormap near the elevator, so you won’t have to go knocking on random doors until you find the person.
Same thing for making deliveries in cities of several million. If there’s an effective addressing system, it’s usually trivial to find the destination, or at least to get very close to it and switch to “ok wtf is going on here with the last bit of this address?” mode.
In reality buildings like this have a mailroom where packages are dropped.
Correct, and the drop-off and pick-up is done through QR codes over WeChat, here is a (German) documentary about this very building showing the process:
Problem is that mailrooms are useless for food delivery drivers.
Seems like an easy problem to fix. Have a designated meeting/drop location
Got nothing on Kowloon. That was a marvel. Scary, probably deadly, but a marvel nonetheless.
If there is tofu dreg in the construction, the architect and builders are gonna charged with a genocide. (if building collapse, thousands die)
And this is not because American propaganda or whatever. My family is from mainland China and my mother told me about all those tofu-dreg stuff. To be very clear, this is not the people’s fault, its not individuals being “lazy”, its a systematic issue. There’s so much corruption and bribery.
Food safety is another one of the big issues. For a supposedly “socialist” government, they sure are doing quite a lot regulating food, by “a lot” I mean jack shit.
I’m suspecting if my older brother is being an asshole because he lived there like approximately 5 years longer there and suffered some food poisoning (like maybe lead) or something and totally has zero empathy. Parents are also shitty. I mean there has got to be lead or something.
(No I did not live in one of these mega buildings lol, mine was more like a 10 story building, no elevators, lackluster of safety barriers. I hate that place lol, so much bad memories of my abusive older brother.)
It’s locust mentality, same thing happens in India or any country with high density + a culture of low trust.
If the CCP wasn’t headed by morons like Mao (and Xi by extension, who for some unfathomable reason wants to emulate him) who brought the destruction of Confucius teachings and heritage through the cultural revolution and terrible economic policies, they had a baseline culture to foster a more cohesive and trusting society.
Food safety is another one of the big issues.
They cracked down on people cleaning cooking oil and reselling it as food oil again, they executed the people responsible for poisonous baby formula, they seem to do something when it becomes noisy.
I got mild food poisoning in China less frequently than in Korea or Vietnam.
I can’t compare to Japan, because while the food safety seems very good, its not because of regulation, restaurants there don’t even have regular inspections.
Sorry mate, elevator is out of service because someone pulled the fire alarm
